(no subject)
Jul. 24th, 2012 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI went to the Outer Banks (we stayed in Kill Devil Hills) in May for vacation this year.
Normal people go to the Outer Banks because they love the beach. I love the beach, too, but I love it without so many fucking people on it. If this sounds like you, I strongly suggest visiting the beach BEFORE prime vacationing season gets underway. We went May 16 through 21 or thereabouts, to avoid the crowds and higher (in-season) rates.
The Outer Banks are in North Carolina, at least that's the state that claims these skinny, mostly-made-of-sand barrier islands. The land is flat and narrow, with the Atlantic on one side and a sound (large body of brackish water) on the other. Only a couple of roads are important (US 12 runs north-south right along the beach and is how you get to the swirly-striped lighthouse and Ocracoke Island) and getting around is fairly straighforward, though, we were assured by local workers, travel was MUCH MORE TIME CONSUMING during the "on" season.
There are A METRIC SHIT TON of vacation properties, prices starting at the mid-six-figures for the new construction we saw up towards Duck (northern end of the thing). There are a lot of businesses catering to tourists (mini golf, places selling beach stuff, places to eat, places to rent bikes and kayaks, piers from which to fish, etc.) and I think it's fair to say that it's a world where tourism dominates.
So. We went to the Outer Banks.
We visited Kitty Hawk and the First-in-Flight thing, which was about half a mile from our hotel. The park ranger person giving the talk was excellent and very informative. If you ever wondered how on earth Orville and Wilbur Wright (bicycle mechanics from Dayton fucking Ohio) wound up being First in Flight in North Carolina, here's how. First off, the Wrights did a lot of work on gliders, wing shape, etc. before they started with powered flight. For gliders, the Wrights needed a pretty reliable wind and a big hill, the same stuff that hang gliders still need in these our modern times. The Wrights needed somewhere flat, without much to run into because they were LEARNING how to build a glider that steered and didn't figure they needed to run into trees in the process. They also wanted to do their experimental flights where there weren't many people around to point-n-laugh. Kitty Hawk suited the bill. No, wait! you cry. You just SAID the Outer Banks were "flat and narrow", so what's all this about a hill? The Outer Banks are *mostly* flat. They have sand dunes, or at least they did back when the Wright Brothers were around. Now, they have a dumb-shit bermuda-grass covered monument to First in Flight (it used to be a sand dune until some bicycle mechanics made history there and the monument-builders wanted a monument that would not move around) and also they have Jockey's Ridge, which is a real sand dune that moves about like it's supposed to and is currently consuming a putt-putt golf course and being used as a launch pad for hang gliders. Jockey's Ridge is not small. It is one hell of a lot bigger than you probably think a sand dune is. Kill Devil Hills (which is what the Wright Brothers took off of for their glider flights) was similarly large. Jockey's Ridge doesn't have shit growing on it. It's a massive damn pile of sand and the wind is incessant and the sand pings against you the whole time because the wind never stops. Assuming that Kill Devil Hills looked, back then, a lot like Jockey's Ridge looks now, it would have been perfect for glider practice.
After the Wright Brothers thing, we started with the lighthouses. North Carolina has a lot of lighthouses on the Outer Banks and you can go look at them as a tourism activity. Previously, the lighthouses existed to keep ships from running into the Outer Banks and/or the Diamond Shoals that are offshore of Hatteras. This kind of worked, but not perfectly, because the ocean along the Outer Banks is known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic because of the huge number of shipwrecks there. (Tricky currents, see, and the aforementioned shoals and practically-invisible barrier islands and also shitty weather with hurricanes and stuff.) The lighthouses are all different (paint jobs and stuff) so that if you happened to sail by in the daytime, you could kind of tell where you were by which lighthouse you saw. Since we were tourists, we went to see the lighthouses. The first lighthouse we went to see was Currituck, which is on the northern end of the obx, near Corolla or whatever. It's brick. Here's a picture:
It is a pretty nice lighthouse and for under ten dollars, you can walk up the thing (a lot of steps, like twelve flights or something) and look out the top of it. There's a parapet walkway thingie right underneath the lens, which is a Fresnel lens. Fresnel lenses work by having a lot of prisms to focus the light and make it go out horizontally from the lighthouse so that it can be seen further. Fresnel was apparently a french dude because his name is pronounced without an S sound.
Here's a Fresnel Lens (mostly -- some pieces are missing) we saw in a museum.
And here's a detail shot -- note the prism shape of the individual pieces.
I learned a lot about lighthouses and how they were lit and what lighthouse keepers did and stuff like that, but much of the learning was from the Bodie and Hatteras lighthouse exhibits because they are owned/operated by the park service where the Currituck lighthouse is a private concern and not so much interested in educating you as getting your eight bucks and letting you climb up and then down. Currituck did have some educational displays on the beginning landings of the climb, though, and those were nice.
Because lighthouses are built on sandy barrier islands without proper foundations and because they are very heavy structures with minimal footprints to spread the load and because it's VERY BAD FORM to have your lighthouses fall over or list in a Pisan fashion, they are equipped with vertical control markers. Here's a picture:
Lighthouses have fascinating spiral staircases. I took pictures of them.
I also enjoyed the attention-to-detail on the lighthouse, some of which was probably not designed to be noticed by people. Here are the hinges on the front door of the thing (they're brass, btw):
Currituck was a lovely lighthouse on very pretty grounds. You also get to drive through lots of small beach village things on your way there, so it's worth a trip if traffic isn't bad.
I stopped at a bookstore near the Currituck lighthouse and bought a book that would significantly influence the things I saw on the rest of my vacation. The book was The Nature of the Outer Banks by Dirk Frankenberg though I don't have the second edition, just the first. I am a huge dork, but this was a truly fascinating book and it added a lot to my vacation experience.
We went out to eat frequently because we were on vacation. There was a pancake place (Stack 'em High) that was continually busy in the mornings and every time we went by we considered stopping there. Finally, we did. Their pancakes were bloody well outstanding. Best pancakes ever. Two thumbs up. We ate there twice. If you are in the OBX and you have the opportunity, eat the damn pancakes.
We went to Firefly, which is not on 12 but is on the other strip, down towards Nags Head. Food was OK, but decor was outstandingly amusing. Notable were their "tree" trunks made out of Great Stuff Expanding Foam and then painted. They were awesome.
We went to see other lighthouses. Bodie Island is below Kitty Hawk, heading south. It's striped horizontally and is currently under renovation so that people can walk up it, the park service having discovered that people will pay good money to trudge up twelve flights of stairs, take a couple of pictures, and trudge back down again. Here's Bodie:
Right now, you can't go inside Bodie, so I don't have any internal pictures.
We took a day and drove down to Hatteras and took the ferry to Ocracoke, to pick up the other two conveniently-located lighthouses. Hatteras is the swirly-striped one that is iconic. It looks like this:
Hatteras is one of the lighthouses that you can pay money and walk up, though I imagine this is a potentiality that, in the on season, exists in name only. There were a lot of people (in the off season) who wanted to walk up to the top of the Hatteras lighthouse and I cannot imagine the lines in the tourism season. Hatteras lighthouse was moved, in 1999, from where it was almost ready to fall into the ocean to a "safe" remove from the shoreline. When we got to the top, we could see this. I took a picture.
This is the old foundation (foreground) and the new lighthouse location in the back.
And then here's another view.
This picture is from the parapet thing on Hatteras lighthouse. I've labled the old foundation and the sea wall thing they built to try to save it before they gave up and moved the whole damn thing on railroad tracks, a feat that won them some outstanding civil engineering awards.
Hatteras has a lovely spiral staircase and apparently gets a lot of tourists who do not wash their hands.
The staircase is still pretty, though.
When you go up the lighthouses, people on the parapets are leaning on the railings and having their pictures taken. I am not particularly impressed with the effects of salt spray on cast iron railings.
From Hatteras, we went to Ocracoke. Ocracoke is an island. You get there by riding the (free) ferry. The ferry runs every forty minutes (more in the on season) and carefully traverses the shoals between Hatteras and Ocracoke.
The waters between Hatteras and Ocracoke have to be dredged pretty regularly because the currents sweep sand down (from north to south) the barrier islands and dump it in the inlet (between Hatteras and Ocracoke) where it makes sandbars and fucks up the ferry service. We saw them dredging the inlet while we were riding the ferry.
Also, there were signs about the shoals all over, plus which you could see the sandbars in the water all over the place. A fellow traveler on the ferry said that sometimes the ferries run aground on shoals after storms re-arrange things unexpectedly, in which case one's ferry ride lasts considerably longer than forty minutes.
Ocracoke is smallish. The lighthouse is small and white and you can't go up it because the Coast Guard is still using it. Of the four we visited, this was the lame-est one. No exhibit, no good parking, not even a very interesting lighthouse. Plus it's a pain in the ass to get to, what with the ferry and all. The streets are narrow and people drive golf carts on them. We did get excellent ice cream from some hippies afterward, though, so that was kind of nice.
And this has drug on really quite far and is image-heavy. How about we quit here and next time I can tell you all about sand? It's fascinating, really.
Normal people go to the Outer Banks because they love the beach. I love the beach, too, but I love it without so many fucking people on it. If this sounds like you, I strongly suggest visiting the beach BEFORE prime vacationing season gets underway. We went May 16 through 21 or thereabouts, to avoid the crowds and higher (in-season) rates.
The Outer Banks are in North Carolina, at least that's the state that claims these skinny, mostly-made-of-sand barrier islands. The land is flat and narrow, with the Atlantic on one side and a sound (large body of brackish water) on the other. Only a couple of roads are important (US 12 runs north-south right along the beach and is how you get to the swirly-striped lighthouse and Ocracoke Island) and getting around is fairly straighforward, though, we were assured by local workers, travel was MUCH MORE TIME CONSUMING during the "on" season.
There are A METRIC SHIT TON of vacation properties, prices starting at the mid-six-figures for the new construction we saw up towards Duck (northern end of the thing). There are a lot of businesses catering to tourists (mini golf, places selling beach stuff, places to eat, places to rent bikes and kayaks, piers from which to fish, etc.) and I think it's fair to say that it's a world where tourism dominates.
So. We went to the Outer Banks.
We visited Kitty Hawk and the First-in-Flight thing, which was about half a mile from our hotel. The park ranger person giving the talk was excellent and very informative. If you ever wondered how on earth Orville and Wilbur Wright (bicycle mechanics from Dayton fucking Ohio) wound up being First in Flight in North Carolina, here's how. First off, the Wrights did a lot of work on gliders, wing shape, etc. before they started with powered flight. For gliders, the Wrights needed a pretty reliable wind and a big hill, the same stuff that hang gliders still need in these our modern times. The Wrights needed somewhere flat, without much to run into because they were LEARNING how to build a glider that steered and didn't figure they needed to run into trees in the process. They also wanted to do their experimental flights where there weren't many people around to point-n-laugh. Kitty Hawk suited the bill. No, wait! you cry. You just SAID the Outer Banks were "flat and narrow", so what's all this about a hill? The Outer Banks are *mostly* flat. They have sand dunes, or at least they did back when the Wright Brothers were around. Now, they have a dumb-shit bermuda-grass covered monument to First in Flight (it used to be a sand dune until some bicycle mechanics made history there and the monument-builders wanted a monument that would not move around) and also they have Jockey's Ridge, which is a real sand dune that moves about like it's supposed to and is currently consuming a putt-putt golf course and being used as a launch pad for hang gliders. Jockey's Ridge is not small. It is one hell of a lot bigger than you probably think a sand dune is. Kill Devil Hills (which is what the Wright Brothers took off of for their glider flights) was similarly large. Jockey's Ridge doesn't have shit growing on it. It's a massive damn pile of sand and the wind is incessant and the sand pings against you the whole time because the wind never stops. Assuming that Kill Devil Hills looked, back then, a lot like Jockey's Ridge looks now, it would have been perfect for glider practice.
After the Wright Brothers thing, we started with the lighthouses. North Carolina has a lot of lighthouses on the Outer Banks and you can go look at them as a tourism activity. Previously, the lighthouses existed to keep ships from running into the Outer Banks and/or the Diamond Shoals that are offshore of Hatteras. This kind of worked, but not perfectly, because the ocean along the Outer Banks is known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic because of the huge number of shipwrecks there. (Tricky currents, see, and the aforementioned shoals and practically-invisible barrier islands and also shitty weather with hurricanes and stuff.) The lighthouses are all different (paint jobs and stuff) so that if you happened to sail by in the daytime, you could kind of tell where you were by which lighthouse you saw. Since we were tourists, we went to see the lighthouses. The first lighthouse we went to see was Currituck, which is on the northern end of the obx, near Corolla or whatever. It's brick. Here's a picture:
It is a pretty nice lighthouse and for under ten dollars, you can walk up the thing (a lot of steps, like twelve flights or something) and look out the top of it. There's a parapet walkway thingie right underneath the lens, which is a Fresnel lens. Fresnel lenses work by having a lot of prisms to focus the light and make it go out horizontally from the lighthouse so that it can be seen further. Fresnel was apparently a french dude because his name is pronounced without an S sound.
Here's a Fresnel Lens (mostly -- some pieces are missing) we saw in a museum.
And here's a detail shot -- note the prism shape of the individual pieces.
I learned a lot about lighthouses and how they were lit and what lighthouse keepers did and stuff like that, but much of the learning was from the Bodie and Hatteras lighthouse exhibits because they are owned/operated by the park service where the Currituck lighthouse is a private concern and not so much interested in educating you as getting your eight bucks and letting you climb up and then down. Currituck did have some educational displays on the beginning landings of the climb, though, and those were nice.
Because lighthouses are built on sandy barrier islands without proper foundations and because they are very heavy structures with minimal footprints to spread the load and because it's VERY BAD FORM to have your lighthouses fall over or list in a Pisan fashion, they are equipped with vertical control markers. Here's a picture:
Lighthouses have fascinating spiral staircases. I took pictures of them.
I also enjoyed the attention-to-detail on the lighthouse, some of which was probably not designed to be noticed by people. Here are the hinges on the front door of the thing (they're brass, btw):
Currituck was a lovely lighthouse on very pretty grounds. You also get to drive through lots of small beach village things on your way there, so it's worth a trip if traffic isn't bad.
I stopped at a bookstore near the Currituck lighthouse and bought a book that would significantly influence the things I saw on the rest of my vacation. The book was The Nature of the Outer Banks by Dirk Frankenberg though I don't have the second edition, just the first. I am a huge dork, but this was a truly fascinating book and it added a lot to my vacation experience.
We went out to eat frequently because we were on vacation. There was a pancake place (Stack 'em High) that was continually busy in the mornings and every time we went by we considered stopping there. Finally, we did. Their pancakes were bloody well outstanding. Best pancakes ever. Two thumbs up. We ate there twice. If you are in the OBX and you have the opportunity, eat the damn pancakes.
We went to Firefly, which is not on 12 but is on the other strip, down towards Nags Head. Food was OK, but decor was outstandingly amusing. Notable were their "tree" trunks made out of Great Stuff Expanding Foam and then painted. They were awesome.
We went to see other lighthouses. Bodie Island is below Kitty Hawk, heading south. It's striped horizontally and is currently under renovation so that people can walk up it, the park service having discovered that people will pay good money to trudge up twelve flights of stairs, take a couple of pictures, and trudge back down again. Here's Bodie:
Right now, you can't go inside Bodie, so I don't have any internal pictures.
We took a day and drove down to Hatteras and took the ferry to Ocracoke, to pick up the other two conveniently-located lighthouses. Hatteras is the swirly-striped one that is iconic. It looks like this:
Hatteras is one of the lighthouses that you can pay money and walk up, though I imagine this is a potentiality that, in the on season, exists in name only. There were a lot of people (in the off season) who wanted to walk up to the top of the Hatteras lighthouse and I cannot imagine the lines in the tourism season. Hatteras lighthouse was moved, in 1999, from where it was almost ready to fall into the ocean to a "safe" remove from the shoreline. When we got to the top, we could see this. I took a picture.
This is the old foundation (foreground) and the new lighthouse location in the back.
And then here's another view.
This picture is from the parapet thing on Hatteras lighthouse. I've labled the old foundation and the sea wall thing they built to try to save it before they gave up and moved the whole damn thing on railroad tracks, a feat that won them some outstanding civil engineering awards.
Hatteras has a lovely spiral staircase and apparently gets a lot of tourists who do not wash their hands.
The staircase is still pretty, though.
When you go up the lighthouses, people on the parapets are leaning on the railings and having their pictures taken. I am not particularly impressed with the effects of salt spray on cast iron railings.
From Hatteras, we went to Ocracoke. Ocracoke is an island. You get there by riding the (free) ferry. The ferry runs every forty minutes (more in the on season) and carefully traverses the shoals between Hatteras and Ocracoke.
The waters between Hatteras and Ocracoke have to be dredged pretty regularly because the currents sweep sand down (from north to south) the barrier islands and dump it in the inlet (between Hatteras and Ocracoke) where it makes sandbars and fucks up the ferry service. We saw them dredging the inlet while we were riding the ferry.
Also, there were signs about the shoals all over, plus which you could see the sandbars in the water all over the place. A fellow traveler on the ferry said that sometimes the ferries run aground on shoals after storms re-arrange things unexpectedly, in which case one's ferry ride lasts considerably longer than forty minutes.
Ocracoke is smallish. The lighthouse is small and white and you can't go up it because the Coast Guard is still using it. Of the four we visited, this was the lame-est one. No exhibit, no good parking, not even a very interesting lighthouse. Plus it's a pain in the ass to get to, what with the ferry and all. The streets are narrow and people drive golf carts on them. We did get excellent ice cream from some hippies afterward, though, so that was kind of nice.
And this has drug on really quite far and is image-heavy. How about we quit here and next time I can tell you all about sand? It's fascinating, really.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-08-12 01:36 pm (UTC)