The Drive from Planet OBX

Each summer, I've felt inadequate when people ask what we're doing and it doesn't involve the Outer Banks. For some reason, around the nation's capital, there are two socially acceptable places to go to the beach: the Cape and North Carolina.

I'll state for the record that people who vacay on the Cape, don't mean the one in South Africa; instead, they're referring to the area around Cape Cod, including Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and another less fancy island that I forget the name of for now. A stint on the Cape involves a lot of money (usually old, but new hedge fund wealth is accepted in these recessionary times), extended family named "Preston" and "Buffy" and madras pants, none of which I'm in possession of.

Anyway, moving down the social scale a few notches, the Outer Banks is the other check box on the beach-bound survey of summer. This summer, the family and I packed a bathing suit and an iPod and headed south of the border to the Outer Banks.

To be fair, North Carolina is perfectly nice. There's nothing dreadful about it - beaches are sandy, skies are generally blue, rental houses are decorated in lighthouse and shell motifs . . . it's the journey that's the problem. Starting at the Virginia/North Carolina border, traffic trickled like molasses to its destination. It took several hours to reach the bridge optimistically linking the Outer Banks with the North Carolina mainland. Driving - and I use that word loosely because it implies speed - up Route 12 to Duck, a jogger in 90 degree heat overtook us. The only solace I could find in this slow-moving, single lane pilgrimage was that it perfectly replicated the Hamptons in summer experience, but at half the price.

According to the Wright Brothers Memorial, it took Orville and Wilbur nine days to travel from Dayton, OH to Kitty Hawk - they had a plane to haul and no Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge to travel across - but I'm sure it seemed quicker than my journey last week.