What does OBX mean, anyway?

This past weekend we decided to take a quick trip to the Outer Banks, NC.

We see tons of "OBX" stickers on the cars here so we wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

image source

We drove down Friday and camped at the one RV campground I could find open- most of the RV campgrounds seem to be on Hatteras Island, which is only accessible right now by taking two different ferries, and they're still recovering from the hurricane. The road was still closed, but should be open in a week or so, which would make Hatteras Island accessible again.

We stayed in Kitty Hawk- you know, the Kitty Hawk the Wright brothers flew their first planes at? That one. There's a memorial and everything.

The three of us in front of the Wright Brothers National Memorial

My  main goal for the weekend was to sit on the beach and read :)

While I did get to do that, we did fit some sightseeing in as well.

We drove up to the Currituck Beach Lighthouse.

And we drove down to the Bodie Island Lighthouse.

We didn't climb either lighthouse, unfortunately. I didn't have enough cash in my wallet to climb the Currituck lighthouse, and the Bodie Island lighthouse isn't open for climbing. The visitor's center was closed because of hurricane damage, but one of the websites I looked at said that the Bodie Island lighthouse is a working lighthouse, which is the reason it's not open for climbing. It looked to us like it was being renovated or had been damaged in the hurricane.

And we played at the beach, of course. LMS *loves* the ocean, even though she's not super-fond of swimming pools (she takes awhile to warm up to the pool, but will jump right in the ocean). When we went to Hawaii 3 years ago we checked out the beach the first afternoon we were there. None of us were wearing swimsuits, but somehow LMS managed to get completely wet, and Mr M wasn't too far behind her (I was on camera duty :).

 

It happened again at the Waikiki beach- we went just to look at it (and say we'd been), when LMS decided she just *had* to go in the water. We took her clothes off for that one and let her swim in her underwear.

We had a repeat this weekend:

Come on in the water, daddy!

Run from the water!

That was fun, let's do it again!

Mr M gave LMS a (deformed) mermaid tail.

And we flew our kite that's been in storage for the last 4 years. The last time we flew it was just before we left California.

LMS was a year and a half old- look how tiny she was!

LMS wanted to fly the kite

which was followed by them chasing after the kite when she let go (they caught it).

Proof that I was there, too :)

Which photo is better? I like the grayer version above, but I like the brighter colors below, too.

We had a great weekend and look forward to going back to the Outer Banks in the future and exploring the islands we weren't able to drive to this time and spending more time on the beach.