Yesterday morning, the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia were shrouded in low clouds, and we kept hoping that they would lift as we drove further east. No such luck. There's been a 50 percent chance of rain since we arrived last night, with lots of thick, gray clouds blowing through. No rain, yet, though.
This morning we set off for the Wright Brothers National Memorial, in Kill Devil Hills, just south of Kitty Hawk. A monument and interpretive center commemorate the spot where Orville and Wilbur Wright launched manned gliders in 1901 and '02, and four successful powered, controlled, heavier-than-air aircraft flights on Dec. 17, 1903. We listened to a park ranger talk about those flights and their significance in front of a plaque that marks the take-off point. Farther down the field, four granite markers show the length of the flights.
The ranger described the conditions (cold and windy), and talked about the other people present who witnessed those historic flights. Some were crew members at a life-saving station down the coast, who had come up to Kitty Hawk to help the Wrights move their aircraft out of the hanger that morning. The brothers had asked one of them, John Daniels, to take a photograph with a camera they had set up. It was the only picture he ever took in his life. If you only took one photograph in your life, it would be pretty amazing if it was this one:
Another witness to the Wright Brother's first flights was Johnny Moore, a 16-year-old from nearby Nag's Head, who was cutting school that day. The ranger put things in quite a sharp perspective when he noted that Moore lived to see the Apollo 11 space flight in 1969. As I realized that there were only 66 years between the first airplane flight and the first steps on the moon, and as I stood in the spot where it all started, I was overcome with emotion.
Also, my curiosity was about the Wright Brothers was piqued: These two young men from Dayton, Ohio, with no education beyond high school were so fascinated with flight and so determined to make it happen. Their experiments and logs were meticulous, and their tenacity and confidence were so focused. Keith read an article that suggested that they had Asperger Syndrome, or at least that they were somewhere on the spectrum. Neither of them married, and the article explained that both brothers had each gotten dumped once and they essentially swore off women after that.
For lunch, we stopped at a little diner that Natalie had spotted on the way in yesterday, called King Tut's Wiener Hut. How could we resist? But yeah, it was really as gross as it sounds.
In the afternoon, we drove south along the national seashore to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest brick lighthouse in North America, where we climbed all 257 steps to the top.Then we packed ourselves back into the van, drove a little farther south to the end of the road on Hatteras Island, then rolled on to a ferry which shuttled us over to Ocracoke Island, the southernmost island in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. For the 60-minute ride, we piled into the passenger lounge for a couple of fast and fierce rounds of Uno.
Once on Ocracoke, we drove straight to Ocracoke Village, which is basically the end of the road, and which has a total island vibe, all seashells and ice cream stands -- much different from the four-lane highway that zips past Pizza Hut and Applebees and Walgreens and super-sized souvenir stores in Nag's Head, more than 70 miles to the north. We drove around Ocracoke for a few minutes and realized that there's really not much to do there, even on a Friday evening. We ate dinner at Howard's Pub and Raw Bar, which reminded us of the Mucky Duck on Captiva, then turned around and headed back for the ferry.
Including the return trip on the ferry, and a stop for ice cream in Buxton, it took two and a half hours to get back up north to our campground, so it was well past dark when we all flopped into bed. Good night!
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