RV There Yet?

I have only three words.

Canine.

Urinary.

Incontinence.

During our stay in North Carolina, Billie Jean began peeing on herself while resting.  Our vet from home diagnosed her over the phone as "incontinent."

Sigh.

To get the prescription medicine she'll need to control her bladder, we visited a vet in Nags Head, North Carolina.  It is our understanding that the dosing of the medicine will require constant tweaking to find the dose that will manage the incontinence.  For the rest of her life.  Always.  She'll need medicine. 

Sigh.

Pee pee aside, we still enjoyed our time in North Carolina.  Our first stop was a long awaited one.  We'd arranged to meet up with some friends at their family's mountain cabin.


The kids had a ball playing in the dirt and building forts for three days.

We enjoyed several days of visiting with our dear friends.  We wanted to get out and hike around the area, but there was just so much to catch up on, that we really didn't leave the cabin much . . . except to eat ice cream.



SE, CER, LAR, MH, CBR, and K celebrating a late birthday treat for CBR.

Me and A.



We managed to pull ourselves out of conversation long enough to go visit the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author Carl Sandburg, a National Historic Site.  I think I would've liked this guy.  He was fascinated by Abraham Lincoln, he was a former hobo who hopped trains, and he referred to the television as the "idiot box."

 

It was a gorgeous spread of property with views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, surrounded by pasture, and overlooking a lake.  Not bad for a hobo poet.

Of course, we earned our Junior Ranger badges.

North Carolina is also home to the Biltmore Estate.  Biltmore is the largest privately owned house in the USA and was built in the late 1800's by George Vanderbilt.  It rests atop 8,000 beautiful rolling acres, and at 178,926 square feet and 250 rooms, Mr. Vanderbilt referred to it as his escape from everyday life.  It was astounding.

Biltmore Estate - Asheville, North Carolina

While much of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was closed due to major storm damage to the roads, we went hiking and toured some farmsteads within the park.  We also toured some Cherokee Indian museums in the surrounding area.  The Great Smoky Mountains is home to remnants of the Southern Appalachian mountain culture.  When the white settlers first arrived in the area in the late 1700's, they would've found themselves in the homeland of the Cherokee Indians.  As the settlers grew greedy for more land, coexisting with the Cherokee became increasingly hostile.  By the 1830's the Cherokees were forced off their land and were sent west in an episode known as the "Trail of Tears." 

Fashioning a bridge over the icy waters - Great Smoky Mountains.

The farmsteads in the mountains really showed you how the people lived in the late 1800's to early 1900's.  We explored a log farmhouse, a barn, an apple house, a springhouse, and a working blacksmith shop.

LAR learning the craft.

Showing off their dinner bells.

As we toured, I was struck by how arduous their lives were.  Meanwhile, just down the way a bit, George Vanderbilt would have been having nightly black-tie dinners and swimming in his heated indoor pool at the Biltmore.

North Carolina offers a beautiful marriage of landscapes.  The Appalachian Mountains give way to the gorgeous coastal beaches.  We'd been studying the Wright brothers, so we made our way to North Carolina's Outer Banks to see where history was made at Kitty Hawk in 1903.

Measuring the distance to declare a winner in the paper airplane flight contest with the park ranger.



The site of the first successful flight of an airplane -- Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Outer Banks is really beautiful.  We spent time touring the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, Jockey's Ridge State Park in Nags Head, and playing and surfing at the beach, and we even worked in a little school.

My personal driver and I in front of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

Playing on the sand dunes at Jockey's Ridge State Park. So so so so so so pretty.

Oh, nothing.  Just handling some business calls.

Mr. Fix-It.  Outer Banks, North Carolina.

The girls -- CER, LAR, and Billie Jean.

A beached seal.  It rolled around and groaned and waved for a while, then made its way back into the ocean.

CER playing "sight word bingo" with CBR.

We also found the most delightful church -- Lighthouse Christian Fellowship in Kitty Hawk.  The sermon was a bold reminder to never be ashamed of the Gospel.  One night, we met the preacher and his family out for dinner.  What fun it is to meet new friends along the way!

Our new friends "N" and "H". 

One of our favorite spots in Outer Banks was the beach community of Corolla.  There are no paved roads in Corolla.  There are homes, but the residents need a high clearance utility vehicle to get to their homes.  Because you can only access the homes by driving along the sandy beach, it's also prudent to pay attention to the tide schedule which affects access to the homes.

Corolla, North Carolina.

The kids thought it was so fun to run beside our car as we drove down the beach.  The girls saw a fence ahead that marked the NC and Virginia border.  They decided to run to Virginia - just to be able to say they'd run from North Carolina to Virginia.  They ran two miles without stopping -- all the way to Virginia!

Their jog ended up being TWO miles.  They made it to the Virginia border.

The absence of roads isn't the only reason Corolla is interesting.  There are also wild Spanish Mustangs roaming freely there.  The horses arrived on the island as survivors of shipwrecks dating back to the early 1500's.  Spying these wild mustangs on the spectacular beaches was so thrilling.

Wild Spanish Mustangs on Corolla Island, North Carolina.

North Carolina was a restful stay for us, and in many ways it was a sweet reminder of things we've missed about our hometown.  The coast of NC is so similar to home -- at times we could easily imagine ourselves just veering south.  We could pull up to our home, and spread out in the extra square footage, and enjoy a home where all the furniture isn't bolted to the floor.  Nevertheless, we're not "there" yet.

A small house will hold as much happiness as a big one. - Unknown

The show will go on . . . to Virginia.