Old Albemarle Boat Tour, the end

Sunday, May 13, 2018

So, the boat tour is over. It cost us $2000 for the 2 of us from Thursday afternoon at 3pm check in to now. That is $1000 pp for 3 nights/3 days. I thought it was a bit pricey for northeast NC and what we got. Clay argued it was $250 per diem and reasonable. You can decide for yourself. I'm glad we did it! Even though we had been almost everywhere but Elizabeth City before, it was different seeing it from the water and we wouldn't have done that without this trip. If NCDCR does another trip some time and we get another timely invite, I am sure we'd go again.

Bob with Clay's beer

Clay's fried oysters

Let me move on to dinner. We had not registered that it was Mother's Day. There were few restaurants open in Elizabeth City on Sunday night anyway. Clay had a few in his sights as serving seafood and only one open on Sunday night. It did not occur to us that with the holiday, we would need a reservation. So, we wound up being about the last people seated and placing our orders before the kitchen closed early due to running low on food. We ate at Grouper's Waterfront. It wound up being good food and not terribly expensive, but it was hard to find and hard to find a place to park and after the stress of nearly being turned away and sitting by the door in the bar watching others turned away, we probably wouldn't recommend it or ever return ourselves.

My steak and potatoes

Bob with our blizzards

We ate over an hour after ordering. We finished and went to the bar to get our check and pay. We left skipping dessert for obvious reasons. I knew there was a Dairy Queen out near our hotel and insisted we go. We waited to make a left turn into the parking lot behind at least a half dozen other cars turning right. It appeared that church had just let out on Mother's Day! I insisted that we wait it out. Worth the wait, cold and delicious blizzards. They have been heavily advertised on TV lately and looked so good. Check that off the list.

I realize that I have not included Clay's photos of the hotel rooms. I am not sure why. To remedy that, here they are. All of the hotels were about the same quality and none were located right in towns, but closer to highways. They were all clean and quiet and even though we only had 2 breakfasts out of the 4 hotel stays, I assume they were all similar. They all had 1 sink and a shower over tub. We had a single king size bed in all the tour hotels because we volunteered to share a bed when the tour organizers couldn't come up with a single hotel each night that had 2 double beds per paired travelers. It was an anomaly of their booking method, I think. Each of us had to make a booking individually and pay for ourself and then request to share a room with each other. I guess it was easier to handle single travelers that way, but made things more complicated in the end, I think.

Here we go, I'll start with tonight's Comfort Inn Elizabeth City, which was not included in the tour.

Below is the first hotel of the Old Albemarle Boat Tour, the Fairfield Inn Elizabeth City.

Second hotel of the tour was the Hampton Inn Edenton. Photos below.

Third night of the tour was at the Holiday Inn Express Plymouth. Photos follow.

So, after our last night in Elizabeth City at the Comfort Inn we got up late and had breakfast in the lobby. We headed back home and after about an hour of driving, around 10am, we were hit by a woman who ran a red light outside Williamston. It was the last traffic light before future I-87 would have taken us straight to Raleigh! We got a rental pickup truck as the last and only vehicle for hire at Enterprise in Williamston and drove home. Tuesday we placed a deposit to buy a Kia Niro PHEV hybrid and they loaned us a sedan until it arrived from Georgia. We learned later it was the 1st Plug-in Kia sold in NC. I'm not sure that is a good thing, but Clay's in love with that compact SUV and the fact that he can get to and from work in all electric mode for about 66 cents a day in energy costs. Wednesday, we drove back to Williamston to return the truck and retrieve our license plate from the Elantra. On the way back by Tarboro, we stopped at Abrams for a snack. Clay had a BBQ sandwich and I had an original cheese biscuit. I don't know how Clay's sandwich rated, but my cheese biscuit was perfection!

My biscuit

My cheese!

Clay's BBQ sandwich

Friday afternoon we picked up our new car and returned the loaner sedan. We are still waiting for the check for our totaled Elantra to arrive. Tomorrow will be one week from when we were told we'd receive it. Still waiting. State Farm was doing an excellent job handling our claim until it was time to pay. Stay tuned.