By the time we arrived in Manteo after our trying trip across the sound, we were ready to do something relaxing. We put the bikes together and went for a ride on the bike/walking trail from downtown Manteo to the north end of Roanoke Island where the trail ends at the William B. Umstead Memorial Bridge that crosses the Croatan Sound. It's about four miles from downtown Manteo to the bridge. We would travel that path every day we were in Manteo as we went to Fort Raleigh, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge Visitor's Center, the Elizabethan Gardens, "The Lost Colony," Island Farm and the N.C. Aquarium, and every trip was a pleasure, even in the heat of the day. The path is shaded almost throughout the day by the crepe myrtles (blooming now) that separate it from U.S. 64 and the trees that line both sides of the highway for much of its passage from Manteo to the bridge. On our second day we learned about the Freedom Trail, a walking/biking path through the woods from the Elizabethan Gardens parking lot to the bridge and we began to make a loop of the northernmost part of our rides.

Fort Raleigh is an earthen fort built by one of the expeditions, likely the one in 1585, sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to establish an English foothold in the New World. The 1587 expedition was, of course, the lost colony. We listened to a really interesting talk by a park ranger who said most "Lost Colony" geeks like himself believe the starving and threatened colony did one of three things after Gov. John White returned to England for supplies, leaving behind his daughter and granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America. They went to the Chesapeake where they were killed by Native Americans (who told newly arrived Jamestown settlers they had killed people like them just before they arrived), they went to Croatan and were absorbed by Manteo's people, or they moved to a fortification farther inland - or possibly they went different ways, dispersing to all three sites. No one knows for sure and what happened to those colonists remains America's greatest mystery.

The present earthen structure is a 1950s National Park Service reconstruction on the site where, based on the archeological evidence, the original defensive structure stood.

For a weather geek like Robert, it was interesting to learn from one of the exhibits at the fort's visitor center that radio pioneer Reginald Fessenden built a tower on the north end of Roanoke Island and one on Cape Hatteras in 1901 to further his work on a wireless system for transmitting weather information. He lived in Manteo for a year and a half working to refine his radio signals. By April 1902, he had succeeded in sending and receiving quality voice radio transmissions. That was a major step forward in regulating electromagnetic signals called amplitude modulation, which enabled clear voice transmissions over the airwaves, according to park literature. Meanwhile, across Roanoke Sound, the Wright brothers were testing their gliders, just seven miles away.

The park also memorializes the Freedman's Colony, created by runaway slaves during the Civil War. Union forces, commanded by General Ambrose Burnside, took Roanoke Island in 1862 and held it throughout the war. Word spread among slaves that they could find safe haven there. By 1865, almost 3,500 lived in 560 log dwellings they had built, along with a hospital, church, schools and a sawmill. Many joined the Union Army and others worked building fortifications and doing other manual and skilled labor for the Army.

One of those who joined the Union Army was Roanoke native Richard Etheridge, the son of a slave woman and a white man who belonged to one of the island's prominent slave-owning families. Later during the week we visited the farm, now called "Island Farm," once owned by the Etheridge family. After the war, Richard Etheridge became the first African-American to command a Life-Saving Station. He was appointed keeper of the Pea Island Life-Saving Station in 1880. Soon after the appointment, his station was burned to the ground, but he supervised the construction of a new station and developed rigorous life-saving drills for his all black crew. His crew received the Gold Lifesaving Medal from the Coast Guard in 1996 for the daring rescue of all 10 crew members of a schooner grounded in a hurricane two miles from his station. The rescue had taken place in 1896, one hundred years earlier. David Wright and David Zoby have written a compelling book about Etheridge's life called "Fire on the Beach, Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge." It's a moving account of the valor of black troops even though they were specifically targeted by the Confederates, who would kill them rather than take them prisoner, and faced hateful prejudice by many Union troops as well.