Road Trip Day #10 of 26

On our tenth day of travel the girls and I left David in Virginia Beach and headed to Fayetteville, North Carolina, to see my godsister and my goddaughter. It took us about five hours to get there, and we had a ball catching up and seeing one another. After Amanda (my godsister) and I got the girls settled down we sat down and watched and entire movie! A grown up movie! We decided to watch "Taken", and needless to say, we ended the evening feeling downright scared of the dangers our daughters face in this big, mean world.

I did get some pictures of the girls playing on Maddie's new swingset. They had a ball!






The next day we ran around and shopped a little, then we took Katie to practice at one of the gyms in town. We have tried to stay on schedule with her gymnastics practices so that she won't be so sore when we get home from vacation and start regular practices again. She got to practice for almost four hours with the Level 4 gym team and loved it! Thanks Sanford Academy for letting my baby girl practice!

After gym practice we hit the road to go see my sister, Alyssa, in Beaufort, South Carolina. We were sad to leave, but we were so anxious to see "Ghee", as Reese calls Alyssa. It took us another five hours to get there, and we arrived at 1am, but we were so glad to see her.

Jockey's Ridge State Park

"JOCKEY'S RIDGE is the tallest natural sand dune system in the Eastern United States. Located in Nags Head, it is one of the most significant landmarks on the Outer Banks, North Carolina. Always changing, always beautiful…"

I have to say that the park website hit the nail on the head with their description of Jockey's Ridge State Park. It was beautiful! We took lots of pictures and had a great time exploring. I was amazed by how big the dunes were! We were climbing up one big hill and you could see NOTHING except sand and sky. It felt like we were cresting a ridge on the moon or something!

Katie, of course, found a friend as soon as we arrived and ended up wakeboarding down the side of the dune. She LOVED it! Reese tired out pretty fast. On the way back to the car she just decided to lay face down in the sand... Poor baby!

Lighthouse Day!

I've been meaning to finish up blogging about our vacation, but can't ever seem to find the time! We took one day of our trip to drive to the southern tip of the Outer Banks to check out the lighthouses.

We made it all the way down to Okracoke. That was my favorite part of the whole day. The little island just looked like such a cool place. We had to ride the ferry to the island, and just loved that. There was a woman in the car in front of us that was feeding the seagulls. They looked like they were attacking her! They were everywhere! We did actually find the lighthouse on Ocracoke, but didn't get a photo of it. :(

After having dinner in Ocracoke we decided to head back to Kitty Hawk. Let me just preface the next part of the story by saying that Katie was NOT happy about visiting the lighthouses and she made sure to let Rhonda and me know it. She'd whined and fussed THE WHOLE TRIP about missing a day at the beach. It WAS only 70 degrees, so swimming would've been awful, but we couldn't make her understand that... Well, we made it back to the ferry in time to make the 7pm boat. We promised Katie that if she'd act right we'd take her to the beach as soon as we got back to the hotel. We'd have been in good shape, but there was a huge line! Needless to say, we didn't make it onto the 7pm boat, even though there were actually two ferries. The 8pm boat showed up and we noticed that there was a box truck AND an 18 wheeler at the front of the line. We didn't make the 8pm either. We did finally make the 9pm ferry, and I got some incredible sunset photos, but Katie was on the verge of becoming fish food!!! Rhonda and I had just about had it with her! She finally cooled off when we got them some ice cream on the way home.