Duck (🦆), North Carolina.

Another one on our travel list: Calvert Cliffs State Park — home to the most fossils per square foot on the East coast, and neighbor to the state’s only nuclear power plant.

Chesapeake Bay is a natural wonder of the world and Maryland has its best parts, making it clearly the best state in the union — no contest.

Reading my post from yesterday one may think I have something against Smith Island, Maryland. Nothing could be further from the truth! Between the nature, the solitude, and the food, it has been on our list of places to visit for the better part of this decade. Stars seem to be aligning for August of this year, so fingers crossed.

We have been watching some videos in preparation, and An Island Out of Time (YouTube link) were 25 minutes well-spent. The island has been getting less and less hospitable for humans compared to the mainland, and it has nothing to do with its supposedly sinking.

This is our second time traveling to the Outer Banks. Henceforth OBX. The first was seven years and two children ago, when I attended a grant-writing workshop held at an upscale resort in Duck, NC.

We were further down south this time, in Kill Devil Hills, ⊕ Yes, these are actual town names. There is also, of course, Kitty Hawk, as well as Nags Head. I’ll take those over European place names — looking at you, Vienna VA — any day. in accommodations that were decidedly more homely — and it was great!

1. Not sure how general knowledge of OBX is — I certainly didn’t know anything about them before coming — so I will summarize the geography thusly: a thin strip of sand oriented north-to-south parallel to the Eastern coast of North Carolina, famous for being the Wright brothers’ chosen site for their glider tests and, ultimately, humanity’s first flight.
2. That thin strip of sand is perilously close to perishing: there was a moderately severe storm on our first day and parts of the road closest to the beach were half-flooded for days; waves are picking at the beach little by little, often helped by clueless beachgoers who make coastal erosion into a family event, little shovels at the ready; so, you’d better see it while it’s still there.
3. And there is more than the beach there to see: the Wright Brothers National Memorial, for one, but also Jockey’s Ridge state park which was even better for being so unexpected (we found out about it by my scrolling around the map and wondering what the big yellow splotch was — incidentally, a random scroll around the map is an excellent way of semi-spontaneous trip planning, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron).
4. I still find it amazing that, with everything else being commodified and price-tagged, the beaches of North America are still mostly free. And that there are so many of them. Yes, the Mediterranean see is warmer, friendlier, better to swim and wade through, and just plane nicer. But the beaches, on top of being hostile to feet, are also much more crowded and much too often open only to those who can pay for a lounge chair.
5. Last month the digitizer on my 5-year-old iPhone Xs Max stopped working and I could no longer postpone an upgrade. What a good thing that I did! It turned out that the touch screen was not the only broken part — the image stabilizer was also dead for who knows how long and I thought I was just very bad at taking sharp photos. Anyhow, this was a well-documented trip.
6. Photo processing has… changed in these 5 years, to the point that this is probably the last time I would bring a DSLR on vacation. I barely got it out, I still haven’t transferred the few photos that were there, and I shudder to think I will have to process them myself — mostly by lightening the shadows beneath the glaring sun, something the 14 Pro Max that I got can do much better on its own and without being asked. It’s magic.
7. Sun blocking technology has also changed. Yes, the sunscreen is now amazing, but the better news is that you don’t have to use that much of it with all the clothes and headwear protects from the sun without being uncomfortable to wear or (this is the new part) get wet. My pale-skinned easy-to-burn 10-year-old self would have loved going to the beach a whole lot more if these were around back then.
8. To the last two points, here is some of that breakthrough technology in action:

Chris Arnade’s travelogue from Senegal (Part 1, Part 2) is well worth your time, especially if you can also spare a minute to read Tyler Cowen’s notes from Kenya and a Masai village. To put the two in (somewhat uncharitable) contrast:

This past weekend there was a conference at the fanciest resort in Dakar, the one with its own golf course. The title was something like, “Solving all of Africa’s problems, 2023!” and representatives of various global non-profits, charities, and NGOs were flown in to spend four days talking about what Africa needs. Presumably something only they and their friends can offer.

Verus:

Kenya Is Poised to Become the ‘Singapore of Africa’

Papermoon Diner, Baltimore’s finest eye spy establishment.

The food is good, too! Best bread pudding in the Mid-Atlantic.

Our first day of vacation:

• Basement flooded for the second time in as many weeks.
• Washing machine unusable until further notice.
• Needless to say, we’ll be traveling light!

The downside of living in a city others come to visit is that it never feels like a good time to be a tourist. Yes, D.C. is lovely just walking around — flaneuring, if you will — but all those buildings around the National Mall are still worth visiting.

Which is to say, our tickets for a tour of the Capitol are booked. It was now or never, since this year will probably be our last in Washington proper.

Let this unsolicited 2014 cartoon of me sipping coffee in Havana sit here for posterity as I replace it with an actual photo for my micro.blog avatar. Slash account photo slash profile pic. I can’t keep up with the nomenclature. Other than the hunched back, the often unkempt sideburns, and the cup of coffee that is always close by, it never truly was a good likeness, even for 2014.

The new photo is a cutout of this particular moment in time, as I browsed through used books in front of an Athens, OH bookstore during one of our first post-pandemic trips. Yes, that feral child doing God knows what on the sidewalk is ours, and obscured by the sign just enough to be included without a privacy blur.

Athens itself ⊕ And yes, having a photo from an institution unironically named the Athens Lunatic Asylum serve as my Twitter profile backdrop was a joke that up until now only I uderstood, but we are both in on it now, aren’t we, dear reader? was a delightful surprise, from the walkable downtown to its partially-abandoded Lunatic Asylum. The latter was the source of my Twitter cover photo, also saved here for posterity pending the site’s likely demise.

Eeast coast beach vacations in December are underrated (Virginia Beach, VA)