This memorial was so cool! We've been to and seen a lot of cool places, but Kitty Hawk actually gave me the chills. Maybe because my dad was a pilot... I just kept imagining him seeing all of this, and how cool he would have thought it was.
The monument that has been erected is at the top of the hill where they first tested their gliders. At that time there wasn't any grass. Just a very loose, very high sand dune. The brothers liked the area to practice, because they wanted soft sand to land on, but that meant hauling their glider to the top of the hill more than a thousand times for practice. They would do this dozens of times a day.
This is the monument from the side. I'm guessing it was done on purpose, but I never heard it mentioned or read it anywhere... But I think it looks like the tail of a modern plane.
This is looking out over the path that they flew their gliders.
The monument from the back side of the hill. When the monument was being talked about, just in the planning stages, local people planted grass all over it so it would be more stable to hold the monument.
There's a metal sculpture capturing the moment the first motorized plane takes off.
Here I am, just hanging out with Orville.
From the back of the plane.
Brad too.
There were just a few witnesses to the first flight, and they are depicted here also.
The guy who took the photograph of the first flight had never used a camera before!
Here's Brad being inappropriate. Big surprise!
If you can zoom in on this, it tells about each of the guys who were there.
Twelve seconds that changed the world!
This is cool... There's a very small landing strip that parallels the first flight paths of Orville and Wilbur.
We even saw a plane taking off from there. How cool would that be?
Because the ground was so sandy, they build a metal rail that the plane would balance on and ride on till it took off.
This is the spot where each of the 4 flights that first day took off.
There are monuments showing how far each of those first four flights went before landing.
This is the shed where they worked on and built their gliders, and then planes. This was the workshop for the first couple of years, and the brothers stayed in a tent.
They later converted that to their cabin when they built a slightly bigger workshop.
After touring all around the grounds, we went inside where a ranger was scheduled to give a talk.
A replica of the glider they first practiced with, off the side of the hill.
And this is a replica of the plane. The front is on the right side.
This was our ranger guy.
There were pictures all over the walls of the visitors center, of people who had made significant contributions to flight. The ones that caught my attention the most were Amelia Earhart, of course, having lived in her hometown of Atchison, KS; one of Mr Beech, Mr Cessna, and Mr Stearman, because those were common names in my house growing up with a small-plane-pilot dad; and the one of the Apollo 11 astronauts, where it pointed out that their landing on the moon came a mere 66 years after the Wright brothers made their first airplane flight... WOW!!!
I thought this was cool. A piece of fabric and a piece of wood from the Wright brothers' first plane was taken to the moon on Apollo 11.
On the way to Kitty Hawk, we drive through Rodanthe, so I had Brad pull over so I could get a picture of The Inn from the movie Nights in Rodanthe.
The current owners were big fans of the movie, and wanted to buy it, but it was sitting dangerously close to the water. So they had it moved a little inland, and have taken great pains to decorate the inside exactly as it was in the movie. In the movie, the inside scenes were filmed at a studio.
This is the house as it was photographed for the movie. You can see why it needed to be moved!
On the way down to Avon, we crossed this rickety bridge while towing the fifth wheel, and I actually held my breath the whole way across. It did not seem stable at all! We had to cross it again today (twice!). Since we've been here, we've found out that until a couple years ago, it was not needed, but a recent hurricane made a new waterway in the island, and the lower half was cut off from the upper half. This bridge is an old surplus army bridge, and was brought in temporarily. Construction on a new bridge is underway, but until then, this is what you have to cross.
On the way back from Kitty Hawk, we decided to go check out the lighthouse we noticed on the way down, the lighthouse at Bodie (pronounced like "body") Island. It has "only" 200 steps, but after yesterday, we decided to just take pictures.
The lightkeeper's house.
There was a walkway out to the water, so we decided to follow it.
We watched this crab scoot around in the water for awhile.
This bird did not seem to be having fun slogging through the marsh.
Looking back at the lighthouse from the gazebo.
It was a fun day!
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