We needed to get out for a few days, so we went to the Outer Banks in North Carolina – I can see why the Wright Brothers chose it to learn to fly gliders because it’s WINDY there. We had a great time with kites!
The waves on the beach were really something else – it had been a good number of years since I’d been to a beach along the open ocean, outside a sound or bay of some kind. The Connecticut beaches are protected by Long Island so the waves stay pretty low. Getting out onto the barrier islands on the NON-barrier side … towering whitecaps, obvious V’s of riptides, crashing volume, mist reaching up to the dry sand … Beautiful, but even in the last week of March it was COLD.
We visited the Kitty Hawk national historic site for an entire day. The experimenters literally jumped off the top of a dune with gliders to see how far they could go, and there’s a monument at the top now. Along the beach flats, there are markers for the first four from-the-ground flights and their distance. The first three were fairly close together, with the fourth a good distance farther. The plane in the visitor’s center is a replica – the original is in the Smithsonian in Washington DC.
We also visited Roanoke Island – the national park there has information about the lost colony of Roanoke and markers for the original site on a walk around the property. This was also where a freedman’s colony of Black people stayed when they escaped from slavery during the Civil War and shortly after it. I have lots of things to study now.
We can check off requirements for the Citizenship in the Nation merit badge – we visited two historic sites and learned about what happened there.