Packing Up Day

It's Valentine's Day, an occasion when many couples go out to dinner, eat red-iced cake, and generally stimulate the economy with lots of cash.

My wife and I are packing up for a weekend on the islands of North Carolina's Outer Banks. We're meeting up with a Texas contact (who's now in Orlando, Florida, where we have business later in the summer). I've tried on the last two trips to the Outer Banks to make it to the Hatteras museum, The Graveyard of the Atlantic. I've written a novel based on a hurricane that ravages the Carolina coast, and I'm hoping to gather information for a new novel based on an Outer Banks lighthouse. Cape Hatteras Light seems the obvious choice, but there's Bodie Island Light, the Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse and many others.

My purpose this weekend is to discover background on ships that went down, what caused their demise, and what the sailors experienced during the storms that broke apart their ships. I said in my last entry that I was leaving my computer at home, but I'll have my phone and tablet with me. There's a rawness to seeing the actual artifacts right where the ships met their end that doesn't convey over the Internet, and I intend to capture it all.

I expect this will be a very good adventure, indeed.

Farley