OK, we arrived on Roanoke Island Sunday afternoon.
We’re staying in a lovely little spot called the Scarborough House Inn, a couple of blocks from the harbor in Manteo, run by Sally and Phil Scarborough. Their families have been here since the Year 1, and they are the nicest kind of people you can imagine. Phil and I were talking out front and his second cousin drove by, whom Phil fondly calls “that varmint”; the driver of every other car going by waves. He’s got a nice twinkle and befitting an engineer retired from running 250 and 320 foot Coast Guard ships, he has stories.
Monday was a day of rest, in that we had nothing scheduled, but of course, it turned out to be a day of exploration, i.e., not rest. We drove over to the Outer Banks and north to Carolla, which is what the guidebooks tell you is the End of the Road, which is NC Highway 12. There you can hire a 4-wheel-drive to take you up the beach and back into the dunes to see the wild horses (and here you thought it was only at Assateague and Chincoteague, in Virginia, right? Is there anyone here who does not remember the book Misty of Chincoteague?)
Well, the reality is a little more complex. It turns out that while the **paved** highway 12 ends at Milepost 12 at Corolla, NC, the State of NC considers that the beach from there north to the Virginia line is Beach Highway 12: it’s a state highway: police cars, state highway regs apply, speed limits, parking rules, etc.
Not only that, but about 8 or 9 miles up there, there is an unincorporated town named Corova (Caro[lina] + Virgini[A]) back in the dunes: a fire and rescue department, post office delivery routes, power lines, all set in the midst of these dunes and sand roads, as if it were perfectly normal to live out there where the only access is via the beach.
Wikipedia doesn’t quite get it right, and Corova’s site is more of a promotional effort, but you get the idea: there are a massive number of HUGE houses built back there in the dunes, houses on the order of 5000+ sq. ft., which rent to large numbers of people, or a big family group, who share the cost for a week or more.
We took the two-hour trip and headed off in a 4-wheel drive to go see what you expect to be wild horses in a wild location, only to find them grazing on the lawns and under the carports of houses in a beach suburb; very dislocating! It was late afternoon, with low evening light, and we had a fine time, we saw the horses we expected to see, but discovered a place and way of life we did not at all expect to see!
It gets more interesting. The state road did not actually reach beyond Duck until 1957, and a large number of residents of Corolla commuted up the beach every day to work in Virginia, as it was (and still is) far shorter by that route than via the state highway system. Because there are now fences at the Virginia line (and at Corolla) to prevent the wild horse populations from expanding north or south, Virginia issued permits to 60 or so residents of Corolla who are still allowed to commute to their jobs via the beach and to pass through the gate in the fence at the NC/Virginia line.
Still, even with all this development, it’s a lovely beach.
On the way up to Carolla we did a drive-by on the Wright Brothers Memorial:
Carolla has a lighthouse, 
and a public park on the site of one of the many hunting clubs from the 1880’s. These places were huge, and attracted lots of rich “sports” from NYC and elsewhere to come massacre waterfowl by the hundreds.
Back in Manteo we took a quick turn through the National Historic Site at the Raleigh Colony. It’s a sad tale but the NPS has managed to imbue the disastrous ending of the colony (in a video) with a pretense that it was somehow the forerunner of the American desire for freedom and independence; it’s a pretty shaky interpretation.
We’ve had spectacular weather, and despite the pretty appalling, dense development of houses right up to the dunes, there is a lot of gorgeous beach, especially in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Unfortunately, the owners of these places can still get both flood and homeowners insurance; we weren’t too sympathetic listening to a couple of them complain about the high deductibles, or the fact that FEMA disallows some kinds of reimbursement. I kept my mouth firmly buttoned to keep from saying that I didn’t really want my tax $$ (via FEMA) to subsidize enormous houses in fragile environments in the path of frequent hurricanes.
They begin to roll up the sidewalks here about now, and really seriously after Thanksgiving or Christmas. As it is, finding a place to have dinner is not a simple task.
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