Glorious Fall on the Outer Banks

    Uncle Jack has always thought that October was prime time on the Outer Banks and his recent two-week sojourn in Nags Head did nothing to change his mind.  The last two weeks were about as perfect weatherwise as one could hope for in these troubled meteorological times and he and Mrs. U.J. enjoyed almost every minute of their stay, the exception being their disappointment in the hushpuppies at Darrell's which didn't seem to be quite as delectable as he remembered them. (They will try again on their next visit---a hushpuppy is a terrible thing to waste). Baltimore has its charms (they wouldn't call it Charm City otherwise) but there's no place he would rather be in the month of October than the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
    While they mostly hung around home and walked on the beach they did make a few excursions and took a few pictures, a few samples of which you will find below.  Click on the pictures to make them larger if you wish.

South Nags Head on Dwellable

      The Currituck Lighthouse-Whalehead Club area has metamorphosed into a major (and lovely) tourist attraction since the last time we visited a few years ago.  The Wildlife Museum was closed on the Sunday we were there but the entire outdoor complex is visually pleasing and the late-October crowd was thin enough to allow visitors to enjoy it.  Deer no longer wander the lighthouse grounds but it's probably just as well, both for them and their tormenters.  The keepers' houses, one of which is shown above,  have been lovingly restored and the landscaping around  them is a treat for the eyes.

It was a great day to climb to the observation deck from which a great view of the rampant over-development of the northern Outer Banks may be had.  Uncle Jack's acute acrophobia saved him from that prospect but he later saw an aerial photograph by Eve Turek at Yellowhouse Gallery that covers the same ground.  Unbelievable.

An oasis of peace and quiet at the foot of the lighthouse.  That's the old keeper's house, now a gift shop, almost hidden in the lush vegetation.

We saw this woman swimming on our first beachwalk in Sonag. She was only one of many intrepid swimmers as it turned out.

Jennette's Pier is coming along nicely.  The wind generators have been operating just long enough to produce the first complaints from nearby residents about how much noise they make when spinning at full speed.  Sigh.

Two new structures have appeared at the base of the pier.  The one on the left will be a bath house for users of the public beach and the other is a pumphouse for pushing wastewater across the street to a new disposal plant out in back of Sam and Omie's somewhere.  There is a very impressive website about the Jennette's Pier project if you want to learn more. Google Jennette's Pier.

The condemned row of derelict houses fronting what used to be Seagull Drive remain in place.  You could perhaps call them the Unpainted Aristocracy if the name were not already taken.

                              This "planter" might turn up on Craig's List one day.

The beach in South Nags Head was extremely wide during our entire visit.  A great time to try to sell oceanfront property to the unwary.

What could be more fun than a trip to Ocracoke on a gorgeous fall day when you don't have to wait in line for the ferry for two hours?

A great place to sit in the sun for a couple of hours.  The docks on Silver Lake never seem to change very much.

The venerable Island Inn was sold at a foreclosure auction the day before our visit but Uncle Jack doesn't know who bought it or for how much.  Many island residents fear that it may be torn down.

                        From a distance Bodie Island lighthouse looks a bit fuzzy these days.

Up close you can see the scaffolding required for the two-year preservation project now underway.  Your tax dollars at work in a worthy cause.

The gigantic wind-blown dune that nearly engulfed the old lifesaving station at Oregon Inlet a year ago has been removed and the building extensively refurbished.  It belongs to the North Carolina Aquariums now but Uncle Jack is not sure what they have in mind for it.

Uncle Jack never did manage to get up early enough to take a picture of the sunrise but he thought this sunset over Sonag was rather pretty.

Tale of Two Cities

            This has been a busy week in Charm City and in Nags Head, too, from what he has seen on the internet.  It was one of those weeks when he wished he could be in two places at the same time---and he almost was, actually, through the miracle of streaming video.
             On Friday morning he was surfing the web looking for pictures and accounts of the storm on the Outer Banks when he ran across a link to a website called hurricanetrack.com which sounded promising.  He clicked on the link and shortly found himself  looking at a live, streaming video of a car driving down a street that looked vaguely familiar.  It was when the car passed the South Nags Head fire station on the right that he knew exactly where he was---driving south on Old Oregon Inlet Road---virtually---and in real time.  The driver kept up a running commentary as he drove, mentioning that he was looking for "Oregon Street" where he wanted to make a video of an oceanfront  house that had apparently collapsed in that vicinity.
             Uncle Jack waited while he parked his car on the berm and went up to the beach to make a video with his camcorder and then suffered with him for at least twenty minutes while he struggled to upload the video to a server in the clouds whence it could be viewed later by storm fans like Uncle Jack.  After a while he turned around and headed north on Old Oregon Inlet Trail, resuming live, streaming video as he went---right past Uncle Jack's house at Ciltvaira street and on up to Cahoon's store at Whalebone Junction where he turned around again and headed for Manteo.  Uncle Jack stayed with him across the causeway and onto the Virginia Dare bridge where he apparently lost connection with the Sprint satellite.
            Needless to say, this was a weird, eye-opening experience for Uncle Jack.  It wasn't quite like being there but it was unlike anything he had experienced before.  The static webcams at places like the fishing piers and the S-curves in Rodanthe are fun to look at once in a while but driving around the Outer Banks in real time is something else.  (The trip that Uncle Jack dropped in on had actually started at the northernmost part of the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk and continued south through Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head before he joined it around milepost 18).  He still knows next to nothing about hurricanetrack.com but you can be sure he has bookmarked it and he recommends that you check it out at www.hurricanetrack.com  It's a great resource.
          Meanwhile in Bawlmer the cultural scene was almost as exciting as the northeaster in Nags Head.  Thursday last featured a doubleheader in the form of a jazz concert at noon by a quintet of very talented Peabody Conservatory students followed by all-Gershwin evening with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  The latter included two of  Uncle Jack's all-time favorite compositions, the Rhapsody in Blue and the piano concerto in F, both of which swing like crazy.
         Sunday morning they paid their first visit to a remarkable Baltimore institution called "The Book Thing". It's a short walk from their condo and it consists of a large, one-story warehouse full of used books---tens of thousands of them,  all free for the taking. (Limit---1500 books per day.  Just kidding---you can take as many as you want).  The Book Thing is a non-profit labor of love for a Baltimore man who cannot stand to see books thrown away so he asks people to donate them and with the help of  volunteers he sorts and shelves them and makes them available to all comers on Saturdays and Sundays.  Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. between them took home a dozen excellent books to put on their new secondhand bookshelf (pictured above) and they will surely be going back for more (as well as donating).
        Sunday afternoon they attended a free concert by the Pavel Haas Quartet from Romania at the Baltimore Museum of Art and yesterday Uncle Jack took the Mini in for its 70,000 mile required maintenance which should ensure a trouble-free trip to Nags Head on Saturday, four days hence, where they will spend Thanksgiving Week walking the beach, or what is left of it, in South Nags Head.  Check in again in about a week when Uncle Jack will blog again.

P.S.  They picked up the handsome mahogany bookshelf at a going-out-of-business store on "Antique Row".   They can now brag that their bookshelf is bigger than their TV (but not by much).
        
        
      

October in Nags Head

     Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. are enjoying a visit to Nags Head this week.  October has always been their favorite time of the year on the Outer Banks and they have been blessed with perfect weather ever since they arrived on Wednesday.  The 59th annual Nags Head Surf Fishing Tournament has been in full swing since Thursday and it brought back memories of when Uncle Jack once served as a judge in that venerable contest many years ago. He wrote about his experience at the time and this is what he said:


                                    It's Nice to be a Judge

If you ask Uncle Jack, one of the best things about living in a country like the U.S.A. is that almost everybody has a chance to be somebody when he grows up. You do not have to be born rich and you do not have to have a father who is a county commissioner or some other important person like that.
All you have to do is go to school and pay attention to the teachers and learn how to do those arithmetic problems where the trains start out from different places and also memorize the capitals of all the states and if you can do this you are sure to be a success. And if you can hang around long enough to graduate from high school there is almost no limit on how far you can go. Uncle Jack knows.
He has been thinking a lot this week about how lucky he was to be born in the U.S.A. because something happened to him this week that would never happen to an ordinary run-of-the-mill person like himself in most other countries. What happened was that Uncle Jack was picked to be a judge of the Nags Head Surf Fishing Tournament which starts on Thursday and goes until Saturday.
In case you do not know what this means he will explain that the judges are the people who drive up and down the beach for two days, picking up dead fish and measuring them so the scorers can figure out who won the tournament.
He should not have to tell you that this is a very important job and not everybody can get to be a judge. For one thing you have to be highly respected in your community and for another thing you have to own a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Uncle Jack is not sure which is more important but he can tell you that as soon as he bought his new secondhand Jeep they picked him to be a judge, no questions asked.
Anyway this is the highest honor Uncle Jack has ever had and he can hardly believe what has happened. Who can believe that an ordinary, average child of poor parents, born in the north woods of Wisconsin, thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, would one day grow up to become a judge of the oldest, largest and finest surf fishing tournament in Dare County?
If you ask Uncle Jack this is real proof that the American Way of Life is working just the way the Founding Fathers hoped it would.
Uncle Jack is not taking this honor lightly, either. He is doing his best to get ready so he will be able to do a good job of judging. For one thing he has sworn off all spiritual beverages until after the judging is finished because he knows how hard it is to measure fish accurately when your hands are shaking or when you have impaired your faculties with foreign substances such as Scotch whiskey.              
He knows he has to measure every fish very carefully because the outcome of the whole tournament could rest on how well he does his measuring. Also he knows he could be assaulted by some irate fisherman if he does it wrong.
Uncle Jack knows that different kinds of fish get different numbers of points so he is studying hard to learn the various kinds of fish so he does not make any mistakes that way. Yesterday he finally mastered most of the main differences between the tarpon and the flounder and he plans to keep studying right up to the time he has to start judging.
Uncle Jack does want to warn all the contestants about the new state law that says you cannot drink beer or any other spiritual beverages in a motor vehicle even when the motor vehicle is on the beach and not on a highway. He wants all the contestants to know that he is planning to keep a sharp eye out for anybody who breaks this law and he will not hesitate to report them to the police. As far as Uncle Jack is concerned beer-drinking has no place in the Nags Head Surf Fishing Tournament anyway and he knows the vast majority of the club members will back him up on that.

      The new Jennette's pier is coming along nicely. Workers were on the job even on Saturday when Uncle Jack took these pictures.  The red crane is riding on a temporary pier that will be removed after construction is completed. (Click on the pictures for larger views).

                                                  
       The permanent (hopefully) concrete pilings of the new pier can be seen here.  Mother Nature will determine how permanent they are but they look formidable.

      
 The pile-driving device is being lifted into position in this rather blurry picture.  Presumably neighbors have grown accustomed to the constant banging by now.

    
There is some talk of replenishing the beach in the vicinity of the pier but nothing has happened yet.  The last attempt to replenish the beach just south of the pier with sand from Roanoke Sound was an expensive disaster of which no sign remains, fortunately.

                                    
       Remember Papagayo and Quagmire's?  Rumor has it that these new condos that replaced the old Croatan Inn buildings are not moving very rapidly in today's economic climate and that the project is in trouble financially. There didn't seem to be much going on around here when Uncle Jack took the picture on Thursday.

                      
      Ditto for this brand new condo development on the Beach Road at the former site of the old Wright Brothers motel.  A third large development on the sound side in Nags Head south of the Tanger outlet mall is apparently in similar straits.  Too many condos and too few buyers who can get financing.  Very sad.

                                              

But hope springs eternal in the developer's heart, apparently.  These are under construction on the old Sea Holly Square shopping center property across from the Ramada Inn in Nags Head which has stood empty since the shopping center was torn down quite a few years ago.

                    Here's a front viewof one of the two new buildings. Uncle Jack is not sure what this is going to be but  the occupants will have a great view of the Ramada parking lot for sure.