Flying Away South

We awoke on Saturday morning and could see our breath.
This is not a good thing. It indicates we are in VERY cold weather. So it was time to head south. And so we did.
We moved along smartly through Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. We parked in an empty lot alongside Jo's particular friend, Sue, in the city of Harrisburg. We caught up with her and and then rolled south, around Baltimore, Washington, and finally, to Richmond, Virginia. We found a little campground among the pine woods, 200 miles away from the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
On Tuesday morning we came to that very special place, Kill Devil Hills. This is an historic place. This is where man first managed to fly. Orville and Wilbur Wright, a pair of high school dropouts who made a living by making bicycles at the end of the 1890s, wanted to fly. They read all the literature available at the time. And they were secretive. They didn't really want to explore the possibilities of flying machines in the bright lights of publicity. This was 'way before CNN, of course. So they set out to find the windiest areas in which to experiment.
They found out from the Weather service that Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina was a little village of 200 souls on the edge of the Atlantic. So they set out to figure out the physics of flying in this windy neighborhood.
First they created a kite, a big kite, and they put up a local boy, weighing 60 pounds, in the kite. He survived. They tried it with one of the Wright brothers but he was too heavy.
But these young men - they were 32 and 36 at the time - figured out that all the current literature about control of kites was incorrect. These smart guys created a wind tunnel in Dayton, Ohio, and experimented with dozens of wing shapes. They discovered the keys to control and they carted their broken-down kites by train and boat to Kill Devil Hills. They were successful with their kite and returned two years later with their first powered machine.
Interestingly, they had asked automobile manufacturers for a light engine (weighing less than 200 pounds) that could generate eight horsepower. They were laughed at. Impossible, they were told. So they built their own 12 horsepower engine that weighed only 160 pounds. It is the embodiment of American ingenuity.
That first flight, as many of you know, was only 120 feet. Think about that for a moment. Many of our homes today are 120 feet wide.
Today, we walked the field and saw the markers showing where their plane lifted off and where it landed a few second later. And the second flight was just a little farther along the field. And then they flew again and achieved an additional 50-or-so feet. And then Wilbur took the plane and flew it for a fourth time that day for 850 feet.
(The picture at the top of the post shows the point of liftoff, with the markers for each of the landings).
You can see the granite marker out there and the significance hammers itself home.
The plane, built of ash, with a cotton muslin material covering the wings, weighed 650 pounds (with its engine).
Their achievement is monumental. But it is astonishing to realize that, 66 years later, Americans stepped onto the surface of the moon.
We headed on south down the Outer Banks. Wind swept the sand in spirals across the road. it reminded us of driving into Luderitz, through the Namib Desert.
We came to Avon, a tiny community on the Banks. And here is where we linger for a couple of nights before continuing on our journey back to Florida.