Jockey's Ridge And The Bodie Lighthouse

Extremely busy day today. Ginger had this idea to go visit Jockey's Ridge. I was skeptical, but she really wanted to do it because she had been there as a kid herself and had fond memories of it. Not wanting to stand in the way a trip down memory lane I reluctantly agreed, even though it meant getting up just after 8 when I hadn't gotten to bed until almost 3 (oh Zelda, how you vex me so).


So off we went this morning, and I have to say, I am soooo glad she wanted to go. Let me just say, if you're ever in the Nags Head area on vacation, you really should stop by this park. It's incredible. And it's almost impossible to take a bad picture (one of the other reasons I liked it so much).









And it's probably one of the best places you'll find to fly a kite in the Outer Banks (it must be true, it says so on the park's website). And it's seriously cool. There's these massive expanses of sand. Kind like a desert without having to actually go to one. Bring water with you though because it can get hot. I mean really hot. Quinn drank two half liter Deer Park bottled waters while we were there. Unfortunately he also ended up wiping his head a lot which I think wiped off the sunblock we had on him, so he ended up getting a little burned by the end of the day (we didn't get Curt's message about reapplying it until later in the day once we got home, and by then it was too late).


Anyway, back to the park. This place is huge. You can watch some hang gliders. It's not overly impressive hang gliding though, since the dunes are only so tall. And it's nowhere near as impressive as the hang gliders Ginger and I saw in California when we were out there (at least I think we saw them in California), but the kids still thought it was really cool to see them since they hadn't seen anything like that before. Add to that the ability for kids to climb on the dunes and run down the dunes and you have a fun filled park visit.




One of the things about this place is it's so big. The only problem is that even if there are only a couple of other people you can accidentally get them in your shot and ruin the illusion of solitude. So I was running around to various locations to take pictures so other people in the park wouldn't be in the framed shots. It's totally worth it though once you get a shot that gives the impression of no one else being there. I especially like the one of Catherine off in the distance on top of the dune.


Once we finished up at the park, we had the kids take off their shoes and clean them out. I don't know how, but the when you tilted Catherine's shoe back the entire back part of the shoe filled up with sand. I don't even know how there was still room for her foot in the shoe with that much sand.


After we left the park we decided to go see the Bodie Lighthouse since it was so close to the park. When we got there Catherine claimed it was the first lighthouse she's ever seen. Which is odd since I have photographic proof she saw the one in Corolla last year.






We wandered around the grounds for a bit and then decided to head across the street to the local beach access. The beach down there is really nice and calm. And there's a lot less people on it than up here in Duck. The beach itself down there is larger than the one in Duck also. Plus there are also all kinds on sea shells along the beach, whereas in Duck there's so many people on the beach all the times you can never really find any decent shells.

On the way home we stopped by a Brew Thru in order to get some drinks for Ginger and the kids. Now I had suggested just buying it a convenience store when we bought gas, but Ginger really wanted to go through the Brew Thru. She said it was all about the 'experience'. Not sure what that meant, but what the heck, we went through the Brew Thru and got the kids some lemonade and Ginger some Starbucks drink (and a Coke for me). So now whenever we drive past a Brew Thru Quinn points out that there's another "drive through lemonade place".

Believe it or not, I still have a ton of pictures from today to post, but it's already past 2 am, so I'm going to wrap this one up and try to post the rest later. I literally think today I got some of the best shots of our entire two weeks here (your opinion may vary). I say this with still having a couple days left to get more shots. I ended up taking about 550 pictures today, which is more than I've been taking per day normally, but only about double what I normally take. At this point I think I've taken well over 9 Gig worth of pictures. I've already more of less filled the laptop (it has less than a Gig free, and it's using that for virtual swap space, so the more pictures I take the slower the laptop becomes). For backup purposes I have burned several DVDs of the pictures also (in case something catastrophic were to happen to the laptop).