Outer Banks Day 2

Day 2, Sunday April 10, 2010


What a beautiful day! Although a little cool, the sun is shinning brightly and you can see for miles--sometimes on the coast, it can be a little hazy early in the morning. After a light breakfast we went to the beach near our quarters. The resort is not on the beach but we can walk to the beach or drive to the free parking lot on the beach. We chose to drive and park.


It was a little cool early in the morning so the walk on the beach was invigorating. Since we are here before the tourist season, we had the beach to ourselves and what a view we had. A lot of the tourist shops are not open, but, enough are for us to enjoy a little shopping from time to time.

After a short visit to the beach we went to the Wright Memorial. The memorial is a national park and admission is free to people with a senior pass. I have a pass so it did not cost us anything to go to the museum and park. We have seen a lot of the Wright Brothers sites in Dayton; however, this is our first trip to where the first flight took place. The park is well laid out and has an excellent description of each event of the first flight. It was interesting looking at all the exhibits and monuments. We also sat through a 30 minute presentation on the Wright Brothers.



After we left the park, we went to a little restaurant call Rundown Cafe. We had watched the local TV network and had seen a program on restaurants on the Outer Banks. This one sounded like it would be worth a visit. The food was good and if we lived in the area we would probably go back. We shared a bowl of fish chowder that was very good. I had Baja fish tacos with black beans and rice that must have been cooked with a little curry. Linda had a fish burrito with the same rice. Both were very good... We will be here for a week, but, there are so many good restaurants that I doubt that we will go back.

After lunch we went to a Corolla, NC to visit the old town and a light house built in the 1870’s. They also had a heritage park that we visited. The light house was in excellent shape and Linda and I decided to walk to the top--160 steps of spiraling staircases. The view was great. When we got back to the bottom we decided that maybe we should start exercising more. We walked around the grounds then took a drive through their old town--not much to see and probably not worth the drive.




We visited the heritage park which has the Whalehead Museum, boat house and other buildings. The buildings were built by a gentleman whose wife liked to hunt. No hunting club would let her become a member so he bought the property and build the lodge in 1921. The lodge has over 21,000 square feet of space and really is a great building. Unfortunately, it is closed on Sunday and we were unable to take a tour.

We left the heritage park and went to check out the beaches. They were great. We did discover the northern parts of the Outer Banks have much better houses and the scenery is much better. If we do come back this way, I think we will try to rent one of these units.

We drove back to our quarters and watched the last of the Masters’ golf tournament. We have missed the entire tournament until today.

We took a walk around our complex; visited the recreation room and finally made it back to our quarters. We are still not very hungry after the large lunch so we are having a light snack for dinner. Tomorrow is supposed to be another great day and we are planning on checking out the southern end of the Outer Banks. After doing a little research, we think there is more than enough to keep us busy for a week.