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The Miracle Worker
She’s got sass, smarts and she can move metaphorical mountains — and real-live weddings
Even though Ella Numera Dos has lived in Hawaii for three years, her real love language is North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
No palm trees. No Trade Winds. Sticky hot some summer days, an Arctic chill when Nor’easters blow come January. No native island cuisine, unless you count steamed blue crabs and spicy shrimp. No ukuleles strumming, no grass skirts swaying. Basically no tourism, as it’s usually played.
But maybe that’s why our entire familia loves the Outer Banks. This 200-mile strip of beaches and loblolly pines off the mainland of North Carolina is basically one long sand bar, punctuated with houses, places to eat, marinas and summer activities like hang-gliding and kayaking. A herd of about 100 feral Spanish Mustangs — descended, most agree, from the horses who survived shipwrecks of Spanish galleons about 500 years ago — lives on the northern tip of the OBX, protected, no less, by an Act of Congress, which prohibits visitors from feeding these beautiful wild critters or getting within 50 feet of them as they roam the beaches. The barrier islands separate the roiling Atlantic from the more placid bays that front the east coast of the Tar Heel State.
