After we left Steph and Dave's house on Tuesday, August 15, we headed east and boarded a car ferry going two hours further east to Ocracoke Island, the southernmost island in North Carolina's Outer Banks. The island is only accessible by ferry. There are no bridges anywhere to the mainland, although it's only a 40 minute ferry ride going NE toward Cape Hatteras.
Here's a general idea of where it is:
And here's a map of the island, which is comprised of a tiny village in the NW quadrant (established in the 1600s and home to Blackbeard the Pirate in the early 1700s), and then 16 solid miles of National Park protected beach along the Atlantic shore. Since only a limited number of people can stay in the village, and the island is only accessible by ferry, the beach is in pristine condition and is largely deserted in many areas... my idea of a perfect beach vacation...
Here I am on the two-hour ferry ride from Cedar Island to Ocracoke:
If you haven't tried the new "chocolate lovers" Chex Mix, I highly recommend it.
Here are two pictures of the boat pulling into Ocracoke Village's port:
After checking into our tiny hotel, we hit the beach in full force later in the afternoon:
We took a two mile walk along the water... great leg work out!
The next morning we woke up early and hit the beach again...
I loved this cloud bank. It reminded me of the white city in one of the Lord of the Rings movies.
Self-portrait... (no one around to take it for us!)
(BTW, I'm wearing this dreadful red ball cap in every single picture from the vacation... but on a positive note, I was saving my skin from the ravages of sun-induced wrinkles.)
In the afternoon, we checked out Ocracoke's famous lighthouse:
Here are two more pictures of it later that evening...
When we woke up Thursday morning, it was raining cats and dogs so we hung out and had a leisurely breakfast. However, the weather broke around noon so we decided to hop on our rented beach bikes and check out the village.
These are our bikes (everyone rides them to get around town):
What we didn't know was that another massive storm was coming our way. And we got caught smack in the middle of it. Despite the rain coming down so hard that I literally could not see and being so drenched that I was literally wringing out my clothes, Miguel wanted to stop in a small clearing on the side of the road to try and preserve some semblance of dry-ness, but as you can see, it was pretty impossible...
I found it a bit more amusing than he.
Here's the view out the other side of the umbrella...
The early evening was gorgeous though, and we had to make another appearance at the beach...
Even the velociraptors enjoyed the seaside view.
On our final morning (Friday), we woke up early and beached again. Here I am flying our trademark kite, AKA our Jolly Roger.
OK, so it's a butterfly instead of a skull & crossbones, but we're nice people... or at least Miguel is.
Speaking of, isn't he so cute?
My attempt at an "artsy" shot.
Here I am trying not to think about returning to Tucson in two days...
Arizona, where what why?
Although my hand looks oddly frozen in space here, I am actually controlling the string of the kite, which had a habit of losing wind sometimes and crashing to planet Earth...
Miguel and I went a little crazy about shell collecting. We likened it to panning for gold. Although I went a bit more overboard than him in my enthusiasm, he was greatly entertained by watching me wade around in the water digging in hopes of finding an elusive conch shell. In the end, I never found one, but I did find this absolutely perfectly humongous clam shell, which I was quite proud of...
As for lodging, we stayed at Edward's of Ocracoke, which I am positive is the cutest place to stay in the whole village. Here is our bungalow efficiency apartment, with kitchen, screened porch, and clothes line (which is a total necessity for hanging out wet swimwear)...
And here's another self-portrait in front of our little place:
And here's the cat I called "Sybil" because she was totally psycho and attacked my ankle with her sharp little teeth and then stalked me outside the porch for the next few days...
And here is our only real picture together -- taken outside the Pony Island Restaurant -- where we had lunch before heading north to DC and the real world...
May I strongly recommend the hush puppies...
... which are absolutely worth an adoring gaze.
Here's Miguel on the ferry to Hatteras...
And the vacation wouldn't be complete without one final stop. After reading in our NC guide book that the somewhat highbrow Outer Banks town of Duck had a shopping area called "Scarborough Faire" (please note - that's FairE, with an "E", for posh pretentiousness), we took a 20 minute detour to check it out, just for the name.
Are you going to Scarborough Faire?... Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme...
I'm doing my best here to look worthy of Scarborough Faire - "the" Shopping Village. Very posh indeed.
Just in case you need an audio cue, here are Simon and Garfunkel singing the old classic (admittedly one of my favorites)...
And on that note, good night bourgeousie. (God, I hope I spelled that right).
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