Last week, as we were preparing for our fifth year anniversary vacation to Hatteras Island, the weather was sunny everyday. Well, we’ve had some adventures this week! We got here to the Island, and spent two days sitting on the porch relaxing (backporch, the silence of the sound, front porch, the gentle waves).
Our first little adventure was when Basho broke free from his collar on the dog’s trip out to go potty. Basho is still a puppy at just a year old, and we should have named him Tigger from the way he bounds everywhere. So he was bounding around running from me as I chased after him. We make a game, and I try to get him to chase me into the house. Finally he took a break to go potty, where I was able to wrangle him back in.
The next day, we took them on bit of a walk, and on the way back, Barton pulls off the road to let an ambulance pass by. Into the sand, of course. I attach the dogs to a sign post, remove all the bags from his wheelchair. At just that moment, Barton sees a couple riding bikes and flags them down. With the three of us, we managed to push his wheelchair back up onto the road.
But, as we turned into the house, Barton took a different way in, back into the sand of course. This time, we were on our own. He had me get two pieces of firewood to wedge under the wheels, and with a bit of pushing and rocking, I pushed his wheelchair out.
We were unaware of the two fronts, remnants from Ira and the Northeasterly wind front that were about to make a huge splash across the Island very quickly. The power went out the first night of the storm, and as I looked down the street, realized it wasn’t just our house, the entire Hatteras Village had lost power. Finally, power came back on after many fits and starts.
The rest of the week, we watched 6-12 foot waves and the water pool on the streets both from the ocean and the sound. I had taken our car to higher ground, but found we were in one of the best places on the Island with minimum flooding. However, to retrieve our car, I had to walk two miles in the wind, fog and pools of water covering the street. For several nights, the house rocked to the force of the wind.
We ventured out to Hatteras Village and realized how lucky we were. Water covered nearly all of the streets. We stopped at the only restaurant that was open and hadn’t been flooded and listened to talk about the storm. Outside, the locals walked or rode their bikes down the flooded streets in galoshes and water bibs.
To get off of the island, we must take the ferries as the road north of us has been washed out, and so we must wait to see if and when they will run. (No, our adventure isn’t over yet)!
Yet, we had the best week together. On our anniversary, we drank champagne with strawberries, read poetry, danced to music. We sat on the porch and just relaxed into the silence of the sound and then witnessed the power of the ocean’s waves and listened to the constant wind across the ocean. We watched dolphins surf and flip through the incredible crashing waves. We watched the stars dance across the night and a rainbow across the sound between storms. We cuddled up together when we lost power. We wrote and read to each other on the swing overlooking the beach and ocean.
We couldn’t have had a better week.