The Outer Banks

We have arrived at the Atlantic Ocean!  It's feels very good to be at the shore.  We arrived in Morehead, NC midday and went to the first place we could find with a beach.  Sam put on his trunks and off we went.  A gorgeous sunny day (have I mentioned that we have had only about 2.5 mildly drizzly days since we left - and an occasional rain at night?) and warm and we played on the sand and watched a lot of people not catching fish but trying awfully hard.  Many of them were wearing waders, and they tow little wheeled carts with their supplies.  They even have harnesses they wear to pull the carts so their hands are free for poles and cigarettes.  I asked a couple people what they were fishing for and the answer was 'anything we can gee'it'.

A bird blurb.  We've been seeing a lot of bluebirds (and hearing them), juncos, flickers, phoebes, robins, and killdeer.  There are lots of red tailed hawks and kestrels.  At the beach there were boat tailed grackles, laughing gulls, great blue herons, and brown pelicans and cormorants.  I think I saw one small group of skimmers, and saw some terns.

Boat tailed grackle

It's odd to hear birds like bluebirds and phoebes singing at the ocean in November when I so associate them with the first bits of bare ground and the warm weather of spring in Vermont.

The brown pelicans are great - they are so darn odd looking and yet very graceful.  They fly in small groups along the waves, wing tips just grazing the top of the water occasionally, following the swell until it crests and breaks and then they soar up and back out to find the next swell.  I didn't see them finding anything that way but they must. 

Due to the big wind on the outerbanks (see further below) the bird life was congregated on the protected side of the banks and nobody was flying around much.  I saw snow geese, what I think must have been tundra swans, green winged teals, american avocets, herons, and some long legged things I can only guess at.  It was so windy it was hard to hold the binoculars steady to get good looks at everything.  I know I missed some things - I just couldn't see well enough.

The sanderlings make us laugh.  They seem to enjoy playing 'dare' with the waves.  They dabble, dabble in the wet sand of the retreating waves, then another wave comes in the they wait till the last half second to turn and run away, legs moving so fast that Sam noticed they look spread out all the time, you can't see the steps.  The waves stops, just lapping at their ankles and they screech to a halt and turn around and follow the wave back out.  Very funny. 

A man.

A cormorant.  These seemed like similar poses. 

Snow geese.

We went to the aquarium in Morehead and had a great time there - they have fish but also a good exhibit of snakes.  Corn snakes in a whole pile, warming up on a shelf, all of the different color phases - I guess they've been bred that way.  We had a hard time telling if they were real or not.  But they were.  One came down a wall, sliding by a tiny nail head to support itself, over this and that and then completely disappeared under a couple of boards on the floor of the cage.  The tip of its tail following the same path as the rest of it.  It's hard not to have the typical snake reaction.

They had an open tank of rays that you could touch.  Cow nosed rays appropriately enough.  They seemed to like being touched and when they saw our hands in the water they'd come up to it for a gentle rub.  They do feel somewhat like cow noses but I think they are named for how they look which is a bit like a cow's nose if you squint. 

We drove out to Sealevel, NC for the night.  Another one of our find the campground in the dark adventures.  But we did find it and it was fine and it's always fun to wake up in the morning and see where we've landed and what we drove through to get there.  It is a lot warmer than inland and in the morning we were able to put up the pop-up and actually stand up straight in the camper.  We did a thorough cleaning and relaxed in the sun and warmth.  Ocean means vacation to us so suddenly we feel like our vacation stage of the trip has arrived.  We can slow down and relax a little.  Lest anyone think this has been pure vacation, it hasn't.  And I don't mean that in a negative way, it's been great - it's just more work than one would think.

See Sam waving?

A long, long road and bridge over great salt marshes.

We saw several Marsh Hawks over this marsh.

We took the ferry from Cedar Point to Ocracoke, a 2.25 hour trip.  There are only about 3 ferries a day at this time of year and we didn't have reservations so we went early and got in line and then went to the beach.  Found quite a few dead jelly fish that evidently aren't appealing to anyone to eat as they were untouched.  We landed in Ocracoke in the late afternoon and found our campground right away - in the daylight!  Ocracoke must be a hopping place, and unbearable, in the summer but at this time of year it's nearly a ghost town.  We visited the local library that is tiny and doubles as the school library.  We had our best pizza of the trip at Jason's.  Bought a game of Oceanopoly (1/2 price) and it's been really quite fun to play.

On the way to Ocracoke.

The jelly fish.

The next day we went to a beach and waded in the water and found wonderful shells.  The water here in November is warmer than I've ever felt in Maine so we had a nice time going in up to our knees.  There were fishermen on the beach and they all have permission to drive their pickup trucks onto the sand.  They are fitted with racks for fishing poles on the fronts of their trucks.  Sam says they look like pipe organs on front - often as many as 10 tubes to put poles in.  It's funny to see them driving around town with a row of fishing poles sticking way up on the air on the front of the truck.  They were catching the same thing the fishermen in Morehead were. 

We visited a tiny herd of the native horses that are still there.  Of course they are now confined but do have some wild land to roam on.  They are stocky, solidly built and now geneticists can determine that they are definitely of Spanish decent - and arrived sometime in the 1500s.  Sometimes animals survived shipwrecks and made it to shore, sometimes when a ship was aground they dumped the animals overboard to lighten the load.  Those must have been some terrible moments - to decide to dump the animals you'd been traveling with for so long.

Our campground in Hatteras was right on the ocean.  During the night the wind came up and by morning it was blowing a gale.  In spite of cheerful weather forecasts about sun and a breeze it was cloudy and blowing like a hurricane.  A storm out over the Atlantic was to blame and while it didn't rain and wasn't cold the wind was tremendous.  Blowing sand and sea mist made the air look thick and polluted.  We walked to the ocean by the campground and found that the noise we'd heard and thought was wind in the pines was actually a roaring ocean just below us.

Photos just don't do it justice. 

We headed north and the island there is very narrow, just a few hundred feet wide.  The surf was coming up over the tops of the dunes - higher than the van - and flooding the road.  Little streets that go towards the ocean had become small rivers and there was sand and water on the road.  We drove through several inches of water to slightly higher ground where the banks are wider.  We found out that later that day they had to close the road to Hatteras in the area of the above picture.  The surf was 10-12 feet at the shore and that was in low tide.  No wonder they build the houses on stilts - and even then some get destroyed.  The beach is forever changing it's shape and sometimes quite rapidly and dramatically.

A wave coming over the top - the fence was already down - I think...

The grader was out plowing the sand and the bucket loader scooping it up.

Like snow in the winter.

We went to a beach where there is some room between the dunes and the water.  The wind was making foam on top of the water and the waves were leaving great drifts of it on the beach.  You could run through knee deep foam and not feel any resistance.  Sam kicked it and ran through it and chunks would loosen and roll or slide down the beach.  Pieces as big as a pillow tumbling along.  It was an amazing thing to see.  The supply kept being refreshed by the waves.  The wind was blowing so hard you had to brace yourself and my rain coat was snapping and crackling.

This was only a small amount - I didn't have the camera for the knee high drifts - I feared it would be ruined by the blowing sand.

We went to Jockey Ridge which is in Nags Head and is an amazing natural dune on the inside of the banks.  It's moving and shifting regularly just like the beach so there are trees and shrubs half buried and I was told the whole thing is moving to the southwest 3-6 feet a year.  The wind was wild up there too and we could see and hear the surf crashing on the beach.  We took off our shoes and socks and had fun exploring the patterns, the hills and steep banks, and leaning into the wind.  Sam ran down the steep banks and rolled down then till he was seasick.  The sand is very, very fine and soft.  And blowing.

Climbing the hill - behind him is the flat part, many feet down from where he is.

Spent a night on Roanoke, which is an island on the land side of the banks.  A little scary crossing the bridge to it in the wind.  The island was much more protected but still the van shuddered with wind all night and it was still blowing the next day.  It was a little warmer so we went back to Jockey Ridge and explored the dunes further.  We visited Kitty Hawk and the Wright Brothers Memorial Museum there.  We'll hopefully see more about them at the Air and Space museum.  The wind was still blowing - and the van had been coated with a salty, dirty layer.  We washed all the windows of the van and a day later they were all filmy and dirty again.  So we left the outerbanks.  The wind was to continue for another two days.  We drove inland and the sky cleared and it was beautiful and the wind stopped.  We camped at Shiloh, NC and the stillness was almost eerie.  No shaking and quaking, no roaring and crashing.