Our week in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina is probably best summed up by paraphrasing Dickens: it was the best of locations, it was the worst of locations.

We want to end on a positive note, so we’ll start with the negatives.

We were initially delighted by the Airbnb, which was a cute little beach house on stilts. Unfortunately, delight turned to disgust when we saw a cockroach crawling around the kitchen within 20 minutes of arrival. It would later turn out that it wasn’t actually a cockroach, but the very similar looking “water bug”. And there’s an important difference between cockroaches and water bugs: water bugs are bigger! The bugs would rear their heads again several times that week, which left Daniel on edge and in shoes the entire time.

A different type of bug - mosquitos - made the week even worse by biting the hell out of us every night when we went to dinner. One night we found a place we particularly enjoyed right by the water. The mosquitos were proving annoying, but as soon as the sun set nuisance turned to emergency and Daniel was immediately bit close to a dozen times, so we had to quickly skedaddle.

And finally, one last thing made us slightly miserable here: the entire town was covered in very tiny, very sharp cactus-like burrs that would painfully attach themselves to Winnie whenever we tried to walk her. And not just the grassy areas, but the asphalt and sidewalks too. We’d walk her a few hundred feet and she’d stop and try to chew the burrs off. Sometimes our fingertips would bleed as we tried to help her out. Fortunately, the beach was a pretty safe place to walk her, but it meant having to drive her somewhere for each walk.

Fortunately, there was also a lot we enjoyed about this stop.

In addition to the mosquitos, the aforementioned water-side dinner also featured one of the most amazing sunsets we’d ever seen. And it wasn’t just us - even the locals couldn’t help but stare.

We also took a drive one evening to a beachside area that was lousy with sand dunes. We had fun climbing on them, and playing “mitts” on the beach (which is what we call playing catch with mitts).

While we were playing we noticed that Winnie was very interested in the sand - she was doing a lot of digging and sniffing. Winnie doesn’t usually do typical dog things like that, so this piqued our interest. As it turns out, she was digging for and eating crabs! Not only was this behavior novel and cute, but it’s the first time she’s demonstrated any kind of competence in hunting other creatures. For a terrier she’s always been pretty bad at terrying things, but maybe she’s just been a crab terrier all along.

On Friday afternoon Ellie arranged for us to go jet skiing. It was a bit too cold to jet ski, so we had the entire bay to ourselves, and we really enjoyed it. There was one exception to this: the owner of the shop told us “you might see dolphins if you get lucky”, which Ellie interpreted as “you’re definitely going to see dolphins”. So it was a real let down when we didn’t see any of the promised dolphins.

We also just so happened to be staying literally across the street from the Wright Memorial, where the Wright brothers took their first flight in 1903. It wasn’t the most exciting memorial in the world, but we did enjoy walking the length of the first flight and checking out the full-size recreation of the plane that did it. And we got ourselves an ornament.

Speaking of ornaments, the biggest highlight of our time here was a shop called Christmas Mouse. Christmas Mouse was a sprawling, two-story building full of Christmas paraphernalia. They had a few dozen trees each with their own unique theme. We love Christmas, so we were absolutely delighted to spend time in this store.

And they also had a Jewish section:

Well, a single Jewish ornament at least. As far as we’re concerned, Christmas is a totally secular holiday anyway so we really had no idea what this menorah or any of the Jesus stuff was doing there in the first place.

On our last night there we ate dinner at a place overlooking the ocean, then sat out on the deck and enjoyed the sound of the waves. A wonderful end to the week before we started our sprint back west.

• How much we’d like to visit again: 7/10. Despite the hiccups, we actually had a lot of fun here!
• How much we’d like to live here: 1/10. There weren’t great places to run here, the bugs were relentless, and the burrs meant we couldn’t walk Winnie. We absolutely couldn’t live here.