Spring Break at Outer Banks, NC Part 1: Jockey's Ridge State Park, Bodie Island Lighthouse, and Beach Fun

Over Spring Break, we took a trip to the beaches of the Outer Banks in North Carolina.  Mimi and Mormor joined us there for a week of playing in the sand at our rented beach house along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in Waves.

Naturally, we spent a lot of time on the beach which was a short walk from our beach house.  We brought our kites to take advantage of the consistent winds on the beach and the kids loved learning and practicing keeping the kites in the air.

The beach house had a few games and we brought a few of our own for when we wanted to relax inside.

 The sand was very soft on the beach and Karina buried her legs.

The water was a little chilly, so we never went very deep into it, but it was fun to wade in.

We found several "treasures" as we walked along the beach, like Lydia with these shark purses.

Within a half mile of our beach house in Rodanthe, there was a stretch of homes sitting above the water at high tide that had been condemned.  It looked like the beach had eroded underneath these homes causing the pillars holding them up to shift and break making the houses lean into the water.  I have to think that when they were built, the water line was further out.  We saw news reports a few weeks after we got home that the homes in this picture and the one Lydia is walking under in the next one had collapsed into the ocean.  (For example, see https://www.wavy.com/news/north-carolina/obx/another-house-collapses-in-rodanthe-on-outer-banks/)  

In the news article, there is a video of the brown house Lydia is running toward being swallowed by the ocean.  The house Lydia is running underneath had already been consumed by the water.  This was all within a few weeks of us being there. 

Chasing the waves with Mormor.

More kite flying from Derek.

We wandered around the Bodie Island Lighthouse one day.

This boardwalk going above the marshland made for a good photo spot.

Our beach house looked out onto a large KOA campground.  We took advantage of some of the campground amenities like this "jumping pillow" that is essentially a bouncy castle without walls.

We visited Jockey's Ridge State Park - it was home to large dunes of sand and steady wind (they had a paragliding school onsite).  It was cool to walk around it, and I thought it could have served as the set of a sci-fi desert planet like Tatooine from Star Wars.

The kids wrote their names in the sand when we reached the top of the tallest dune.

We walked down the other side to get to the shore line of the park, where it was a marshland for birds, fish, and crabs.  Derek had fun finding crab shells.

Here's our "desert" landscape at the Jockey's Ridge park.

This hill was fun but hard to race up as we were climbing the dunes since the sand was so soft and deep that each step would make you sink down.

Lydia with one of the crab shells that we found.

Back on the beach, the kids dug in the sand some more.

Some of the waves were pretty big.

The kids built a cool sand castle complex.

Our beach house had a solar heated pool, but even with the solar heat, it was still too cold to swim in (though I did perform my own polar bear plunge to test it out).  We also had a hot tub on our balcony where we spent time every day sitting and relaxing.