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Monday, February 12, 2018

Visiting the North Carolina Outer Banks by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the North Carolina Outer Banks by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


When my husband Laurent went on a business trip to Virginia, I went along with him to see some new sites in our old home.


We wanted to visit the Outer Banks in North Carolina and headed south through the Great Dismal Swamp that is located in both Virginia and North Carolina.  This place is creepy.  The road is built above the soil, which is flooded with water and surrounds tree roots.  Mosquitos like to call the Great Dismal Swamp home.


We drove across low-lying bridges above ocean water in rain to arrive on the island where Manteo is located.  They have an upscale Harris-Teeter grocery store where you can buy raw (fresh) oysters, dry white wines to go with the oysters, banana-cream pies, and chocolate covered coffee beans to munch on.


In Manteo, they also had drive-thru liquor stores all along the beachfront.  Manteo is the main town for excursions to the outlying islands, which you get to by driving over mile-long bridges that lie low over the ocean water.


We drove over more low-lying bridges in the rain.  I was becoming concerned about the rising ocean water around us, but the bridges were not flooding, so we continued onward.
Once on Roanoke Island, we drove around Dare County.  The Carolina-Algonquian people inhabited this area in the 16th century.


The English under Sir Walter Raleigh founded Roanoke Colony in this area in 1585.  Governor White of the Roanoke County left the 120 colonists in 1587 to get supplies in England according to the website for North Carolina’s Outer Banks.


When Governor White returned in 1590, the colony had vanished.  The only thing left of the colony was a carving on a tree that said, “Croatoan.”


From Roanoke, we drove over more low-lying bridges to arrive at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  From Kitty Hawk, we had to drive to Kill Devil Hills to see the Wright Brothers National Monument, which details aviation history.


The two brothers, who manned the “first controlled powered airplane flights” at Kill Devil Hills, were Oroville and Wilbur Wright.  The brothers were engineers from Ohio.


After we finished visiting the aviation museum, we drove home over the low-lying bridges in more pouring rain.


We drove around some of the beachfront house suburbs and drove back to Norfolk, Virginia through the Great Dismal Swamp for chicken mole as I thought of reading some Edgar Allen Poe stories in this creepy, dank, and fungus-prone world.


By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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