Just Us: The Outer Banks Part 3, Up, Up In The Air

Sunday, September 22, 2019

The Outer Banks Part 3, Up, Up In The Air

I went to Wilbur Wright Junior High School. It was an old building and in the fall, when it rained, it looked like a prison. Yellow tinted lights would shine from the building into the parking lot and a high, pointed fence circled the building. Rain would drip down the black, screened windows and grey smoke from the cafeteria drifted slowly across the sky.

The desks were old and uncomfortable. They detailed a history of the students who sat in them previously with notes carved into the wood telling us "who ruled, who was here and when and how bad the school sucked."

I never really gave Wilbur Wright a thought. Oh, I knew that he and his brother, Orville, were the pioneers of flight, but that was about it.

While we were in the Outer Banks, we went to the Wilbur and Orville Wright museum. It's an interesting place to see, housing a model of their airplane (to scale) and a history of their experiments into flight and their family life. It turns out that the Wright Brothers got much of their mechanical curiosity from their mother.

Each time they failed at achieving flight, they analyzed each step in their processes and made changes to their plans. It was a bicycle that gave them the idea of how to engage a steering mechanism in their glider that could be manipulated with their hips to turn the machine into the wind. In 1900, the brothers were ready to build and test a man-carrying glider. They searched for areas with specific mean wind velocity and found Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in the Kill Devil Hills area. Kitty Hawk had strong, steady winds and soft sand for landing, which made it a perfect launch spot. In 1903, they did it. Orville Wright was the first man to fly.

The museum focused on early flight, but had short film clips of other memorable aviation milestones from around the world. The grounds had stone markers measuring the distance of three of the successful flights--the longest being 59 seconds and over 800 feet. We also saw life sized statues depicting the Wright Brothers and local citizens witnessing the first flight.

There is a monument high on a hill overlooking the museum, the grounds and the launch site. It's a beautiful statement for the first step in modern aviation.

From Kill Devil Hills, we went to Nags Head and enjoyed the beach. The weather was perfect and the skies were clear. We saw surfers, birds and colorful umbrellas. We met more new people, David and Ann from Iowa, a retired couple who enjoy the beach as much as we do.

Here are some pictures from our adventure.