Outer Banks

For three years in the early 80s three groups of friends and I went to the Outer Banks in North Carolina to an area called Duck. Each year we rented a different home on the ocean and we had anywhere from six to ten people.

The first year we rented the cottage from Phil Tigan who was Assistant Director at ISD. We went Labor Day weekend which started the tradition. We were two houses back from the oceanfront but still with beautiful views of the ocean. We toured the area going to Kill Devil Hills. We enjoyed the local grocery store, the Mucky Duck, and enjoyed the company of good friends. We spent some time during the week exploring lighthouses. We knew there was one more lighthouse at Ocracoke Island. We got up very early one morning to take the three hour one way drive. When there, we discovered a breakfast place with the best damn coffee in the world. It became an annual pilgrimage to go back for that coffee.

One of the idiosyncrasies of this house was a sliding screen door out onto one of the decks that was difficult to tell if it was open or closed – at least for me. I must have walked into that door five times. Luckily it didn’t get bent too badly. We finally had to put a marker on the door so I could tell if it was open or closed.

That first year two members of our party were not able to stay the whole week because college classes were starting. They were going to leave late at night and unfortunately had spent the entire week not getting gas. So late in the evening we’re siphoning gas from one of our cars to the other so they’d at least have the opportunity to get to a gas station. Jim offered Brian some milk to coat his stomach in case he accidentally swallowed some gas. Brian, not understanding the intention said, “No thanks, I’m not thirsty.” We used the house hose which we had to cut and they were successfully on their way.

The second year we had a different group and a different home. A picture of the group is included here.

Back row: Jim, Mark who I have known since second grade, Judy, Barry – no comments on hair and glasses please
Front row: Dave and Joan who now have a family in Ellicott city and just returned from the Outer Banks this evening from their annual multigenerational family vacation, Nancy a friend of Mark’s, Kathy, and John.

One evening we were all in particularly good spirits and perhaps ended up making a little more noise than was appropriate. More on that later. We also discovered by accident why the tarheels are called the tarheels. It took us some time to get the tar out of the bathtub that accidentally got tracked in.

We would usually do group dinners with everyone sharing in the cooking and cleanup responsibilities. This particular year, one of our group had brought a frozen turkey. Unfortunately the evening we were to have the turkey the thawing of same bird had not yet begun. We gamely moved forward with the dinner slicing off cooked pieces of the turkey as we could and continued cooking that bird throughout the evening. We had a lot of cheese and crackers, stuffing with too much onion in it, and luckily no one ended up with salmonella poisoning.

The third year we had a smaller group and were closer to the ocean. You remember from the year two I mentioned that there would be more about the evening that we partied a little louder than we should have. When we arrived at check in, the real estate agent said, “Well, Mr. Whiteley, we had some complaints from your neighbors last year about the noise. Please be more careful this year.” We were mortified. They hadn’t said anything on our way out the previous year but waited a whole year to mention it to us at check-in.

I remember this particular house had a guest book, a bottle of wine, and a note from the owner Millie. We had friends who were going to be arriving late so we looked at the phone, and gave them the number on it in case they had problems finding the house. Our guests did arrive late and said that they had had difficulty finding the place. We indicated that we had been home all evening waiting for a call and they said, “Well, the number you gave us isn’t the right number.” We checked and the number they had was the one on the phone. We called the number ourselves and got an entirely different person. So in our note in the guest book saying that had enjoyed the vacation we included a section saying, “Millie, Millie, Millie, why is the number on the phone not the number of the phone?” We never did find out what the number was.

It was an election year and we were having a discussion around politics. We were trying to recall who George McGovern’s running mate had been in a presidential election and it was quite late at night. It was of course befoe the Internet and none of us could recall the information. We finally realized that even that late at night the public libraries in Hawaii would be open. So, we called the public library in Hawaii to ask and got the answer to our question. It was Sargent Shriver. Since all of us in attendance were Marylanders we were quite embarrassed that we didn’t recall that his running mate was in fact from Maryland.

Several of those that went on these various trips have continued vacationing in the Outer Banks to this day. So we started a fine tradition of memories with wonderful friends.

Most of our time would center around playing games, taking long wonderful naps, walking on the beach at night, and enjoying the amazing phosphorescence that would literally set the beach and the ocean aglow. Since there were so few houses in the area, it was almost as if you had a private beach. We would do sing-alongs, “You Are My Sunshine” being a particular favorite. None of us are good singers but it always sounded very good to us. We stopped taking flashlights on the beach walks for two reasons - to see the phosphorescence and with the flashlights we could see all the crabs on the beach. Somehow it was better not knowing that you were about to have your toe nibbled by a crab. This was of course before the area got built up and the stars at night would be magnificent. We could see the Milky Way and felt like we could see the world.