Days 26 & 27: Oregon Inlet, NC

The weather started changing as we left Cape Hatteras, with a strong wind coming out of the southwest.  We headed out early, trying to stay even with the leading edge of the front, in order to increase the odds that we would reach our destination before any rain started.  I managed to average a bit better than 20 mph at a fairly conservative pace, until around the midway point, when I had a puncture in my rear tire (the first of the season).  Once that was fixed, the sun came out and I decided the weather was no threat, so I took a more leisurely pace the rest of the way.  That is, except for the long bridge over Oregon Inlet just before our campground.  Then it was an all out effort to get over it as quickly as possible (there was about a foot and a half of space to ride between the fog line and the guard rail, but with a strong crosswind and way too many big RVs with the weekend starting).

Help, Ma!  Aliens have snagged me with their tractor beam - they must be after my ball!

So we will spend two nights at Oregon Inlet Campground ($28, primitive, cold showers), where we've once again crossed paths with Joel and Marcy (and Bill the Goat), as well as some others that we've seen camping along the Outer Banks.

Marcy & Joel - Fun Folks!

Once we stopped for the day, the otherwise great tailwind made it hard to enjoy being outside, though we did manage to spend some time on the beach and to see the Bodie Island lighthouse.

Happy, happy, happy...

It stayed dry all day, despite some threatening thunderstorms late in the afternoon.  From around midnight on, the rain was fairly constant and heavy, and it continued off and on until late morning.  That is probably just as well, as it made it a perfect day to do chores.  We got caught up on laundry, did some grocery shopping, cleaned out the van and got the generator squared away (oil changed and filled her up).  We ran the generator for a few hours once we got back, which was more than enough to recharge our electronics and hopefully enough to keep the refrigerator going overnight.  While out and about, we stopped by Fort Raleigh, site of the first English attempt at colonizing the New World.

The obligatory Outer Banks lighthouse photo.

Shortly after we got back, Joel and Marcy were having problems with their motor coach.  The generator wouldn't work, so they had no way to keep their refrigerator running.  They couldn't find anyone to work on it until Tuesday, so they decided to go find a campsite with power in the meantime.  But when they tried to break camp, one of their slide-outs wouldn't close.  Joel got some information on how to close it manually, and it eventually took ten of us to get it to go back in.  It was a great bonding experience - the sort of thing that we would hold a ten year reunion about, but everyone returned to their weekend getaways as quickly as they joined in to help...

After that, the weather improved for a while before another front came in, late in the afternoon.  Lana had a repeat of yesterday on the beach, so she's a very happy camper tonight.

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We got some very sad news tonight.  My uncle, William Carl Adams, died today.  He was 96 years old.  My mother has now outlived her parents and her three siblings.  Thankfully, she has all of her children still living (at least I assume they are alive, as I haven't heard anything to the contrary in a while).  

We visited Uncle Bill two years ago, when he was 94 years old.  He had a body like a gymnast and could jump up off the ground like a teenager - a really remarkable guy.  Since my dad died at 57 it was a relief to find some male longevity genes somewhere in the family.  We had expected to see him a few more times during our travels, but it was clear for some time now that the quality of his life had been declining enough that life wasn't the pleasure for him that it had been most of his life.

Thanks to Uncle Bill, we know that his great grandfather, William Adams, was not actually an Adams.  William Adams was born an orphan in Madison County, Indiana in the early 1830s, and there seems to be no known information as to the identity of his parents.  So Uncle Bill agreed to do a yDNA test, which would identify what male line he was descended from.  The results showed that there were two close matches to some Etchisons, one of whom had done a lot of research on the Etchison family.  He believes that there were a group of Etchisons who had migrated to Indiana from North Carolina, one of whom left NC with a wife, but returned without her.  Speculation is that he left William Adams with relatives after his wife's death, and returned home.  That would suggest that William Adams was raised by an aunt, but the courthouse in Madison County burned down in the 1880s, and there are sporadic marriage records in North Carolina prior to 1830.  So there are few public records available to better piece this puzzle together.