Road trip with my sister

One of my sisters is in her 3rd year of residency and is trying to decide where she wants to target her job search. You can only learn so much online, so the best way is to visit potential places and see what they're like. She had some time off that coincided with our end of term break, so LMS and I got to go with her on her exploratory trip. Mr M had to work- we're saving his time off for a couple trips we have planned for next year, so it was a girls-only trip.

We did spend lots of time in the car, but we checked out some good potential neighborhoods and added to our respective light house lists.

Our first one was actually a pair of lighthouses on Fort Henry. The striped one is in use and you can't go up it, but you can climb the older brick one.

The view of both lighthouses from a pier not too far away.

We tried to see the Bodie Island lighthouse (we saw it last year), but this is what it looks like right now:

I thought perhaps it had been damaged by the hurricane last fall, but apparently it's several years into a reconstruction project, which should be finished by the end of this year.

We had much better luck at Cape Hatteras lighthouse, which we got to climb up. This is a cool lighthouse that was moved further from the waterline a few years ago. They moved it intact- jacked up and rolled about a quarter mile or so (over three weeks) to it's current location. Apparently it's the tallest brick building to be moved in the US. Very cool. Despite being still in use, they do allow people to climb to the top.

view of the original lighthouse site- the sand spot that's above and to the left of the parking lots- taken from the top of the lighthouse

We also saw the lighthouse on Ocracoke Island. It was quite short, especially compared to the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. It wasn't open to visitors either because it's still in use. We were less than impressed with the tiny parking lot in a residential neighborhood.

We got to ride a couple ferries during our trip, which was fun. I took the opportunity to take some photos of LMS.

One night we stayed very close to the beach, and while the water was too rough to go in, we did enjoy walking up and down the beach at sunset. We had a fun time!