The Vegan Food Truck at Avon
MST. Chapter 4. Segment 18 (Part 4)
This is my serialized story of hiking the Mountains-to-Sea Trail (MST), a 1,175-mile route that crosses the state of North Carolina. I’m hiking west from Jockey’s Ridge near Nags Head on the Outer Banks of the Atlantic Ocean to Kuwohi (formerly Clingmans Dome) near the Tennessee border in the Great Smoky Mountains. If you’d like to start at the beginning of my story, click here.
See the Mountains-to-Sea map at the bottom for reference.
Day 3 and it will be a beast of a day. I have scheduled myself to walk 30 miles - mostly on beach - 23 miles - with the last seven through a forest to get to the Frisco Campground, run by the National Park Service, where I have paid for a camp site for the night. I am on my way to the Ferry at Hatteras where my journey will take me to Ocracoke Island.
Thirty miles is pushing it for me and I know it will require new-found strength and endurance - both of which were sorely lacking on the Camino this past fall. And so, the day begins with what I estimate to be a ten-hour day.
On top of it all, my daughter Helen texted me the night before complaining about my lunch selection of Lays potato chips and has done me the favor of scouting the route ahead. She suggests I stop in Avon, a small beach town and eat lunch at a vegan food truck parked right off the fisherman’s pier.
She says there’s only one problem: the food truck closes at noon. Noon? To have a chance at all to reach Avon, I will need to hike 16 miles down the beach by noon.
At 7:15 AM, after packing up the tent and loading my thirty-pound pack onto my back, I have less than five hours to get there. It’s like a race, the hike is on to get a decent vegan lunch!
On my way, I follow the footprints of another until that fades away and am on an empty beach that no one, I swear, ever walked - that is until I meet a fisherman named Brad who was in the midst of catching a ray fish. He invited me to watch him pull it in, but my time is tight and the vegan in me has to keep walking.
By mile 14 I have run out of water, once again, and am now operating on the stamina I I think I must have loaded up on by being at the gym all winter.
Time is not on my side, though, as I see from my watch, and I am - one more time - becoming dehydrated -now visualizing cute mermaids handing me bottles of Gatorade just past the crashing surf.
Oh, to be tied to some fisherman’s truck - instead of all the fishing poles they have in those shining steel tubes on the front of their bumpers, and driven to Avalon - no it’s Avon for lunch.
Finally, sixteen miles in and its twelve minutes past noon. I struggle to climb up the sand dune next to the Avon pier and descend on two food trucks. One is closing up and, like a drunk-walker, I stumble to this vehicle. “Wait, wait, you can’t be closing! I came 16 miles to eat vegan food!” He looks at me askew and says, “We only sell coffee and vegan donuts.” WAIT, WHAT! I came all this way for donuts?
I need to sit down. I sit on the curb in the sun with my pack on the ground beside me. He says it’s all right and gets me a glass of water from the truck. “The other truck here sells vegan tacos - if that helps.”
As he drives away, I slowly work my way to the second truck. A picnic table next to the truck has a small block of shade on the right corner of the table and I grab it before anyone can take it.
When I order I feel like I am about to faint and can’t imagine eating tacos, but I don’t see any Lays potato chips on the counter and besides what I really want is water. I buy five bottles of water and sit at my shaded corner of the world thinking it’s only 12:30 and I have 14 miles still to go.
Click here to read the next chapter.
Click here to read the previous chapter.
Map of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. This post focuses on Segment 18.
