East Coast Summer Trip Days 1-3

States Visited:

West Virginia-Virginia-North Carolina

On Friday, June 18, 2021, we set out on our summer road trip after my work day ended. We left at about 5pm and headed towards I-64 in Louisville, KY. We decided to have dinner at the Claudia Sanders Dinner House in Shelby County, KY.

It is named after the second wife of Colonel Harlan Sanders, the founder and creator of Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC for short. I had to have the fried chicken to see if it was any different. It was OK but not great, at least to me. Apparently, the recipe for the fried chicken is another recipe from the Sanders’ and the dinner house is the only restaurant outside of KFC to be allowed use a KFC recipe.

From there we drove until we made it to our hotel for the night in Huntington, West Virginia.

The next day, Saturday, we drove through the beautiful mountains of West Virginia, through Charleston, seeing the capitol building, and then through the mountain ranges and valleys of western Virginia.

We stopped for lunch at a Wawa gas station in Charlottesville. If you haven’t been to the east coast you may not know about Wawa. You could say that it is not your average gas station food. The quality of the food, the amount of options, and even the ordering and order fulfillment process is light years ahead of the normal, subpar food that is in most gas stations. I’m sure that there are plenty of people that go to a Wawa just for the food.

Anyway, after that we went around Richmond to the coast and down into North Carolina. Our final destination was Nags Head.

Crossing the bridge into the cape was a chore and after we finally made it to the motel after 7 pm we ordered some pizza from Nags Head Pizza Company. It was pretty good.

On Sunday, June 20th, we woke up and had one of the muffins we had picked up before the trip from Sam’s Club. Our first destination was the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island. Roanoke Island was the first colony in the New World for the English. We watched a short video about the colony.

I also bought a book on the Civil War battle that was fought on the island in 1862. The author of the book just happened to be the park ranger in the visitor center and kind of talked me into buying it. It wasn’t a hard sell since I’m extremely interested in the Civil War. I wish I would have asked him more about how he wrote the book. We then explored the grounds a little bit, which was basically just the recreated earthwork fort.

From there we checked out a local candy store called Sugar Kingdom. It had an insane amount of candies and sodas in it. Everyone picked up a few things.

After that, it was a short drive to the Bodie Island lighthouse inside of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

We waited out the rain for a little bit and then went inside the main house. There wasn’t much in it.

Then we had to wait a little while longer until our time to go up the lighthouse. The lighthouse is about 187 feet high and we were able to walk up most of it. This was the third lighthouse built in the area and this one was completed in 1872. The climb wasn’t too bad and the view was worth it.

Then we went back to the motel and had leftover pizza for lunch.

Here are some kites flying while we were on our way to Kitty Hawk.

Next on the list was the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kitty Hawk.

This spot was where the Wright Brothers did all of their test glides and then their first flights on December 17, 1903. The visitor center had a ton of information on the Wright Brothers family history, their thought process, research, testing, and flights along with what other people were doing (unsuccessfully) at around the same time as them. The monument and grounds were quite neat too.

From here we took a short drive to Lost Treasure Golf for some mini-golf fun. It was a pretty cool place with multiple waterfalls, a pirate ship, and some difficult holes. I ended up beating Andrea by one stroke.

Dinner soon followed at Dirty Dicks Crab House. It was about as coyly perverted as you can imagine. Both of the kids went with lobster, I had a fish sandwich, and Andrea got a burger. Everyone was happy.

Then we went next door to the Christmas Mouse store to find a magnet and a Christmas ornament. We finished the night off with some great ice cream from Fatboyz near our motel. Unfortunately, as it was raining off and on all day, we did not get to take the short walk to the beach to swim.