Three Strikes
Well that trip ended sooner than expected. I ran into three major setbacks and decided it was time to head home to try again another day. First of all, I started the trip a few days late. I had originally planned to leave Friday and return Tuesday morning (today), but instead left Raleigh on Sunday and returned the following morning. I found that I wanted to stay in Raleigh on Friday night, and then spend much of the following day working through technical issues on the mobile live streaming rig. Once these issues were resolved, I hosted a driving tour of the city and decided to make the drive to OBX the following morning.
As is shown at the end of the previous entry, I arrived at the campsite Sunday afternoon and immediately took a walk on the beach. Immediately after turning the camera off and putting my equipment away, I discovered the second major setback of this trip: the campground bathrooms were closed! Having spent precisely 3 hours 49 minutes and 51 seconds on camera, this was a concern. Fortunately, there are many public restrooms on the island (namely Walmart), but it didn’t make for a particularly comfortable nor immersive camping experience. Sun set shortly thereafter (I was there for the solstice, after all), and I stood outside on Jeanette’s Pier uploading the driving stream to MinIO. It was cold and very windy, but I enjoyed some of the most spectacular stars I’ve seen in a long time. In fact, I enjoyed those stars throughout the night, as one rarely sleeps through the night when car camping. In my opinion, that alone made the trip worthwhile. Even so, the next morning I was unable to boot my laptop. I had to make space on the boot partition to recreate the initial ramdisk during a routine update, and failed to restore an important file. Simple to fix with a bootable USB with Arch Linux, and I attempted to create one at the Ol’ Faithful, Walmart. Unfortunately, the demo computers did not have sufficient permissions to create the bootable drive, so I was unable to restore the bootloader until returning home. At this point, there was very little left for me to do at the Outer Banks, so I decided it was time to call it on this adventure and try again another time. Overall, I enjoyed the trip, but I am glad I came home when I did.