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...