For the purposes of this description, since I want this to be as generally applicable as possible, we started in Richmond. The plan for the first day was to travel via Norfolk to VA/NC 168, which is a toll road, joining US 158 just south of South Mills, North Carolina, then to take US 158 eastbound onto the islands. Our first planned stop was the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk, followed by lunch, then Fort Raleigh National Monument and the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo, followed by a drive south to our final destination at the Cape Hatteras KOA in Rodanthe.
Road distance, this was about two hundred miles, with one toll road, two-plus national park facilities, and one roadside tourist trap. It included two planned meals and one catch-as-catch-can in Rodanthe. It wasn't a terribly complicated trip, and with everything that we included could have been executed as one very long day trip. Later, we did do basically this trip as a day trip, but didn't capture anything after Kitty Hawk in it because of one of the great imponderables of road trips: traffic.
The first stop of the day was the Virginia Diner, in Wakefield, Virginia, which was a staple point for all of our various wanderings in the Tidewater country. Virginia Diner is a peculiar combination of restaurant and roadside tourist stop. It really requires no directions beyond "in Wakefield," since there's not a lot of Wakefield and Virginia Diner, like Rock City, advertises from miles away. They serve traditional southern food, which means it ranges from pulled pork to fried chicken. My wife says the fried chicken is excellent, but because it's in Virginia I always get something ham-based, usually two orders of ham biscuits with mustard and pickles. For my money, no one in the United States does ham like Virginia; Virginia feels about ham the way that Texas feels about beef. There are legal restrictions on what can be called a Smithfield ham, including a radius from Smithfield and methods of execution. A Smithfield ham is therefore a salt-cured ham prepared within an area about fifty miles across. This serves as a pretty good indicator of how seriously Virginia takes ham. Ham biscuits are exactly what they sound like, biscuits with thin-shaved ham. Two orders sounds excessive, but is cheaper than any of the other common entree items, and is just about perfect to fill the belly, and has the added advantage of being napkin-portable without needing more. I've also had their biscuits and gravy, and their pulled pork, so I can confidently say that everything I've ordered off their menu has been up to my occasionally picky standards. If I were going to make specific menu recommendations, the carrot souffle is something unique to them in my experience, the ham biscuits are hands-down my favorite (followed closely by the all-you-can-eat biscuits and gravy, though most people could do well with a single order of biscuits and gravy), and the chocolate peanut butter silk pie is good enough that my eldest daughter, who dislikes pie, did not refuse it instantly. Additionally, though not on this trip, we have showed up five minutes before closing time, and they have cheerfully seated us, served freshly prepared food, and raised absolutely no fuss about a party with children showing up at the very tail end of the day, so their service has been, in my experience, beyond reproach. The restaurant also has a gift shop, which includes a variety of knick-knacks, never purchased, and peanut-based products, occasionally purchased, as they are almost as proud of their peanuts as they are of their ham. The peanuts are, so far as I'm concerned, peanuts, but who am I to turn down chocolate-covered nut clusters?
Once we were in North Carolina, we stopped at Wright Brothers National Memorial first. The main visitors' center has changed very little since I first visited in the 1980s with my family. To the new visitor, this may mean it has a slightly dated feel, but to me it meant a sense of comfortable wear. The visitor center itself is a National Historic Landmark, built in art deco style in keeping with the forward-thinking, futuristic implications of the first heavier-than-air flight. Outside is exposed-aggregate concrete and metallic trim, inside is wood paneling and more exposed-ag concrete. Within, there is a full-sized mock-up of the Wright Flyer in one area, a discussion of the Wrights and their experimental process in another, and mock-ups of wind tunnels, gearing, and controls in yet another. The site offers a junior ranger program, and regular talks in the area with the mock-up of the plane. Throughout are "hall of fame" pictures of influential aviators, some famous, some less so. Lindbergh, Earhart, Doolittle, Mitchell, Curtiss, Hughes, Yeager, Armstrong... all of them have pictures up on the wall, as do many less famous names. Some of them died in the process of getting on the wall. One of the recurring themes here is going to be that nothing great comes easy, and the wall at Wright Brothers, like Fort Raleigh, like the astronaut wall at Johnson Space Center, is a reminder that sometimes the price is very steep indeed.
Outside the visitors' center, there are new exhibits about life at Kitty Hawk from 1900 to 1903, which are housed in inflatable tent buildings, and on general aviation. There is a brief film over on that side of the complex, but it was not the main attraction. The main attraction is what was once a sand dune, since stabilized and sculpted better to accommodate visitors, called Kill Devil Hill. Atop is a granite monument in the shape of a stylized wing, dating to 1932 and inscribed thus:
In commemoration of the conquest of the air by the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright conceived by genius achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.
From this monument runs a metal rail, a reconstruction of the original rail used by the Wrights. It terminates at a granite monolith with a brass plaque on it, marking the point where the Wright Flyer left the ground for each of its flights. There is a picture of me, with my father, standing at this marker, the oldest surviving object on the site, as it was dedicated in 1929. There's also a picture of me out there with both of my at-the-time children at this spot. As you, O gentle reader, can tell by the number of words I have spent on it, it is one of my favorite memories.
From Wright Brothers we stopped for lunch at Awful Arthur's Oyster Bar, in Kitty Hawk. My father-in-law had recommended it from a previous visit, and we said we would check for him to make sure it was still there, so this was no mere spur of the moment visit but a planned feature of the trip. This is the original Awful Arthur's, though there are others in the greater Hampton Roads-Outer Banks area. The menu is about what one would expect for a place called Awful Arthur's Oyster Bar, heavy on fried seafood with a side of drinking, but on both of my visits, they were very child-friendly and had menu options that didn't involve frying things. The first time I recall my wife ordering some sort of grilled fish, but that may be a mistake on my part; I definitely ordered crab bisque and crab and butter, with orders of calamari, crab balls, and hush puppies for everyone to share. I don't recall what the kids ordered, because their food tends to be pretty predictable. It was all quite good, good enough that two years later I can remember exactly what I ordered, but the standouts were the crab balls, because crab meat, packed into a ball and then fried, is one of the secret joys of the universe. The crab and butter is exactly what it says: lump crab meat (not imitation, definitely actual crab), with butter. It is elegant and delicious in its simplicity. The only drawback to Awful Arthur's is the price; even ordering much more modestly than we did could be an expensive meal. However, since part of the purpose of this is to encourage people to do things for the experience, not just the cost, I would, and did, still go back without reservation.
After lunch we hooked back inland slightly via the Virginia Dare Bridge to Manteo, an island community that is neither seedy and dirty-feeling, nor excessively overdeveloped. I suspect it's not a cheap place to live, but it looks neither particularly bad, nor particularly amazing. It is a nice, sleepy-looking town; if Hobbits had a beach town, it would be Manteo, North Carolina. The Virginia Dare Bridge sums the town up pretty nicely: nice, not terrifying, but also not spectacular in the way that, say, the Astoria bridge over the Columbia, or the Earl Long I-10 bridge in Baton Rouge, is. Manteo is home to Fort Raleigh National Monument, the site of the first English-speaking settlement in the Americas. Little is known of what happened to the settlers, other than the marking "CROATOAN" carved into a doorpost. There's no record of their disappearance; in 1587, they were there, in 1590 they were not, and the colony had obviously been abandoned for some time. As settlements go, it made even less of a splash than Vinland or Port Isabella. Its real main contributions to history were as part of the legend of Sir Walter Raleigh, reputed lover of Queen Elizabeth, as the source of lost-colony myths, and as the home of the first English subject born in the New World, Virginia Dare, who vanished with the colony before she could properly be called an English-speaker. The settlement site is surprisingly small, encompassing a four-bastioned star fort smaller than any house I've lived in since having children. Nevertheless, to a military eye all the elements are there: a perimeter wall, including probably a log palisade atop the earthwork, a shallow dry moat, a sallyport, and likely firing positions for four cannon. It is a small fort, but the expected threat wasn't the Comte de Vauban.
Fort Raleigh also holds a large wood and concrete amphitheater with the Sound at its back, host to a play called "The Lost Colony" since 1937; its most famous attendee was Franklin Roosevelt. The play only runs during the summer, so we did not attend. Of more interest to me personally were two of the displays in the visitors' center. First of these was a Tudor chamber, reconstructed from original materials purchased in Britain and transported across the Atlantic to display what a finished house of the period would have resembled. The interest here was not in Tudor architecture, which is full of heavy, dark woods, thin lead-lined diamond-paned windows, and half-timbered exteriors finished with mud and painted for maximum contrast; it was in the measures taken to ensure accuracy, as the entire thing was filled with materials dating back to the 1500s. The other display was on the Civil War history of Roanoke. The island was used as a freedmen's colony after Burnside captured New Bern. At first called contrabands, indicating their status as seized assets of a warring power, they were later called freedmen after the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in military-controlled areas. They streamed into the Union lines from the swampy coastal areas, fleeing the plantations and establishing lives strikingly similar to those they knew on the plantation. Freedmen cabins were small, cramped, little better than hovels, but where elsewhere they might have ordered their lives by someone else's plan, here they set their own. Large numbers were not quite drafted by the Union army as laborers, unloading ships, carrying cargo, building corduroy roads, expanding the South's meager rail lines. They were paid a pittance, but their wages were theirs. Still more became soldiers, joining the US Colored Troops. They knew the risks they faced bearing arms against the Confederacy, and still thought that it was worth it.
The last stop at Fort Raleigh was the privately owned Elizabethan Gardens, owned by the North Carolina Garden Club. This is meant to mimic an Elizabethan garden of the late Tudor period, but in reality probably bears more resemblance to a fantasy of an Elizabethan garden than anything else. Paths meander through it, there are several bronze statues, including one life-size of an artist's Sexy Virginia Dare Halloween costume concept (keep in mind, she vanished before she was three; we have no idea what she would have looked like as a young adult!) and one larger-than-life of Elizabeth I. I am not a huge garden enthusiast, but even so I enjoyed it, and I regret not picking up roses when I had the chance. One of the varietals they have is the Queen Elizabeth, bred for the visit of Queen Elizabeth II on the quadricentennial of the establishment of Fort Raleigh in 1987 by crossing New World strains with strains from the Buckingham Palace rose garden.
That brought us to the middle of the afternoon, so we turned southward once more, going back out to the outer islands and proceeding through Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge towards Rodanthe. The road was one of the more unnerving experiences of the trip, because it was constructed at much lower grade than the surrounding dunes are now. Therefore, it gives the impression of driving through a cut in the dunes along much of its length. This produces a sort of highway hypnosis that I encounter frequently driving through scenery that does not materially change for mile after mile, a less than thrilling condition when groundwater occasionally seeps from beneath the dunes to flood the road. The one stop we made prior to Rodanthe was at the Bodie Island Lighthouse, the northernmost unit of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The rest of the family was restless and uninterested, so I swung in, looked around, stamped our park passport books, and came back out. It was just as well; the attendant seemed annoyed at our presence.
We finally pulled in at the Cape Hatteras KOA in Rodanthe with the sun still above the horizon, got our Airstream keys, and set up for the night. The Cape Hatteras KOA was still recovering from Hurricane Irene two years previous, but even so, the facilities were good, the beach was a very short walk away, and there was a resident murder of fish crows. One advantage of an Airstream or other luxury cabin at a KOA is that the facilities are not communal, which you don't get with a standard camping cabin or tent in most places. I have a great deal more to say about lodging types and styles, but that deserves its own full-length discussion, not as an appendix. So take off your shoes and put your feet up, we're sleeping here tonight.
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