Outer Banks, North Carolina

The sun is shining today. We took a day trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. On the map the shortest route was using country roads. It wasn’t the fastest, but it was very picturesque. The Outer Banks barrier islands are 130 miles long and to this Californian most famous for the Wright Brothers flight and Cape Hatteras.. We won’t have time to drive as far south as Cape Hatteras today. Another next year project, maybe. We spent 2 hours at Kill Devil Hills, just south of Kitty Hawk, where the Wright Brothers had their first controlled powered flight on December 17, 1903. They had been coming to the area for 4 years and working on their project. Then they would go home and come back with a redesigned plane based on the prior year’s experiments. We were walking up to the granite monument when we met a young man (45) who had flown his Bonanza into the small airport next to the memorial. He asked us to take his picture in front of the monument. He lives in Newport Beach, California, and is flying around the country like we’re driving. He left home in April and has been to Florida and the Bahamas. His plane is outfitted with a bed and closets and refrigerator. He calls it a BonanzaBago.
There aren’t very many north/south roads on the Outer Banks in the Kitty Hawk, Nags Head, and Kill Devil Hills area. There are only two east/west roads from the “mainland”, the one we used and one at Roanoake Island. There are a couple of ferry access points farther south and one north from Currituck. With thousands of houses and hotel rooms out here, in summer the traffic jams must be horrendous.
To get home we drove back to the mainland, then took a 45 minute ferry ride from Currituck to Knotts Island, just south of Virginia Beach. Again, it wasn’t the fastest way, but it was beautiful. Most of the North Carolina ferry system is free. It was dark by the time we got home.