All my life my dad has talked about one day going to the Outer Banks of NC. I remember him talking about it when I was a kid and my older sisters say they remember it, too. Well, last week he finally made it there and a bunch of his kids and grandkids did, also! When we first started planning this trip it seemed like only a couple of us would be able to make it, but at the last minute we ended up with a total group of 21! We left out early Wednesday morning and arrived in Nags Head at 2:30 that afternoon. We spent the next four days doing lots of sightseeing…like walking the sand dunes at Jockey’s Ridge, climbing the Currituck lighthouse, driving on Corolla Beach looking for the wild horses (but disappointingly not finding any), walking the beach at Nags Head, touring the Wright Brother’s memorial, climbing the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, riding the ferry to Okracoke, visiting the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and eating lots of food. Last night I was uploading my pictures from the trip and pulled these out to share on the blog. I’ll probably upload the rest to facebook (maybe later today) to share them with my friends there, so if you’d like to see more check out my facebook page a little later.
Jockey’s Ridge absolutely amazed me. It’s the largest natural sand dune on the east coast and it was almost like being in a desert. It’s hard to capture the size of it in a picture but these next three kind of give you an idea of how large it is and how tall some of the dunes are.
We climbed all over these dunes and let me tell you that walking up a sand hill is hard work; I feel like I got a good leg workout!
The beach at Nags Head near our rental house.
The Currituck lighthouse. It was beautiful, this picture doesn’t do it justice at all. I wish there was a gorgeous blue sky behind it, but it was cloudy when we were there. If you’re ever in the Outer Banks you should go see it. The grounds around it are beautiful with old, worn brick paths, there are huge trees surrounding it, it’s lovely. They say it’s one of the few that was left natural brick. They estimate it contains about 1,000,000 bricks! It’s 214 steps to the top and we went up every one. Another leg workout!
Walking up the hill to the Wright Memorial…it was so windy there you could definitely understand why Orville and Wilbur chose that site for their test flights! It was a nice little hike to the top of the hill and once we got there the monument looked much larger. It was designed to climb all around the base and gave a great view of the whole area.
I love this one. That’s Charlotte and Caroline in the far distance running out onto the beach with Abigail and Samantha following behind. One of the things I love about it is the color…I didn’t change it to sepia, it came out of the camera this way. The sun was at just the right angle to give the whole scene this color.
And a shot of Cape Hatteras, the tallest lighthouse in North America…268 steps! Yet another leg workout! This was the most active vacation I’ve had in a while, haha!
It was a great trip. Lots of family memories were made. And I’m so glad that so many of us were able to go!
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