Couple looks forward to a return trip
CENTER TWP — Jean and Don Vaughn of Center Township covered all the bases during their vacation on Hatteras Island: land, sea and air.
During their visit between July 21 and 28 to the barrier island located off the North Carolina coast, they enjoyed its beaches, did some pier fishing and visited the site of the Wright Brothers' first heavier-than-air flight.
The Vaughns traveled by car to Hatteras Island with Jean Vaughn's daughter, Leanne Rosthauser, and Rosthauser's daughter, Morgen Pencille. The trip, their second to the island, took a day and a half with an overnight stop in the Norfolk, Va., area.
Once there, they met with Jean Vaughn's son, Ed Zukowski; his wife, Chris; their children, Ally, 12 and Madison, 8; and Chris' parents, Ron and Dot Erv.
They all stayed in a six-bedroom beach house equipped with an elevator, pool, Jacuzzi, pool table and media room.
Jean Vaughn said the beach house was called “Dick and Jane” after the names of its owners. It was a three-minute walk to the beach from the house.
“This was a really luxurious beach house,” said Jean Vaughn. “You could tell the people who owned it were pretty well-off. It had a lot of original artwork on the walls.”
The beach house was located in a town called Salvo which is about in the middle of the 42-mile-long island, part of North Carolina's Outer Banks.
Jean Vaughn said the town supposedly got its name during the Civil War when a passing Union ship spotted the settlement. The captain ordered a barrage and a sailor marked the site on the map with the word Salvo. When the town got a post office in 1901, Salvo became the official name.
“It's just a wide spot in the road,” she said of Salvo, but added they returned to the Outer Banks because “the kids enjoy it so much. They asked to go back.
They enjoy the beach, building sand castles and flying kites.”She added it didn't hurt that the house has a media room with a pull-down TV screen and pool table“We brought food. We ate breakfast in every morning,” said Jean Vaughn.David Vaughn said the families dined out three or four times.“The seafood places are usually pretty good. The rest were pretty run-of-the-mill, pizza places and buffets,” he said.And the beach was something of a disappointment, too, the Vaughns said.“I don't think that we will go to Salvo again because the waves broke too close to the beach,” said Jean Vaughn.“The beach wasn't as shallow as you'd like. The bottom dropped away pretty quickly,” said Don Vaughn.“The undertow was very strong that week. The kids couldn't go in the water. The waves would come and sweep you away, “ said Jean Vaughn.She added, “We did like watching the sandpipers (beach birds). The wave would go out, and the sandpipers would gather at one spot and peck at the sand. We all enjoyed watching the sandpipers run from the waves.”“We enjoyed watching the parasails behind the boats,” said Jean Vaughn. “Sailboards too,” said her husband.She added the beach was not crowded, and the houses were spread out.“It is not like Myrtle Beach where you have to go out to the beach early to get a spot on the sand,” she said. “The week we were there, in the afternoons there would be a thunderstorm and then the sun would come out again.”
The families also took some day trips.They went to Kitty Hawk, N.C., a 45-minute drive, where Orville and Wilbur Wright conducted their flying experiments.They also visited the Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station Historic Site and Museum in Rodanthe, N.C. It is one of the preserved stations of the Life-Saving Service, a forerunner to today's U.S. Coast Guard, which was of special interest to Don Vaughn, a retired Coast Guard aviator.He said, “This is just one of the hundreds of life-saving stations on the East and West coasts. They were all volunteer. They had to go buy their own boats and so forth. They were taken over by the federal government as the Life-Saving Service. They had watch towers watching for ships to get into trouble.”“They were outstanding small boat people,” David Vaughn said. “In World War II, when they had trouble landing in Morrocco, they stripped all the life-saving stations of personnel, and they were the ones who really got things organized for the landings at Casablanca.”Every week during the summer, said David Vaughn, the people at the Chicamacomico station perform a re-enactment in which they “use a Lyle gun to fire a projectile that looks like a steel rod with a line.”In the days of the Life-Saving Service, he said, the projectile and line were fired over ships in distress.
Bigger lines would be attached and finally breeches buoys were run out on these lines to the distressed ship to bring in the passengers.“It was a buoy with what looked like a pair of breeches attached,” he said. Similar to a zip line, the person being rescued was pulled to shore.But not all the earlier inhabitants of Hatteras Island were altruistic life-savers, David Vaughn said.“Before the life-saving stations, they had ship wreckers,” he said. “They would have ponies on the beach with lanterns on them.”“The ponies would run up and down the beach and mislead the mariners, and they would run aground. And they (the wreckers) would take everything off the ship that they could. That's how they made their living. They never knew what they were going to get,” he said.Describing other aspects of their vacation, Don Vaughn said the families fished off the pier at Avon, a town farther south of Salvo. But he said day trips weren't the point of their vacation.“You are going to relax, not to see everything there is to see,” said Jean Vaughn.While she said the northern end of Hatteras Island between Nag's Head and Kill Devil Hills was “a little overdeveloped and touristy,” they both look forward to returning.“I've never been down there and been unhappy. We've only been there twice and we want to go back,” Jean Vaughn said.
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