OBX Weekend

When we first moved to North Carolina I noticed lots of people driving around with these bumper stickers that just had the letters "OBX" on it. I was really perplexed (and feeling slightly out of the pop culture loop) by not knowing what this meant until around spring break when several of my students mentioned that they were going to OBX for the week. My brilliant 'ah-ha' moment was when I finally put it together that this is the Carolinian way of saying the Outer Banks. We're slowly learning the lingo! So, to complete our tour of the North Carolina coastline, we spent Memorial Day weekend in the Outer Banks camping on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. It was beautiful! We initially drove down through Nags Head, then continued on to the very end of Hatteras Island and got the last campsite left on the island that weekend (a long story in itself).

The OBX culture is like none I've ever experienced before. On the one hand, the restaurants and shops along the coastline are all very local, the beaches are pristine and not commercialized, and it provides the experience of visiting several small fishing villages. On the other hand, I've never seen so many BIG trucks in my life, and people actually rig devices to the front of their trucks to store nearly a dozen fishing poles at a time. I would venture a guess that the crowd this region draws is a little more NASCAR than Monte Carlo. Welcome to North Carolina!

We had a great time checking out the beautiful lighthouses and spending a full day on the beach. We attempted to build sandcastles (although Dewey's preference is a little more in the realm of demolition rather than construction) and tried our hand at body boarding. Dewey proved once again to be a useful companion when it comes to shell collecting - he always seems to uncover the best ones! However, he also discovered a washed up baby octopus and tried to chew on it at every chance (not sure where he acquired a taste for calamari in this family!). We did; however, all enjoy a nice scoop of ice cream after a long day in the sand.


We spent Memorial Day Monday on the northern coast of the Outer Banks, exploring Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills, and Kittyhawk. The highlight for me was seeing Jockey's Ridge (a.k.a. the desert!), the largest sand dune on the east coast. It was one of the more impressive things I've seen in a lifetime - an estimated 30 million tons of sand in this dune. It was also deathly hot and I felt like I was wandering for 40 years in the desert hoping to find a single oasis. I'm sure this is just a small taste of what's awaiting us in the middle east! We also paid hommage to the site of the Wright Brothers' first flight, as all good Daytonians must do. It was fun to see the location we've always read so much about - although it certainly did demonstrate to me how much Wright Brothers information infiltrated my childhood. There wasn't a picture in that museum that I haven't seen before and not a story that I haven't heard. Ha!