Virginia Beach - North Carolina - Charleston, SC

Hey hey...safe to say today has been the hardcore driving day we thought it would be!! We reckon we've drove about 480 miles in total in what has been an incident-packed day!! Ha, we quickly checked out downtown Virginia Beach this morning before leaving...seemed like an ace place but we knew we had to be hitting the road, bit of a shame but we always knew we'd be in a bit of a rush to get down to Orlando for friday.

We then got to state number 7 of the trip, North Carolina...where we decided we didn't really like the route the Sat Nav was taking us on (all the way in to the 95 South)....so armed with nothing but an old road atlas & our sense of direction we decided to attempt it ourselves!! This worked perfectly as it turns out, however a certain Michael Alderman - my co-traveller, was clearly in too much of a hurry when he got pulled over by the North Carolina PD, thats right...for speeding!! I have to say we've noticed a big culture change as we've moved south today...poorer looking places and even poorer accents, so we didn't really understand much the cop said, but I think it centred around the fact he could throw Alderman into prison, that he should throw Alderman into prison, but he wasn't going to. And that Alderman shouldn't speed again. So there you have it kids, if ever in North Carolina, learn from Michael's mistakes...!!

We got going again at a more moderate pace & quickly checked out Wilmington, North Carolina as we wanted a driving break, before hitting the road again & heading into South Carolina (state number 8!!), where we were hit by an awesome storm;

We did manage to survive this though, and eventually made it to Charleston around 8.45pm. We're going to try check it out early in the morning as we have another big driving day tomorrow, only the 380 miles or so we reckon, next stop after Charleston will be Savannah and state number 9 (Georgia), before we get our asses down to Orlando, Florida...where we have a hotel booked for 4 nights :-)