#1935 three lighthouses and the Wright Brothers Memorial

There are five lighthouses on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. During our visit there, we went to see three of them.

Pronounced "body", Bodie Island Lighthouse is not far from Nags Head. Six of us went on this adventure: MT, Lizzie, The Ladies (Linda, Jennie and Patty) and me. We were mostly looking to get out of the house so I put "Nags Head lighthouse" in my map program and this is where we ended up. It was probably 30 minutes or so from the house.

MT, Linda and I climbed to the top. This lighthouse allows only one person on each flight of stairs at a time because the stairs aren't hooked to the walls. The lighthouse is the height of an eight story building and there are just over 200 steps.

Bodie Island Lighthouse

View of the marsh and ocean from the top of the lighthouse

View of the sound from the top of the lighthouse

The light

The light keeper's house

If you click on the bottom photo of the light keeper's house, you will see on the right hand side of the photo a figure in pink, That's Aunt Patty. There's also a figure in white, and that's Lizzie. Fun fact: while I was taking this photo, Linda and I were talking and MT was talking to the ranger. Lizzie said that she could hear pretty much everything we said. Kinda crazy!

The Currituck Beach Lighthouse was right in Corolla. We passed by it every time we went into town and back out to the house. It has exactly the same measurements as Bodie Island Lighthouse. All ten of us went to see this beauty, but only seven of us climbed to the top. The Ladies chose not to make the climb. The thing that is different about the Currituck lighthouse from the others is that it is unpainted.

Currituck Beach Lighthouse

View from the top looking south

View from the top looking north

I like these two photo because it really allows you to see the islands that are the Outer Banks. In the first photo, looking south, the Atlantic Ocean is on the left and the Currituck Sound is on the right. Going south, you get to Duck, Southern Shores, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head. Looking north, the house we stayed in is up that way and lots of beach and eventually, the state of Virginia.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is way south down past Rodanthe just outside of Buxton. The southern end of the Outer Banks is quite wild. There are plenty of houses, but it's nothing like the area were we stayed. Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the biggest of the five lighthouses. It is the equivalent of a 12 story building. I remember the ranger at Bodie Island telling us there are two million bricks each in the Currituck Beach and Bodie Island lighthouses, and 2.25 million bricks in Cape Hatteras.

Gotta show you this pic of the navigation computer in our rental car.

This is how you get to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. The Outer Banks is a little strip of land with a single road going down the middle. When you get by a town, there are little roads that branch off the main road, but mostly, especially in the southern part, that's all there is. The thing is that you can't see the ocean or the sound most of the time because of the dunes. And it's a good thing the dunes are there or water would just wash across the road. We drove through quite a bit of water in some places.

MT, Lizzie and I drove to this lighthouse on our last day (Sunday) before we headed back to Norfolk. Sadly, we didn't get to climb to the top because Hurricane Maria was advancing up the coast and it was super windy, so they closed the observation deck just 15 minutes before we got there. Darn it!

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse

An interesting thing about the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is that it was moved from its original location in 1999. It was "just" jacked up and moved about half a mile inland. Pretty remarkable.

Did you know the lighthouses are painted black and white so they can be easily seen during the day? The Atlantic Ocean along the Outer Banks has been called "The Graveyard of the Atlantic" because thousands ships have sunk along the coast. There is a museum in Hatteras, but we didn't go there.

We did stop in Kill Devil Hills to see the Wright Brothers National Memorial, though. You know the Wright Brothers...they invented flight. Pretty big deal. The main visitor center is closed for remodeling, and we didn't bother to stop at the temporary visitor center. We headed straight for the monument. It is up on a hill and it was a short but steep climb to the top. The memorial itself is huge. Here's a photo of MT pretending he has just run up a whole bunch of stairs a la Rocky, even though it was really only four stairs for MT.

 There is also a statue park with the plane and the people who were there on the day of the first flight, December 17, 1903.

There's not a whole lot to the monument park area, but I was glad we stopped. I liked it a lot.

That's all I've got for tonight!