A Look Back: Christmas Vacation Part (touring around the Outer Banks)

We were cooped up for a few days because of the snow, but once the roads cleared, we started to venture out more.

Mom, Dad, Maria, and I spent a day driving down the peninsula, geocaching, bird-watching, and lighthouse-sighting.

The first of the lighthouses was under construction, but a boardwalk led out to a marsh with flocks of birds and a suspicious splash and trail that could have been a mammal of some sort.

We continued our way down the coast, stopping at the house featured in Nicholas Sparks' Nights in Rodanthe. Our southern-most point was the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

We wandered inside the Visitors' Center (as we are apt to do) to find a park volunteer who "lived the life", working at Mount Rainier in the summer and here in the winter. (Dad was jealous.) He started a documentary for us of how they moved the lighthouse away from the shore in the 1990s.

With the changing coastline, the original structure had gotten too close to the ocean, so engineers were afraid that the pilings that were holding the lighthouse up were beginning to rot, which could be a danger for the lighthouse keepers and others who were climbing in it. So the decision was made (and then heavily contested) to move the lighthouse inland.


After digging at the base, and sawing it off the cement rocks that it was attached to, the pilings were found to be in good shape... but too late! Time to move it back a few hundred meters to its new site.


They bulldozed the trees between the two sites, then put the fortified structure on a bed that was moved by rolling bars underneath it. Over 23 days, they inched it along until it got to its new home.


The documentary went into great detail, including what this massive engineer manevuer did for the town. Our favorite part was the shopowner who was selling shirts that said "I swear I saw it move." (Read with a twang, of course.)

As we were driving back, the sun was setting. We found a beach to pull into, and took some amazing pictures of a brilliant sky. 

The next day, a group of us went out to visit the Lost Colony of Roanoke and do some more geo-caching. The park had a trail we hiked through, then a little visitors' center and a stage where the production of the Lost Colony (a famous play) was performed.

The other families were so impressed with our geo-caching skills, that we continued to find other caches along the route. Imagine our surprise when one led all twelve of us into a library, where a book was the final clue!