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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