Traveling from Hampton Roads to Cape Hatteras and Back Again

I just noticed today that there are no utility poles where I live. I live in a rather large townhome community in York County, Virginia (which is part of Hampton Roads), and have done so for the last year. Not only have I lived here, but I’ve also biked through the area every day in search of exercise...and yet I never noticed until today that there were no utility poles around. I’m not sure if I’m singularly unobservant, as Sherlock Holmes would say, or just average-ly unobservant. (For example, I asked my father a trick question a few minutes ago  - if he knew how many utility poles there were around here, and received a pitying look in return.)

I went looking for utility poles today because I’d been doing research about them on the internet. I was trying to find out what all of the paraphernalia suspended from the poles were. Electricity wires, phone wires and cable TV, presumably, but I wanted to know which wires were which.

And why was I doing research on the internet? Because I’d gotten back from a day trip to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina  the day before and had decided to find out, not only about utility poles but other mundane items that had aroused my curiosity on that trip.

My parents and I went to Cape Hatteras for the day. I was going in order to acquire information to write a travel article, to be entitled “A Day Trip to Cape Hatteras”, my dad went in order to climb to the top of the lighthouse so that he could  say he’d done it, and my mom just went along for the ride. My dad did the driving, I sat in the passenger’s seat with a notebook, a pen, and an eagle eye, and my mom sat in the back and read Imperial 109, by Richard Doyle (which is a pretty good book, by the way, all about a round-the-world journey via flying boat just before World War II.).