💡 Cape Hatteras & Tim’s Birthday Adventures! 🥳🎂 🎈 5/16-5/18/2023

71* Overcast day~ up at 7:30am Breakfast of champions… blueberry cheerios with bananas, coffee & tea. New friends Danny & Angela stopped by for awhile and then we started to pack up. Pulled out at 10:22 and arrived at the Ferry Dock for Cape. 10:38 arrived at the dock for the ferry to Cape Hatteras. 4 guys walked the lines and were sizing up all the vehicles so they could Tetris them on the ferry. 12:45pm we drove off the ferry! Welcome to Cape Hatteras. It’s been a long time since we were here! Daniel might have been only been 4-5 years old. We drove through beach towns then a long stretch of bridges and natural sand dunes on both sides of the road.

2:15pm we arrived at Oregon Inlet Campground. After finding our site we realized we forgot to dump, so we pulled out and had to go across the street to a marina where the dump station was. Back to the CG and our site C-19. OMG it’s very windy! 71* The high for Nags Head, NC is 72* with a low of 67*. 3:10 we’re all set up and away we go exploring. 1st stop….you got it…for our diet cokes. Drove over to Roanoke Island.

Fort Raleigh National Historical Site – toured the visitor center then the trail throughout the park. Finished up around 5pm and we’re hungry. As we were driving across the causeway we stopped at Lone Cedar Cafe for dinner. Did’t look like much from the outside, but what a surprise inside. We were seated a few tables away from the big picture windows with a view of a large Osprey nest with babies, named Ricky & Lucy. The adults come back every year and nest there in front of the window. We started with a drink.(heavy pour), and calamari. For those who know us, we love Calamari and order it all over the world to see who has the best! Well this is the 2nd best we’ve ever had! Freshly made southern cornbread and our meals were outstanding. We then toured the grounds which is all vegetable and herb gardens which the owner uses for the eats. Farm to table!

When we got back to the CG we had storm warnings…..very dark sky & wind was blowing hard enough for us to put the slide in for the night! It’s going to be a fun night! Traveled 95 miles today!

Wednesday, May 17th, 2023

Last night we had the storm around 2am. Rough night’s sleep with all the howling wind around us! Ruby was rocking. We were up at 7am to order our tickets for he Lighthouse then went back to bed till 9am. Enjoyed our coffee/tea, egg cups and pears. 10:10 left for the Lighthouse tour. Overcast, with blue skis coming our way. We toured the Bodie Island (pronounced “body”) visitor station, walked the boardwalk out to the water then met for our climb to the top. Only 8 people/tour because there’s eight landings and with the circular stairs being free floating, one person at a time could be on the stairs and you then yelled clear when you got to the landing so the next person could precede. This was done on the way down too. We had 20 minutes up at the top and then a ranger let us one by one look at the lens and she talked all about it. What an amazing experience..

Next adventure finds us at Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge which is a bird sanctuary which was pretty cool. Back to Ruby by 12:45 and made sandwiches. 1:15pm on the road for Kitty Hawk to the Wright Brothers National Memorial. There we toured the exhibits in the visitor center, walked the field & up to the memorial. When the boys were younger a ranger had given then kite kites to make there on the field and put them in flight. We were flooded with lots of memories here.

Time to stop at Auto Zone for DEF fluid for the truck! Now off to the National Wildlife Refuges visitor center in Manteo, NC. What a beautiful center..we watched a movie about Buffalo City in the area where we were going next, a lot of hands on displays and exhibits. Off to Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and took the dirt road where we were told there’s lots of wildlife there. Well…. We did see Red-winged black birds, woodpeckers, turtles, purple martins and just as we said this was a gimmick for the tourists a black bear was on the side off the road and we watched it go into the woods. We got back to the CG at 6:05pm, made dinner and called it a night. Traveled 109 miles today

Happy Birthday Tim! May 18th, 2023….Day 18 of our trip!

64* at 7am 65* at 10am high is only 67* for the day and tonight only 62* 💨 What a windy night….we rocked and rattled all night….so we had a relaxing morning.

1:30pm we drove back over to the Lighthouse visitor center to turn in our completed Jr. Ranger Booklet and got sworn in by the Ranger. He was a card and we laughed so much earning this badge. He checked every page and asked us a lot of questions.

2:10pm time for more adventures! 1st had to get diet cokes for the day. Then visited “Wings” a typical beach tourist store just to meander about. Stopped by a Publix to get Tim’s free birthday carrot cake, oatmeal cookies and his favorite chocolate Entenmann’s doughnuts! His wish was to eat a Tavern today, so we drove to the town of Mateo and walked the town and stopped at Lost Colony Tavern. There we enjoyed Happy Hour & “loaded Guinness Chips” …fries with beer sauce, sausage and bacon!!!Tim enjoyed Nags Head IPA & Hatteras Irish Red. Food was amazing. The waitress then put Tim’s beer in a to go cup with a label so he could walk around. We walked around downtown and went down to the water then across to a park. Unfortunately the appetizer didn’t sit well with me and I walked then threw up, walked a repeated the rest of the night. When we got back to the CG Tim took a 2 mile hike on the beach to get sunset pictures with the Lighthouse in it. We traveled 49 miles today.

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site protects and preserves known portions of England’s first New World settlements from 1584 to 1590.
This site also preserves the cultural heritage of the Native Americans, European Americans and African Americans who have lived on Roanoke Island. It sits on 14 acres. We took the trail and the saw the monument, Freedmen’s Colony and the Earthen Fort. Roanoke Island has been the scene of historical dramas for more than four centuries. Algonquians, Europeans, and African Americans have all played their parts here.

First here were the Carolina Algonquians, who farmed the land and fished the sounds. In 1584, English explorers sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh arrived here. It was the first of three voyages in England’s attempt to colonize North America. During the American Civil War, the US Army established a freedmen’s colony here. The colony prepared formerly enslaved people for life after the war. Today, The Lost Colony dramatically interprets the 1580s interactions between the Algonquian and English.

Lone Cedar Café, Farm to Table – it specializes in fresh and local Outer Banks seafood.For generations, Outer Banks families made their livings — and their daily meals — from the bounty of local waters, caught fresh every day. The family, the Basnights, were part of that history, and continue the tradition today by serving only the freshest Outer Banks seafood, caught in local waters and brought to the docks daily by local fishermen, then cleaned and prepared right here at the Lone Cedar Café. The vegetables are “just picked” from North Carolina farms, we serve only all-natural beef and poultry and even the herbs and greens are grown in the chemical-free garden on-site. Also known for their resident ospreys and our warm Southern hospitality.

Cape Hatteras Island also known as Croatian Island, is a thin, broken strand of islands that curves out into the Atlantic Ocean and back again to embrace NC mainland coast and offshore sounds. 70 miles of beach, and the HWY 12 which is narrow, somewhat paved goes through 8 villages which is not part of the National Seashore. Elevation of 3 ft, 2020 population 577. The island is one of the longest in the contiguous US, measuring 42 miles along a straight line from end to end, or roughly 50 miles along the curve of the land. Cape Hatteras National Seashore protects parts of three barrier islands: Bodie Island, Hatteras Island, and Ocracoke Island.

The first lighthouse at the Cape Hatteras was built in 1803; it was replaced by the current Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in 1870, which at 198.48 feet from the ground to the tip of its lightning rod is the tallest lighthouse in the United States and one of the tallest brick lighthouses in the world. In 1999, as the receding shoreline had come dangerously close to Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the 4830-ton lighthouse was lifted and moved inland a distance of 2,900 feet. Its distance from the seashore is now 1,500 feet, about the same as when it was originally built.

The Bodie Island Lighthouse was built I 1972. It stands 156 feet tall and is located on the Roanoke Sound. There are 214 steps that spiral to the top. The 170-foot structure is one of only a dozen remaining tall, brick tower lighthouses in the United States — and one of the few with an original first-order Fresnel lens to cast its light.

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1938 to provide nesting, resting, and wintering habitat for migratory birds, including the greater snow geese and other migratory waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, raptors, and neotropical migrants; to provide habitat and protection for endangered and threatened species, such as loggerhead sea turtles; and to provide opportunities for public enjoyment of wildlife and wildlands resources. The bird list for Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge boasts over 370 species.

Kitty Hawk – Wright Brothers National Memorial- At 10:35 a.m., on December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made history in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, when they made the first powered, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air flying machine, a craft they designed and built, simply called the Flyer. The airplane had been invented. The flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was a true flight nevertheless. The brothers would make three more flights that day, the longest covering 852 feet in 59 seconds.

For their tests, the Wrights needed a place with wide-open spaces and strong, steady winds. They wrote to the U.S. Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C., to find suitable locations. Among the paces that seemed promising was Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a small fishing village on an isolated strip of beach on the mid-Atlantic coast. Later, Orville would describe Kitty Hawk as “like the Sahara, or what I imagine the Sahara to be.” 

The Wrights made four flights from level ground near the base of the hill on December 17, 1903, in the Wright Flyer, following three years of gliding experiments from atop this and other nearby sand dunes. We walked along the actual routes of the four flights, with small monuments marking their starts and finishes. Two wooden sheds, based on historic photographs, recreate the world’s first airplane hangar and the brothers’ living quarters.

A 60 feet granite monument, dedicated in 1932, is perched atop 90-foot-tall Kill Devil Hill, commemorating the achievement of the Wright brothers. They conducted many of their glider tests on the massive shifting dune that was later stabilized to form Kill Devil Hill. Inscribed in capital letters along the base of the memorial tower is the phrase “In commemoration of the conquest of the air by the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright conceived by genius achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.”