2009 Vacation: Day 10

Today was another huge, epic day for us. But before we could even eat breakfast, we discovered that the tooth fairy had stopped by again-- for the second time this vacation.



We ate breakfast and got ready for our big day. Today we planned on driving back down the barrier islands and picking up where we left off on two days ago on our big letterboxing quest. We drove 45 minutes down to Avon, and planned on making our way back north to our house, stopping along the way for various sights and letterboxes.

Our first letterbox was hidden at a public beach access walkway. While we were trying to find it, we found this dead animal. I tried to explain to my kids that it was a dead cat (there was a dead rabbit right next to it- my guess is they were both hit by something while running across the road), but they insisted that it was some type of fox that was indigenous to the area. We agreed to disagree. You make the call:



Here we are at where the directions told us to look for our first letterbox. It was buried under the boardwalk, directly under the "P" in "Public Walkway."



We found it!



And now to exchange stamps and entries between our journal and the letterboxes' journal.



Before going on to the next letterbox, we decided to keep going on the boardwalk down to the beach to get shells.



The kids found a bunch of shells. The girls in particular like to find tiny, intact shells that have a rock or other small object incorporated into it. They then come home and carefully pry out the little rock, which leaves the tiniest hole in the shell. When they get home, they're going to get their earring hooks and make earrings out the shells. That's pretty cool.



For our second letterbox, we went to a find an address in Avon, and get the prime numbers from it. Then we found this boardwalk accessway and had to count the number of planks out for the number we made the prime numbers from the address? Confused? It really wasn't that tough. Under that plank we should find the letterbox.



We found it!



A stamp here, some entries there... and we've gotten another letterbox under our belts.



Our third letterbox in Avon was at yet another boardwalk outside the north side of town. 14 paces down the boardwalk then look off to the right for a white barked bush...



We found it! We were having great luck finding our letterboxes!



And now to memorialize the event:



Our next set of letterboxes were just south of the town of Salvo. By sheer luck, as we drove up to the next location, Jen had to use the bathrooms which were close by. On our way to the bathrooms we found yet another really cool graveyard:



North Carolina has a ton of the cool family plots. We love looking through them.



This graveyard was right on the water on the sound-side of the island (as opposed to the ocean-side). Where the water was lapping up on the small shore, it was freezing into these giant ice structures.



The next set of letterboxes was a set of three letterboxes, all hid inside an abandoned campgrounds. The campgrounds were really cool, they look like they were abandoned over a decade ago (and for all I know it was more that-- some of the paved roads had three to four foot pine saplings growing up through the middle of them.

The kids wanted to know why the campsite was abandoned, and I explained that Jen had put me under strict orders not to tell them, but I did reveal to them that it used to be called "Camp Crystal Lake" and that some teenagers got into a spot of trouble there a few years back. However, even when Jen backed-up my story, the kids pow-wowed and decided that I was lying.



While at the campsite, Max found this really cool stick. Oh man. A three year old with a stick. You know what that means.



Our first letterbox was hidden at campsite #C51. However, the sites were so old, and the paint faded, that you couldn't read the number on more than half of the sites. And on the ones you could read, it was hard to tell what the numbers were. But when we got to C51, we were confident we had it right.



We found it!



Stampity stamp stamp! This series of three letterboxes had the best stamps ever-- but I forgot to take pictures of them.



The next one was hidden at the old Camp Host's site at the base of a large tree. Well, the problem is that this thing was hidden over four years ago. And you thought this place was overgrown and untended four years ago-- it was tenfold more so now. So when this guy hid the letterbox at the base of the tree, he probaby hadn't contemplated that we would need a machete to cut through the brambles to get to it now.



We found it!



Even though these letterboxes were really difficult to get to, they were stamped by someone as recently as last November. So we added our stamps to make sure we were the first for the year 2010.



Here's my oldest and I puzzling through the instructions to the last letterbox in these campgrounds.



And once again, the undergrowth is out of control, and we have to cut ourselves to shreds on brambles trying to get to the letterbox.



We found it!



We're sad as we make the journal entries in this last letterbox, because we really, really liked these abandoned campgrounds and talked about how cool it would be to actually come out and camp there. And, of course, Jen and I talked about how much fun it would be (and how much trouble we could have gotten into) to find this place as a teenager.



The next letterbox we went to was in Rodanthe. But there had been construction done recently where the letterbox was hidden, and it wasn't there anymore. So we played for a while at this playground.



Here's a picture of Marney on the fish climb... HEY, STOP SWINGING INTO THE PICTURE, CONNOR!



But anyways, here she is on top of... I SWEAR TO GOD, CONNOR! IF YOU SWING INTO THIS PICTURE ONE MORE TIME!



Yes! Victory is mine!



Finally, we stopped at the Pea Island Bird Sanctuary on the way back to hide our own letterbox. We originally vetoed visiting this place, in lieu of doing other, more exciting things. But as we were driving up and down the islands, these seemed like a good place to hide ours, so we decided to check out what the bird sanctuary was all about. And I'm glad we did because this might have been my favorite place we've been to.

Apparently these salt marshes (where the ocean meets the sound) are the midway point for over hundreds of species of migratory birds. Even in the dead of winter there is reliable food here, so many birds stop for prolonged periods to eat and rest.

The National Parks System has built a cool walkway through their man-made dykes, which are supposed to be preserving the migratory fowl salt marshes. There's a boardwalk that leads to a walkway, down to an observation point. We decided to walk down and find a place to hide our letterbox.



Here's where we hid our letterbox. It's under a crook in the sideways growing tree right on the ground. It's ideal because it's easy to find, but well hidden.



Here's a cool shot of an arbor over the path:



All along the boardwalk they had these binoculars you could use to look at the birds-- and there were tons of them. Huge, huge swans, tons of ducks and other birds.



Here's some swans chilling out on the ice. It was cool how the birds preferred to sit on the edge of the ice.



It was a half-mile there and a half-mile back at the bird sanctuary. So if you wanted to make sure you stayed well rested (because... you know... you never know when you're going to be involved in a toddler stickfight) you could lay out on benches along the path.



Here's the observation tower at the end of the paved walk. There was another 3.5 miles of hiking you could do off the path if you wanted to, but our day was getting too long. So we decided to stop here and look through the scopes and see what kind of birds we could find.



And man, did we see some! Look closely at this picture. Look at the dead tree. Do you see something perched on a top branch at the far left of the tree? What do you think it is?



No kidding. It's a bald eagle. Using my "zoom in and enhance" technology tricks that I learned from Blade Runner, I was able to get this better version of the eagle. Later at the visitor's center, the ranger confirmed that it was a bald eagle, and even though it was more common to see them in the summer, they are almost never here during the winter.



Here are the kids at some of the displays at the Pea Island visitor's center.



At the last stop for the day, we went to the Bodie Lighthouse. Named in honor of Patrick Swayze's greatest acting role, this lighthouse is situated between Nags Head and Pea Island. We weren't able to go into it because they were doing some massive renovation and construction on it while we were there.



We finally got home just before 3:30. It was a great day. It was still cold, but not as cold as before- I'd estimate the upper 30s (the ice was melting in the sound as we drove home) and the wind was a little less brisk. I'm guessing we ended up hiking around between 2.5 and 3 miles today (the campgrounds and Pea Island sanctuary were each over a mile). We really had a good time and everyone enjoyed it.

Tonight: Last Night on Earth (Advanced Rules!).