The Wheres:
When you drive on the Outer Banks from north to south, you eventually reach a point when you can't drive anymore and you have to park your car in a line of other cars and wait.
...and wait.
Then, they put your car ON A BOAT and off you go across the sound, across salt water where sharks live, until they arrive at another island that doesn't have any roads leading to it and there you are.
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| In a van, on a boat |
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| Not a Gloria Estefan song |
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| ON A BOAT WITH CARS |
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| Pelicans fish like I water ski |
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| Dredging the channel |
Ocracoke is famous for its wild ponies. We did indeed see some Ocracoke ponies, but they weren't so much with the wild. They were beautiful, but I think I expected them to be more unlike other horses that I've seen. Possibly, I haven't been around horses enough and my horse pallet is not refined and these ponies looked remarkably different from the ones that I used to ride at Summer camp.
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| Right whale skull at the welcome center |
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| Cemetery for British Navel crewmen |
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| Stone cold kitty |
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| The Ocracoke Island Lighthouse |
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| Nutria! Not a muskrat! |
It takes about 20 minutes to drive from one end of the island to the other and that's taking into account for traffic. After we looked around, wandered through a really cool shop called the
Island Ragpicker and waved at the nutria it was time to turn around and get back on the boat.
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| Fishermen off the shore of the island |
Back at the rental house I managed to re-take a picture of one of the more common flowers we've seen and Ben found a prickly pear... with his foot.
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| Marsh pink |
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| Prickly pear |
You may have noticed that I've actually been giving the names of the flowers and plants and you may also be aware of how incredibly rare it is that I know these names. This is all thanks to a great book that Esther picked up called "
Living Beaches of Georgia and the Carolinas a Beachcomber's Guide". I can't recommend this book enough if you are going to be traveling anywhere on the shores of the southeast. Anything that we saw that was plant, animal, or geological beach formation that we didn't know by sight we only had to flip a few pages to learn about. It's the perfect size, full of great photographs and illustrations and taught us something every time we picked it up. I've been referring to it while catching up on these blog entries.
Gallery of pictures (minor warning- very first picture contains a rude gesture; some background on that picture can be found
here.)
Tracklog of our boat ride to the island.
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