Outer Banks Escapades

This weekend did not go as planned.

As I mentioned last week, I decided to take my parents to the Outer Banks for their first time. After driving for 6 hours, we saw a sign that Ocracoke Island had been evacuated. Apparently, a construction team accidentally drilled into the transmission cable that was supplying the entire island with power. Due to the vast number of people on the island, all backup generators failed.

Hatteras Island was also affected by the power outage, so while all the hotels had power, no restaurants or groceries stores were open. Of course, we had a booked hotel on Hatteras Island. Despite the setbacks, we went to the beach late at night and danced in the waves with our flashlights in hand. The next morning, my mom and I woke up at 5 a.m. to watch the sunrise and shoot some photos, in manual of course. A massive thunderstorm hit while we were out there, so my mom and I were trapped underneath a pier. Fun stuff, right? After about 10 minutes, we decided to brave the storm and made a mad dash back to the hotel, which was about a mile away from the pier where we were shooting.

We decided to check out of our hotel early and drive to Corolla because we were told the beaches are gorgeous and supposedly it wasn’t raining there. On the way, we passed a few State Troopers who were blocking the entrance to Hatteras Island. Evidently, they were evacuating the whole island because of the outage. When we were finally about 20 minutes away from our final destination, we hit the worst traffic jam. What should have been 20 minutes quickly turned into 3 hours of stop & go traffic. The entire day was gone…by the time we arrived and found a beach, the rain had caught up with us.

That night we treated ourselves to the most expensive seafood we could find, some wine, and ice cream. (Yeah, it wasn’t the best combo but we felt we deserved it.) When we got back to the hotel, we all had a serious case of the giggles and ended up having a front flip competition onto our beds.

We woke up early Sunday morning and headed to the beach. The sky was clear, but it was cold and windy. The water also felt freezing, so we couldn’t swim. As we were checking out a couple hours later, the temperature had risen and everyone was flocking to the beach. We obviously joined because we were desperate for some beach time! My sister and I slathered on our sunscreen and ran into the ocean. After about 10 minutes of pure bliss, the lifeguard came over and crushed our dreams. Apparently, the ocean was perfect for surfers, which meant it was not acceptable for the public to go in past their ankles. My sister and I like to go in waist-deep, so we were a pretty disappointed. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the 10 minutes we had in the sea and spent the remaining time laying out in the sand to tan, together. (It was actually pretty painful because the wind was blowing so strongly and the sand felt like it was stabbing us.)