Life's a Beach - Today, Anyway!

What is better than a day at the beach? Not much!

We had a lovely morning, with pancakes for breakfast, and then...beach time! We sat and watched the waves and the busy little shorebirds. We threw Molly's toy for her and she fetched it. Once, she dropped it at the feet of a passing man and looked at him expectantly; he very kindly threw it for her. We went for a walk. Molly stopped occasionally to dig in the sand. Sandeep stood in the waves and got splashed and then nearly knocked over, like me, by a surprisingly large wave. Molly stalked the shorebirds, ineffectually.

You would all stop reading the blog if we spent all our days at the beach, wouldn't you? I'm sure it's not SO much fun to read about someone else's beach day! Well, we'll be back to driving again tomorrow. In fact, we did drive a little bit today...

After lunch, we left our campground and drove south on Route 12, to see a bit more of the cape. The undeveloped National Seashore land is punctuated by small villages with shops, restaurants, and LOTS of rental houses. It seems that nearly every house has a "rent me!" sign on it. Most of the houses appear to be of about the same age; we wondered if they were built during a building boom, or if all the previous houses were swept away in a hurricane and these were built to replace them. We did read about the extensive destruction caused by Hurricane Isabel in 2003.

We stopped at an empty beach, where we nearly collapsed with laughter while watching Molly chase crabs. She would find one roaming about on the sand, then start off after it. The crabs are fast and agile, but also hard to see; Molly would pursue one wildly, and then it would hide under her foot (or mine!) while she hunted for it. The more she turned to see where the crab quarry could have gone, the more the sand she stirred up would hide it. She did manage to come nose-to-eyestalks with one crab; you can see it, looking like a crab-shaped clump of sad, at the end of Molly's nose in the photo above.

Sandeep photographed the strange and beautiful afternoon light. We drove all the way to the village of Hatteras, at the end of the cape. The next island, Okracoke, can be reached by a 40-minute ferry ride, but we decided to turn back northwards at Hatteras. Now, here we are, at our campsite again, with the waves crashing just out of sight.

We'll be heading for Durham tomorrow, as Sandeep has two talks to do there on Thursday.