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The Ramseys Do the Outer Banks
Nags Head, North Carolina · June 26 to July 3, 1999
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Hi from Pittsburgh! This is our family vacation album: me (Maria), my husband Tony, and our kids Jasmine, who's 8, and Johnny, who's 5. It was our first real vacation in three years, a whole week in a rental cottage on stilts on the Outer Banks. Tony's cousin had been telling us to go for years. She was right. Click on any little picture to see it bigger. (My camera prints the date in the corner, so you can follow along.)

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A gray-shingled beach cottage on tall pilings with a maroon minivan underneath and a couple unloading a cooler Saturday, June 26 ~ Getting There
We left the house at 4 in the morning with the kids asleep in their pajamas and pulled into Nags Head about ten hours later, after three bathroom stops, one McDonald's and one "are we there yet" every fifteen minutes from Virginia on. The cottage was everything the brochure said: two stories of gray shingles up on tall pilings, a big deck, and you park right underneath, out of the sun. Jasmine took this picture of Tony and me unloading. Fifteen minutes later both kids were in their swimsuits standing at the top of the walkway over the dune.


Sunday, June 27 ~ The Beach
All day, every minute. Johnny got knocked down by his first wave and came up laughing with a mouthful of sand. Jasmine found a whole sand dollar. Tony fell asleep under the umbrella and woke up with one red leg. I reapplied sunscreen on everybody every hour like a crazy person, and we all still got pink.

A girl in pink and a boy in stripes running barefoot down a huge sand dune Monday, June 28 ~ Jockey's Ridge
The biggest sand dune on the East Coast, right in Nags Head. Everybody told us to go first thing in the morning before the sand gets hot, so we were there by 8. The kids ran up and rolled down and ran down and ran up again about a dozen times. On the far side people were taking hang-gliding lessons off the dune. Tony wanted to. I said we'll see. (That means no.)


The black and white spiral-striped Cape Hatteras Lighthouse standing on a steel frame on its moving track, seen over a fence Tuesday, June 29 ~ The Lighthouse on the Move
This was the day I was most excited about. We drove down Hatteras Island to see the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which was right in the middle of being MOVED. The whole lighthouse! It was sitting up on a huge steel frame on a track of steel beams, and every day they inch it a little farther from the ocean with hydraulic jacks. You don't actually see it move while you watch. It's too slow. But you stand at the fence and look up at it sitting on those beams in the middle of the sand, and you can't believe it. That little maroon van parked on the left is ours, by the way.


About the Lighthouse Move
The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was finished in 1870 and it's the tallest brick lighthouse in the country, painted with those famous black and white spiral stripes. When it was built it stood a long way back from the water, but over the years the ocean washed the beach away until the waves were only a little more than a hundred feet from it. So the Park Service decided to move it. They lifted the whole thing onto steel beams and rolled it about 2,900 feet inland, along steel track, pushed by hydraulic jacks. The move started June 17, 1999, and it reached its new spot on July 9, just six days after we got home. We were there for history!

A man with a crab net and a little boy holding a string kneeling at the edge of a wooden pier Wednesday, June 30 ~ Crabbing
The man at the bait shop sold us a crab net and a pack of chicken necks and told us to try a pier on the sound side. You tie a chicken neck on a string, drop it in, wait until it feels heavy, then pull it up v-e-r-y slowly while somebody gets the net under it. Johnny caught his very first blue crab, and I don't think his feet touched the pier for the rest of the day. We caught six and let them all go. Johnny said goodbye to each one.


A tall white granite monument on top of a grassy hill, with a man and two children walking up the path Thursday, July 1 ~ Where the Wright Brothers Flew
The Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills. Down on the flat there are stone markers that show how far each of the four flights went on December 17, 1903, and the first one is shorter than our street. In the visitor center there's a full-size copy of their airplane. Then you walk up the big grassy hill to the monument on top. That's Tony and the kids on the path. It's windier up there than you would think, which I suppose was the whole point.


Friday, July 2 ~ Last Day
Beach in the morning, miniature golf in the afternoon (Jasmine won, Tony demands a rematch), soft-serve for supper because it's vacation, and then packing. Everything we own was full of sand.

A girl and a little boy asleep in the back seat of a minivan with a stuffed dog and beach towels Saturday, July 3 ~ Home
They lasted about an hour. Look at those sunburned faces. Johnny slept with his mouth open the whole way through Virginia, and Jasmine wouldn't let go of the stuffed dog she bought with her own money at a souvenir shop. We were home by supper, and the first thing Johnny did was ask when we're going back.


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Maria's Outer Banks Tips

  • Climb Jockey's Ridge early in the morning or in the evening. By noon the sand will burn your feet, even with shoes.
  • Bring a crab net, a bucket, a ball of string and a pack of chicken necks. Best cheap fun of the week.
  • The sound side is calm and shallow, great for little ones who are scared of the waves.
  • Do your big grocery shopping before Saturday afternoon. Everybody checks in on Saturday, and the stores are a zoo.
  • Give the drive down to Hatteras a whole day. It's farther than it looks on the map, and you'll want to stop.
  • Pack twice as much sunscreen as you think you need. Then buy more there.
Added Sunday, September 19, 1999
It's been a hard month for the Outer Banks. At the start of September, Hurricane Dennis sat off the coast for days and the ocean washed right over the road on Hatteras Island. Then on September 16, Hurricane Floyd came ashore near Cape Fear, and the flooding in eastern North Carolina has been terrible to watch on the news. Nags Head is a long way from where Floyd came ashore, and I hope our cottage on its stilts did what it was built to do. Mostly I keep thinking about the bait shop man and the lady at the cottage office who gave the kids lollipops. If you're from down there and you see this, we're thinking of you.

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Last updated Sunday, September 19, 1999