North Carolina Day 4

Welcome to my 100th post!  While I may not be as prolific a poster as Melinda (1000 and counting!!)  I'll get there yet!  And now to wrap up our long weekend in North Carolina...

On the last morning on the Outer Banks I wanted to see the sunrise over the ocean.  Living on the west coast I am used to seeing the sun set over the ocean and, on the rare cloudless day, waiting for the green "flash" right before it's gone as the sun is seen through the ocean water due to the curvature of the earth.  I was excited for my first sunrise and we set an alarm and got up with time to spare.  We walked out onto the decks that take you down to the beach and I waited with camera in hand.  There were a few other people out there who had stayed up the whole night!  As we were waiting I saw some fins in the ocean, just surface and come back down.  Sharks?  No, those would have stayed up as they swam along.  Dolphins!?  Yes! There was a whole pod of dolphins just of shore and we watched them come up to the surface for air and then dive again for breakfast.  There was also a flock of pelicans that kept coming back and forth over the water.  Obviously it was a happening breakfast spot.  Then the sky got really red...  It's coming!

Then just the tiniest piece popped up!

And continued to get bigger...

Until we had a full on red sun rising over the ocean.  What's that saying?  "Red sun at morning sailor take warning?"  Maybe it always rises red?  We didn't end up having any bad weather, but there were some amazing clouds behind us as we walked the beach and I kept taking more pictures.

After about an hour on the beach we got back to the room, cleaned up and packed up and were on our way.  We decided to go to the Roanoke Island Festival Park we had missed the day before since they opened at 9 and we had all day to get the car back to Raleigh.  It turns out on a Sunday there aren't a lot of people there at 9 AM, so we had the park pretty much to ourselves.  We walked through the native american dwelling recreations and got eaten by mosquitos pretty bad.  Then we headed out to the Elizabeth II, a recreation of ships that were used during the time the first colonists came to America.  It is a working ship and they've taken it down to the southern part of the Outer Banks and back.

It was quite small and would have been very cramped to bring over all the people and supplies they would need to start a colony.  There were two men on there in character and they told us all about how things worked (they didn't have wheels to steer the ship, just a pole attached to the rudder), where the people would have been on the long voyage (staying in the hold and not allowed on deck and it being so cramped you'd sleep sitting up) and why it's dangerous to cook on a ship (wood+pitch+flame=bonfire!).  We then moved on to the colony recreation where we had the best time!  The only person there was the blacksmith, but he was quite a character.  He made a square nail for Mom right in front of our eyes, which she considers the best souvenir she got.  He also had a hat and armor that they would have worn and it was really heavy!  We both tried it on...

He also showed us a lathe that they would have used to make furniture legs and other decorative pieces.  It was a lot of fun and quite easy to use!

Then we talked a bit about the area and how much we liked it.  We told him we would have to rent a "cottage" and make it through a hurricane before we'd decide to move.  He said that everyone knows the categories of hurricanes but to the people that live through them they mean something different.  Category 1 means you buy a 6-pack of beer and wait it out.  Category 2 means you by two 6-packs of beer and wait it out.  Category 3 means you buy a keg of beer and wait it out and a Category 4 means you buy a keg of beer, put it in the back of your truck and drive like hell!  He also showed us the water line on the back of the smith-house that was from the height of the flooding from Hurricane Irene.  He said it was such a damaging hurricane, not because of the rains, but because the winds pushed the waters from the sound out of the bay and then when they ceased, it all ran back in and flooded.  We told him that from living on the west coast and always hearing about tsunamis we knew that when the water recedes out that far that it's a BAD sign.  He was really fun to talk to and we got to feel a bit of North Carolina hospitality.

Around 11 we headed out of town because we were driving down to New Bern before we made it back to Raleigh.  We seriously drove over half of North Carolina while we visited, good thing it was unlimited mileage on the car!  The reason we were going to New Bern was to visit Mom's college friend Annie, whom she hadn't seen in 40 years!  They had always kept in touch with Christmas letters and such over the years but we had never made it to North Carolina before.  Not the type of people to waste an opportunity we wanted to see her while we were there.  As we drove south towards New Bern we got to see a lot of the countryside.  The area is very agricultural and it was fun to see things like tobacco being grown in fields on the side of the road.  We got a little lost on our Google Map directions when we got to New Bern and ended up driving through the old town a bit.  What fantastic buildings and architecture!  Too bad it was while desperately searching for a road sign.  Mom called Annie and she helped us get on the right road and to her house.  We had lunch with her and her husband Stroud and got to love their two little dogs Maybelle and Paris.  It was a such a wonderful visit!  Mom and Annie picked up like they hadn't seen each other in a couple of weeks, rather than years and we all had fun watching the squirrels in the backyard chase each other and perform daring feats to get to the bird feeders.  They have some small houses out at the back of their yard, a koi pond and lots of feeders which bring in birds I had never seen before like cardinals (SO red!) and orioles!  The visit was all too short and Annie invited us to come back for another vacation and they'd take us to the lighthouses along the south of the banks that we'd missed, especially Cape Lookout.  We are seriously considering it because we fell in love with North Carolina!

It was time to get the car back to Raleigh and we got to the Enterprise rental place just a few minutes before 8 PM when it was due!  Enterprise called the Embassy Suites that I was staying at and we were shuttled to the hotel that I'd call home for the next week.  Mom flew out the next morning and went back to work while I stayed for training.  That next week was a lot of fun for me, learning new things, meeting great people and just enjoying time away from work.  Watching the morning news programs was fun also since they kept you up to date on the new Iron Man movie that was being filmed close by.

More on that and what else has been keeping me busy to come!

North Carolina Day 3

So on Saturday June 2 our plan was to see 2 more lighthouses and go through the Roanoke Island Festival Park, but since we had missed the actual Fort Raleigh exhibit we thought we'd fit that in too.  As we drove through Manteo there were people everywhere and cars parked on the sides of the road with people all walking towards the Festival Park that we were trying to get to.  It turns out that was their annual community celebration called "Dare Days".  We gave up the idea of going there what with all the traffic and headed on to Fort Raleigh.  Adjacent to the Fort is the Elizabethan Gardens and we stopped there first.  Since the first settlement was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I, a local group has cultivated and maintained the gardens for over 50 years in honor of what sort of gardens the colonists may have had if the colony had thrived.

The gardens were truly lovely and quite expansive with meandering paths...

hedges trimmed into shapes with flowers planted inside...

tall hedges with "windows" through them that made you feel like Alice in Wonderland...

beautiful statuary, including a large statue of Queen Elizabeth I...

and fountains...

wonderful structures...

and a small area that you could see the sound from with a beach of sorts...

some fabulous gates too!

I really could imagine wandering the paths in the beautiful garden all dressed in the heavy, immense dresses of the time.

Next we went to the interpretive center and looked at the pottery chards and small coins they have found on the Fort Raleigh site.  The history is that the first English settlement, consisting only of men, was founded on Roanoke Island and subsequently abandoned.  Sir Walter Raleigh then gathered a group of men, women and children and led by John White as governor they settled on Roanoke Island again.  John White was also grandfather to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World.  When the people encouraged the governor to go back to England to get more supplies he thought he'd return in 3 months but was delayed 3 years due to the Spanish-English war.  When they got back there were no people left in the settlement, no graves or bodies to be found and the word "CROATOAN" carved in a tree.  Croatoan was an island to the south where Native Americans friendly with the settlers lived and it's possible they left the colony to go there.  John White wasn't able to travel south to find out and the ultimate fate of the settlers is still unknown.  We got to watch a short movie and then ventured out to some earthworks where they believe might have been the fort site, but archaeologists admit it would have been too small to house 100 colonists.

We headed out on the long drive to Cape Hatteras and the drive showed us a different part of the banks than we had been seeing.  There had been occasional dunes on the sides of the road, but most of the area we had been in was really developed.  This was almost all sand dunes with the sand constantly encroaching on the road and there was heavy machinery parked randomly along the side of the road, which was apparently to move it off the road when it became impassable.

Off in the distance we finally saw the black and white striped tower of the Bodie Island Lighthouse.  They are still in the progress of resorting the lighthouse but using the keeper's house it still made for some great pictures.

We drove through the town of Rodanthe, famous from the movie "Nights in Rodanthe" which shows an amazing house where the ocean rushes underneath it.  Well that's not far from the truth.  We saw a couple of houses that had been damaged in a storm, maybe Hurricane Irene?  There was this one with the porch falling off (and a "For Sale"" sign out front in the water that WAS the front yard)...

...and another that was tilting like the leaning tower of Pisa, which I didn't get pictures of.  There were also houses with really amazing architecture and the stilts on most of them went from 1 story off the ground like we had been seeing, to close to 2 stories from the ground.  See high water often?  Obviously!  As we drove further south the feeling that you really were on a moving bar of sand and that if a hurricane came along there was NOTHING you could do about it became really apparent.  But then the best sight of all, a tall black and white spiral striped lighthouse!

And since it is so pretty it needed to have lots of pictures taken of it...

We arrived pretty late in the day so we chose not to climb it, but did get to look inside.

We went over to the keeper's house that they have turned into a museum and read about the history of lighthouse keeping on the outerbanks and watched a video documenting the challenging and amazing feat of moving the Hatteras Lighthouse from the edge of the ocean.  In 1999 the lighthouse was on the verge of being swallowed by the sea but the community finally decided to hire a moving company to move the lighthouse out of harms way.  It was really fascinating to see all the technology they used to make sure it wasn't tilting at all, measure the vibrations to keep from damaging it and monitor the temperature and atmosphere around the lighthouse.  And then we took more pictures :)

We then drove out to the old lighthouse site and watched some really awesome waves crash on shore and of course took yet more pictures.

Granite ring marking the old site...

And where it was moved to...

It was late in the day by this time and we had an hour and a half drive back to the Nags Head area.  When we got back we went to a restaurant called Tale of the Whale that we had decided to eat at before we had gone out to North Carolina.  It was a fancier restaurant than we had been to so far and it was on the sound between the banks and Roanoke Island.  It has a promenade and gazebo out on the water and with the moon up it was a perfect place to try some night shots.

We split prime rib and deep fried shrimp.  I also got some She-Crab soup which is creamy like the northwest style of chowder and has crab instead of clams in it, but again no potatoes.  I don't know what is up with the lack of potatoes in their soup since the first potatoes taken to England were from there!  The food was delicious, regardless of my tastes, and the hush puppies there were truly divine.  We drove back to our hotel and went out of the decks to see the moon across the ocean and stayed until the mosquitoes became unbearable.

Before we went to bed that night I Googled the time the sun would be rising because that was on my list of must-sees on the East Coast.  We set our alarm for 5:30 AM so we could see the sun rise over the ocean!

Only one day left...