Beautiful morning! I was up around 7:15am and made a coffee and sat out in the lawn chair outside in the morning light reading my book. Sun rising over the ocean side of the campsite. Then Jsy was up and followed by Amelia. We sat outside and read books and enjoyed the sunshine and quiet. Decided to add a third night to our stay here... easy as a quick text to the office.
Jonathan cooked eggs on our campstove outside and by 9:30am we made plans to go visit the Wright Brothers Memorial and some of the other beaches and find the Post Office to mail some stockpiled postcards and get more stamps.
We left around 10am and drove back up the strip (sand banks on either side)... passed a guy throwing nets into the overflowing ditches trying to catch the fish schooling in them ... we guessed from the flooding after Hurricane Ian, the fish ended up in there. Jay had seen them when he biked yesterday... big fish and tons of them! 11am stopped at a stunning beach on the non-preserve side of Pea Island Beach (inland side is all preservation, and the outer bank is the open ocean). No one on this beach! gorgeous stretches of sand and ocean. Lots of cute little (And some big!!) crabs scuttling along the sand in the dunes up to the beach... ducking into their holes in the sand. Some prickly pear cacti along the path mixed in with the dunes grass.
We walked the beach... explored the huge tide pool between sand banks, found a seastar floating along in the current, and one lone sand-dollar. Every step had beautifully marked shells made smooth by the ocean.
Not wanting to overdo our beach time since we knew we'd be beach exploring again tomorrow when the wind was supposed to pick up and Jonathan could go kiting... we left around 11:40 or so to continue on exploring further down the road. Found the post office at Nag's Head (yay post offices haha) then continued on to Kill Devil Hills to the Wright Brothers Memorial. Spent over an hour there looking around the grounds and checking out the visitor centre. We had free admission with our "America the Beautiful" Annual National Parks Pass we bought in Acadia. The memorial was very impressive and it was super cool to see where Orville and Wilbur first made flight happen. The visitor centre was informative and interactive. Lots of neat history about them and their families too. Sounds like their mother was the engineering brain in the family and instilled a love of learning and mechanics in her kids, while their dad instilled a strong sense of family and closeness.
view from atop Kill Devil hill, and a camouflaged little lizard that after some research we identified as a "Five-Lined Skink"... super cute.
Next we drove back towards "home" and stopped at North America's tallest sand dunes at Jockey Ridge State Park not far from the W.B. Memorial. We saw a string of cute little sparkly metallic dune buggies driving along the road towards us.
Spent from 1:30-3pm at the dunes exploring... it was HOT! saw cool tracks of gray foxes and snakes. Saw more five-lined skinks, and a very cool super yellow butterfly. We walked the dunes in hopes we'd make it to the water, but it was a steep bank down through lots of trees (after trudging over the expanse of sand that felt like the sahara, haha). We did find a small steep path that was marked very vaugely and ended up in a marshy bit of the water with no beach. Neat to see but not to fully swim and cool off.
Back to the rig! Jonathan took the kids to the office store and they bought a big fish net. He took the kiddos down the road to look for those ditch fish to see if they could catch any... no luck... the fish were super smart and fast. I put a couple loads of laundry on while I lounged by the pool and read my book. Tough life. I did go in the freezing pool then sat in the sunshine to warm up. Had a nice chat with a lady that tried going in waist deep into the pool.
Once kiddos back, they all had a swim session before tucking into a salmon burger dinner at the RV. Great day! tomorrow... WIND!!!! Daddy very excited. I bet he won't sleep tonight. Hee hee.
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