The Outer Banks

My sister's birthday was September 5th and she has really wanted to head out to the Outer Banks to check things out. So, on the Thursday before her b-day, we packed up the kiddos and took off for a long day of driving and ferry-ing :). It was truly a long day but tons of fun. I would love nothing more than to spend an entire weekend out there when Mark gets home. It is definitely on our "to do" list as a family. I've created a slide show of all of the pictures because I couldn't narrow it down...I think you can click on the "view pictures" link and go straight to them if you don't want to watch the entire show. We took tons of pics.

It started with a 2 hour drive out to Cedar Island where we caught our first Ferry over to Ocracoke. That ferry ride was a little over 2 hours long and the kids did great. It was a little bumpy so it helped Bodee to take a nap for a little of it :). Dakota thought it was so cool that our car got to ride the ferry with us. We had lunch at Howards Pub (thanks Kellie) in Ocracoke and then headed on out to catch the ferry over to Hatteras. This Ferry ride was onlyl about 30 minutes and we actually stayed in our car for most of it because it was raining a little bit. Definitely a weird feeling to have your vehicle swaying all over the place. From there, we just drove up the shore and stopped to check things out as we felt like it. We even pulled over and got out to see the house that was in Nights in Rodanthe...which was a must for us on the trip. We finished off our site-seeing at the Bodie Island Lighthouse and got some great shots of that. (You just thought there was nothing else out there with the name Bodie ;). ) Anyway, I encourage everyone to see the Outer Banks at some point. It was absolutely gorgeous and definitely a great vacation spot. It's not necessarily the best idea to make it all in one day though because the 3 1/2 hour drive we still had left took forever :). Enjoy our pics on the next post!