Hello! Welcome to DAY TWO (6/11/11) here in OBX (that’s the slang for Outer Banks, and now you’re as cool as we are). Before I started on day two actually, I wanted to share a few more stories from the day before that I was reminded of by my faithful cohorts. I know this is a little late – but believe it or not, we’ve been keeping busy. Things should wind down to island time in the next couple of days and I’ll be back on track.
So far on the trip and really it was just day two, and really Friday was mostly travel – so it’s almost like it was just day .5 and Saturday was day one. But BM has pointed out that she is already exhausted. We are efficient travelers and it’s hard for the little ones to keep up. Every time we get near a car they fall asleep. But digressing – we seem to be collecting catch phrases of the trip, and it’s not like we’re trying. On the trip up the phrase was “You missed it!” – someone would say, “Oh look at that cool sign/car/thing/whatever”… “where?”… “You missed it!”. It still continues and we chuckle each time because only now are we starting to manufacture it.
The other phrase is “What’s that smell?” and I laugh just thinking about it because we had a full day of smoke everywhere. The whole part of the island smelled like bonfire – we had come back to the room for a bit to unwind and then we were going back out to grab food. Patti steps out into the hallway, and gets this look on her face like she just smelled something unpleasant – she turns to us and says “What’s that SMELL??” – I laughed because I thought she was joking because the only thing you can smell anywhere (including in the buildings) is smoke. She looks at me, not breaking, seriously wanting to know what that smell is…. Um smoke? OH!!! DUH!!!! But this morning the wind was blowing inland, so you could actually breathe. I know I keep mentioning the smoke, but it’s like standing next to a bonfire at all times. Our clothes smell like smoke, eyes burns, throat burns… there just isn’t a way to forget about this smoke. Unless you’re Patti.
Also yesterday, we checked into the hotel and I was investing info while Patti and Dana were wrapping up the details with the check in. I come back into the lobby, Patti and Dana are walking toward me with huge grins on their faces and something behind their backs – I’m concerned. They pull out WRIST BANDS!! What??? My face FALLS – Dana says “I knew we should have had a camera!” – I have instant flash back to our week in Italy at the resort that forced us to wear wrist bands everywhere… They explain, it’s not that bad… We have to wear these wrist bands for the activities… what??... just for breakfast in the morning, and we don’t have to wear them, we just have to SHOW them. Ok. I can do that. But if we would have had to wear arm bands on vacation again… hmmmm…
We had a plan – breakfast, then the Wright Brothers memorial and then to the Kite Festival… we went to breakfast, and then we came back, packed… and got BP up. She’s a sleeper. We told her that we’d waited long enough, it was 11 and we couldn’t wait anymore because of check out. She couldn’t believe that we let her sleep that long!! And her alarm didn’t even go off – Um, yah, sorry it’s only 8am. So she got ready and did the food thing while we loaded the car. Wright brothers is just a half mile away and they open at 9am – so we’re good. It’s pretty warm already, but we notice that there’s no smoke in the air! Nice! So we’re lucky to have the wind blowing the other way, but when we get in the car, it smells like smoke… and when we walked into the Wright Brothers center – smelled like fire… it’s going to take a long time to get that smell out of this area.
The Wright Brothers memorial was very interesting to me – I had watched a documentary to prep. I like knowing a little before I go so that I know what I’m looking at and what to look for. Here are some of Susen’s interesting facts about the Wright Brothers – in the course of inventing the airplane, they also invented the air tunnel and the method of using it to test for aerodynamics, they had to create their own propellers out of wood with just wood working tools, and even when recreating them scientists were amazed that they had 90% accuracy – most planes today are like 93%. They selected Kitty Hawk because of the wind (duh) and the sand (safer landings) – and Wilbur never let Orville fly because it was very dangerous and he didn’t want to report back to his mother that he had killed his baby brother. Neither of them were ever married, and they lived with their parents and their sister (also never married) – in 1901 they were going to give up, convinced that flight would not be conquered for 100 years (when in fact it only took 66 years to get from Kitty Hawk to the moon) – their sister convinced them to go to this national conference of researchers who were discussing flight. She told them that maybe they would meet someone who could help them – they went, and discovered that they knew more than anyone there. THEY were the experts, and so it spurred them on to continue. Their first flight was only 120 feet and lasted 12 seconds… ok – there you go. You have the Wright stuff.
When you go it’s a little visitor center with a few items in it and a recreation of a couple of their planes, and then you go outside and they have markers where the flights started and where each of their first four flights landed. It’s pretty cool to see it laid out with markers like that. In the pictures you can see the bit white marble stones. The fourth flight was pretty far in comparison to the other 3 – 852 feet, 59 seconds. There is also a large stone memorial to them, and it’s at the top of Kill Devil Hill – we walked up to the top of it, and toward the top of the hill we were huffing a bit. It’s quite a slope, but there’s a great view from the top. The Brittanys kept calling it a mountain… not exactly a mountain, but it did feel like it toward the top. There were signs all over warning us of “cactus area” and they had these pictures of “prickly pears” – BM was really excited and wanted to see a prickly pear because that’s what Baloo (the bear) eats in The Jungle Book. We were on the look out, and all we saw were these brown dried up LITTLE burs all over the place – and then we realize that those are the prickly pears. BM is very disappointed to find out that sometimes the fact doesn’t measure up to the fiction.
It’s early in the morning (9-10am), but it’s blazing hot sun and we’re on very flat land with lots of sand, so we are melting just a little, and it’s a large area – I wish I had my pedometer to give you an idea. But we had a nice little hike from the flight markers to the memorial and back down. We found a little AC and cooled off, I’ve added a picture of the girls and their fans. And I thought this was really cool – this is a picture from 1901 of their “camp” (two tents) and what the area looked like then. TOTALLY desolate!
The markers..... #4 is waaay down there
The "mountain"
The view from the top - the building way in the distance is the visitor center.
Cooling off
The camp in 1901 - they put an X to mark the spot... 
BP not thrilled that there might be more walking across a desert to see kites...
Seriously miles of dunes!!
The kites from what we can see around the corner....
We hang out in the visitor center for a second, make sure we’ve gathered everyone up, and we drive down the road a bit until we see these massive, beautiful kites. We just pull over by the side of the road and take pics from the car. The Britts have commented that we make them tired, we are efficient vacationers! We have done Kitty Hawk, and a “drive by” Kite Festival – we are good – and we’re ready to head south to our final destination.
We stop off to get lunch before the road trip – we pass several interesting stores like “Try My Nuts” and “The Bird Store” (we wondered what they specialized in). The atmosphere in this part of OBX is very commercial – it reminds us of the strip in Branson a little bit, lots of T-shirt and souvenir shops, mini-golf, and things like that, and LOTS of seafood restaurants. We stop off at Miller’s because we can eat by the ocean, and someone else recommended it. The food was great – I had a grilled tuna sandwich (like tuna steak), Patti had a nice shrimp wrap with avocado, Dana didn’t have chicken, and BM tried fried oysters! She’s trying something new everyday. She was ok with it, until she decided to look in it after she bit off half of it – big mistake for her – but great for me and Patti because we got to finish off her oysters. While we’re eating we’re watching the people out on the sound (the west side of the island that faces the mainland) and they’re wind surfing, kind of – we’re not sure what to call it, but they’re on boogie boards with their feet attached like they’re skiing, and then they’re being propelled by a huge kite like thing that acts like a sail. It looks like it takes WAY too much coordination – it’s like surfing while trying to fly a kite. We think they should call it some combination of kite and surfing… kurfing, or kifing…. Later on the way down the road we see signs for “Kite surfing” lessons. Hmmm. I guess that works too.
The trip down the banks will take about 3 hours – and that includes a ferry ride to Ocracoke island. Everything in the southern part of the island, with the exception of Ocracoke village, is a national park. That means that it’s really well preserved, not commercial at all – and just lots of beach area. We get to the end of the line, and hop the ferry. We drive on, and we’re at the front, so we have a great view once we hit the water. We start moving, but its subtle – and there is another ferry pulling in at the same time, so since they’re moving in the opposite direction it looks almost like we’re not moving, but that it’s just that optical illusion that makes us think we’re moving. I play with the rest of the girls a bit and say “wow, it feels like we’re moving”… Patti says, “Yah it does.. weird”… and then I say look at that dock moving… they finally realize that we really ARE moving – it was a cool effect to have your brain fooled like that. To be moving, and feel like you’re moving, but to have your brain think that you weren’t moving but only feeling like you were moving… hard to explain. But the best part was when BM realized that we really were moving – she totally freaked out, “WE’RE ON THE FERRY!?!?!” – she was even further behind – she said that she didn’t even realize that when we parked that we were on the ferry, she just thought that we were still waiting to get on and then we’re moving. We all laughed pretty hard. She’s a fun toy sometimes.
The ferry ride was about 40 minutes and a nice ride – seagulls started following the boat and flying along with us. We couldn’t really figure out why, but it looks really cool to see them just gliding along with us – and then people started THROWING food at them. OH! That’s why they’re following us – it was pretty impressive to see them dive and catch the food in their beaks in mid-flight. We have a good time singing “We’re on a BOAT!” – we got our flippy floppies and we’re on a boat… never thought I’d be on a booooat….
Once we got off the ferry, there’s still a bit of a drive down south to get to the village itself. There is only one road on the island, it goes right down the middle of the banks. Really reminds us of the Florida keys, you can see water on both sides of you.
The village is so cute! Most people ride bikes and horses, or just walk to get around – not a lot of drivers and there’s limited parking. We feel a little “big” in the car and we plan on renting bikes to get around for the week. We find our place, and we’re right by the lighthouse – the house is so quaint, and it’s called “Changes in Attitude” – it’s decorated with Margaretville stuff, and they refer to it as a Parrothead house. Patti says that it was calling to her.
We get settled – find a store to get some food and supplies for the week – get some dinner, and find the slushy place that came highly recommended (fresh fruit slushies that we are really refreshing) – we have vowed to have at least one daily. J
I think that’s more than enough for the day. We did so much that it felt like two days! I’ll catch up tmw! We'll end with a great pic of BM. This was outside of the restaurant!
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