The Outer Banks - Kitty Hawk

It was interesting to see the area of Kill Devil Hill, where the Wright Brothers accomplished the first controlled flight. They spent many years traveling from their bike shop in Dayton, Ohio to this area around Kitty Hawk to work on their ideas for aerodynamics.

There are photographs of this historic event because Orville had taken an interest in photography. They had tossed a coin to determine who would make the first attempts with the 1903 glider. Wilbur won the toss, but lost his chance when he oversteered on that flight and caused damage to the glider. After repairs, on December 17, 1903, Orville was able to sustain a controlled flight for 12 seconds, flying 120 feet. Three more flights were made that day, with Wilbur, on the last flight, flying 852 feet and staying aloft for 59 seconds.

The location has been covered with grass, but originally it was a sand dune. I'm sure the park service is attempting to control erosion, but it doesn't really give you a feel for what the area looked like in 1903.

This is the boulder marking the distance of the first flight and farther out are markers for each progressive flight.

The memorial at the top of Kill Devil Hill.

We stopped up the road at Kitty Hawk, where they have been teaching hang gliding for many years. In fact, a good friend of ours, Randy Cobb, worked here in the 70's.

This is probably more how the sand dunes looked when the Wright Brothers were flying their gliders down the road at Kill Devil Hill.

It has sure been a long time since I've taken a picture of Les in front of a hang glider!

Cape Hatteras & The Outer Banks

Using Roanoke Island as our base for a couple of days, we started our explorations south along Highway 12, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore to the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. At 208 feet, it is the tallest in the United States. We would have climbed the 248 stairs to the top, but they had closed the top due to high winds.

This is the info from the website: http://www.nps.gov/caha/index.htm The climb is strenuous! The 248 iron spiral stairs to the top equal climbing a 12 story building. The stairs have a handrail only on one side and a landing every 31 steps. There is no air conditioning. It may be noisy, humid, hot and dim inside the lighthouse and there is two-way traffic on the narrow stairs. Don't you think they should pay you $7 to climb the stairs!

The light from the lighthouse can be seen for 24 nautical miles, and shines every 7.5 minutes. It is repainted every 7 years. It was built in 1870, replacing the original lighthouse which was built in 1802.
In 1999, due to the changing shoreline they had to move this lighthouse from it's original location. It took 23 days to move it 2900 feet, at a cost of $11.8 million dollars. That's $4,069 per foot! The original location is now under water.

Caretaker buildings.

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Torpedo Junction
During WWII, the spring of 1942, German U-boats sank a ship a day in the waters off the outer banks.

We stopped for lunch on the beach, but just as we got settled, the wind shifted and started pelting us with fine white sand.

Tryon Palace ~ New Bern, NC

Tryon Palace was originally built between 1767 and 1770, as the first permanent capitol of the Colony of North Carolina and a home for the Royal Governor and his family. Governor William Tryon had brought John Hawks, an English architect, with him when he came to North Carolina in 1764. Hawks designed the Palace in the manner of a number of fashionable houses in the vicinity of London-- Georgian in style, with symmetry maintained throughout. It was soon regarded to be the finest public building in the American colonies.

Governor Tryon, his wife Margaret Wake Tryon, and their daughter Margaret, lived in the Palace for just over a year. They left New Bern in June 1771, when Governor Tryon was appointed to the governorship of New York. (from the official website: http://www.tryonpalace.org/history.html)

Now, according to our guide, conventional wisdom says that Tryon begged to be moved to New York to escape the miserable summers in New Bern, North Carolina!

The second Governor, Josiah Martin, fled the palace in the face of the American Revolution and patriots made it their capitol and the first sessions of the General Assembly met there. The building was eventually abandoned, and on an evening in 1798, the building was destroyed by a fire.

What's really cool is that this is a reconstruction, built using the original plans and spearheaded by a group of very determined women who started back in the '30s to get the Palace reconstructed.

The original site had been built over with roads and houses, and the reconstruction involved moving all those things and then excavating the original site. This involved removing more than 50 buildings and rerouting North Carolina Route 70, including a bridge over the Trent River. The reconstruction is built on the original foundation! It was finally completed and opened to the public in 1959.

The only building that was remaining was this one ~ the horse stables.
When the house caught fire, the townspeople tore down the wooden walkway to save the outbuildings.

There are 14 acres of gardens.

During redevelopment,they also moved some of the other historic houses in town to this site. This is the George W. Dixon house, circa 1830.

The ticket for this is a real bargain at $15. You get the tour of the palace, 3 houses, a blacksmith shop and the gardens and they give you two days to take it all in.

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New Bern is also the birthplace of Pepsi!

A very unassuming store, which was a pharmacy when Caleb Branham invented the drink. You can purchase a drink or branded items and watch a video loop giving the history of the soft drink.

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These are just photos of my favorite house, so far.

Shalotte NC and Flights home

When we were first starting out on this journey, we spent about a week in Quartzsite, where we got to know some other Monaco coach owners. I've had a great time corresponding with them and reading the blogs of their journeys. One of those couples, Peg & Jim, full-timers from North Carolina, let us know that they would be at a KOA in Shalotte, North Carolina, for a couple months as work-kampers. It was an easy decision to head their way so that we could renew the budding friendship that had started back in the desert. (Peg was the one encouraging me to try to drive this behemoth!)

Peggy & Jim produce an RV lifestyle website that you might want to check out: http://www.americanrver.com/ Check out the webisodes! (They used to own a TV station, so they know what they're doing!)

It was also time to put Kyle on an airplane back to California. We made reservations to put him on a plane out of Wilmington, NC, which was only about 45 minutes north of Shalotte. We loved getting to share a bit of our adventure with him.

Bob & Marlene have a blog: http://rea-of-sunshine.blogspot.com/
So does Rod & Jean: http://rod-jean.blogspot.com/
I've already learned some blogging tricks from both of them.

Broadway at the Beach

Myrtle Beach is another of those great seaside resorts where you can lay on the beach and soak up some sun. We checked out the arcade and the pier, where we found a place to have a beer!

On our second day we spent some time checking out "Broadway at the Beach"; a themed shopping area built around a man-made lagoon full of creepy looking fish. It was apparent that the fish had spent their whole lives being fed those nasty fish food pellets that you can buy out of the machine for a quarter.

There's also a Ripley's Aquarium, an IMAX Theater, nightclubs, restaurants, and enough shopping to keep a shopaholic happy.

How cute is this! Like Father, like son. Kyle was the first to spot it and said "Look Mom, Dad & I match."

Some of the rides from the old Myrtle Beach Pavilion Amusement Park have been moved here.

Lake Marion, South Carolina

After Charleston, we headed inland to Lake Marion, which holds the states fishing record for largemouth bass, so that Kyle could get in a little fishing.

On our first afternoon, Les was flying his little RC airplane (I call it the people magnet) and a fellow camper, Kenneth, pulls up alongside our campsite to ask Les about it. When he finds out that Kyle is the fisherman in our group, he invites Kyle to join him on an evening adventure to go catfishing, something neither of them had done before. Now, even though Kyle doesn't fish for catfish and neither of them caught anything, it was a fun opportunity and he had a good time.

Off into the sunset

It was good that Kyle had an opportunity to go night fishing since the very next day the weather turns and it rains on us for 2 days.


Watching the satellite news feed as the downpour came right across the RV. We did actually spring a leak in the bedroom (the A/C seal) and had a puddle right in the middle of our bed. Yikes!

We still enjoyed the view out over the lake.

Beautiful Charleston

Charleston is a city that screams for days, not hours, to see all it's glory. Unfortunately, we're now on a schedule that includes hours, not days. I will go back! Charleston is a preserved city, while Savannah is a restored city.

Our AAA tour book had a couple of walking tours, so Les & I headed out to see how much we could see on foot.

The steeple of St. Michael's Episcopal Church was used as a target for British ship gunners during the Revolutionary War. So glad that they weren't very good shots! The pews inside are more like family boxes than individual pews. George Washington and Robert E. Lee sat in these pews.


This is a beautiful example of a 'single house' - meaning the house is a single room wide. The front door opens onto the porch, or piazza, rather than the main house. Many houses are built in this style, with the house sitting sideways to the street. The piazza would overlook the front yard (many yards have been turned into a place to park a car).

Tradd Street is lined with historical properties.



Just some examples of great homes.

15 Meeting Street. Aside from the brick basement, the rest of the house is cypress. The facade is covered with stucco which is scored to resemble stone. (This was a cheaper process than importing stone and was not uncommon.)

East Battery Street, taken from the walkway along Charleston harbor.

Chalmers street is the city's longest remaining cobblestone street, paved in 1760 with creek stones brought from Europe as ships' ballast. 17 Chalmers is the Pink house, which served as a tavern in Colonial days. Constructed about 1712, of Bermuda stone (a coral limestone), it has an interesting gambrel roof, made of clay tiles, called thigh tiles, because the clay was shaped over workers' thighs.

What I didn't get a picture of were Charleston women wearing their big, glorious hats! Wish I had had the nerve to ask for a photo, but it was obvious that this was common attire for them and not some kind of costume. They looked marvelous!