![piggly wiggly oriental nc piggly wiggly oriental nc](https://wave.marineweather.net/iharborcam/oharbor-10.jpg)
What will you be serving then? “I’m not sure. The staff person found us to tell us that they wouldn’t be serving the lunch menu. We went downstairs to talk it over, feeling a little awkward. Especially when empty.) “Um, usually you can, but we thought tonight we would set it up as a water station.” So we can’t eat at the bar? “I don’t think so.” Can we eat at the bar? (The dining room was very elegant, too much so for us. “That’s what we are serving tonight.” OK. We asked to see a menu, and were given a lunch menu. Out of curiosity we thought we would try their restaurant. A few transient boaters like ourselves wandered down the docks, but that was it. In spite of the homes that are owned and “occupied”, I never saw a resident. Not a person in sight, except for minimal staffing. The development is struggling, or at least that is our assessment. It was first begun in 2006 and still has a looooong way to go before it is built-out. Everything except golf, as far as I could tell. There is a “club house” with a restaurant, a gift and necessities store, a cafe, a pool, spa, etc. River Dunes is a planned living community with a central and very nicely designed, engineered and constructed marina. River Dunes: a luxury “planned” community. With a blow forecast the next afternoon we thought it would be a nice place to kill two of our five days. River Dunes is up Broad Creek, off of which it has its own private dredged canal into a large and totally protected basin. From there it was a quick ride into the Neuse River. We had heard snippets from the Coconut Telegraph that “Oooh! River Dunes is soooo nice!” so why not try? We got a leisurely start from Belhaven and enjoyed a relatively easy and relaxing run out the Pungo River, across the Pamlico river into Goose Creek Canal. With few options, we decided to make a stop at River Dunes Marina. We might have contemplated a run out to the outer banks, maybe to Ocracoke, which we would love to see, but the weather forecast showed three systems rolling across us in the next five days, so that wasn’t really a feasible option. The problem with Oriental was that it sat just 1 degree north of 35 North, so once there, we couldn’t go any further for five days. Our next obvious destination was Oriental, about 40 miles south. It is a pattern that had begun the day we left home a month ago, and it persists. The sub-optimal weather was preventing us from cruising at a normal pace we dash as far as we can when we have a weather window, then hunker down as gales blow over. Given the storm devastation in North Carolina from September and October the restriction does make some sense, but we were beginning to feel a bit like caged rats. This is a clause that is designed to keep us out of the worst of the hurricane zone until after hurricane season winds down. We had one major constraint to contend with: our insurance policy stipulates that we remain north of 35 degrees North until after November 15. While we explored Belhaven we contemplated our next move. We sampled both while waiting for our November 15 insurance restriction to expire.