Monday was actually a surprisingly awesome day. I hit three national park sites, although I feel a little guilty because I didn’t actually hang out at the beach at Cape Hatteras National Seashore. It was rainy, and I had just been at the beach all weekend.
I started out at the Wright Brothers National Memorial. From the website, it looked like it was just a memorial on top of the hill. But when I got there, there was more to see. They had a nice museum, and you could still see the runway with markers that showed where the plane had flown on those first few flights.
I climbed to the top of the 90 foot hill to see the memorial. I feel like I’ve seen about 9 million monuments and most of them look the same, but this one was actually really cool.
My next stop was Fort Raleigh National Monument, which I thought would be another boring sport. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that it was on Roanoke Island, and there wasn’t actually a fort there. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. (Now, of course, as an adult, I am not a fan of colonialism.) But I was always so intrigued with the story of the lost colony at Roanoke. The video I watched there didn’t give a lot of information about theories as to where the colonists had gone. They just said that when that guy John (forgot his last name- was it Dare?) came back from England three years later, there was no sign of any of the colonists and all they found was the word Croatoan carved into a tree. Croatoan was the name of a nearby island, and because of the weather, they were not able to go to that island to see if anyone was there. So, in my mind, the colonists probably needed help and went to that island for it. A lot of them probably died, and the rest probably intermarried with the native tribe. I’d like to think that somewhere, a member of that tribe did the ancestry DNA test and is confused as to why they have some British DNA.
Although they have restored some earthworks that Sir Walter Raleigh built in 1585, they do not know exactly where the colonists lived on the island. The earthworks would have been too small for all 89 people. It’s crazy to think that this was over 400 years ago!
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