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December 13, 2003
Well, Saturday was a busy day for us. I arrived at Brad's house at 2:30 this morning (well, yesterday morning now - it's nearly 1:00am Sunday as I write this), then at 7:00 we got up to head to Kitty Hawk (airshow starting at 10:00). Got there just as the show was starting - the flat terrain made it possible to see the planes from miles away!
Parking was easy, at least today - we found a spot behind a utility building across the street and one block down from the main entrance to the Wright Brother's Memorial. We still had all our luggage in the cars, so we didn't want to leave it in a bad parking area. The main road through Kitty Hawk has police and military personnel everywhere (some with M-16s) handling security and traffic flow, which should peak on December 16 and 17. There is a good chance that President Bush will be in attendance on Dec 17, so I'm sure they are being extra cautious.
The first thing we noticed when we got inside the park were all the temporary buildings set up everywhere. It'll take forever to look at everything! One of the buildings is climate controlled and houses the soon to be donated Wright Flyer Replica (with over a million US dollars spent on the project, it is sure to be quite true to the original). We haven't even had time to look at it yet - there were so many other things going on today. The Wright Brothers Memorial Monument is atop a hill in the center of the park; around this hill there are dozens of planes and other exhibits, including an F-16 (using the zooms on our cameras we could see people climbing into the cockpit). Tomorrow if the rain holds off we'll get some up-close photos. From the monument at the top of the hill we got a lot of great video footage of the flybys which we'll be posting clips of at a later date
Here's a photo of the Wright Brothers monument - it's a lot taller than it looks! More pictures of it coming later...
From the top of Monument Hill I got a good shot of the area that has been cordoned off for the reenactment site - they have even groomed it to look just like it did 100 years ago! In the following picture you can see the reenactment site as well as a few of the planes that are lined up around Monument Hill:
Shortly after we arrived at the park, the Beach Boys concert began (pictured below). Tomorrow the Temptations are singing, although with the heavy rain and thunderstorms forecast I'm not sure how much will actually happen as planned tomorrow.
The wind convinced us to duck indoors a few times to check out the exhibits. Apparently everybody else had the same thought because it was quite difficult to capture some of the exhibits on film because of all the bystanders. I did get a good shot of the Wright Flyer Replica that will be flown on the 17th:
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At 2:30pm we headed back outdoors and to the top of Monument Hill to watch the second airshow of the day featuring a few older planes, starting with an Extra 300
We didn't take any photos, but captured just about everything on digital video. Since we had rolled into town without checking into our rental house, we didn't dig the tripods out of the cars today. The rest of the week the video footage should be a lot smoother than what we captured today, although we did get some great clips 
Well, it's now 4:30am and we have to be up in a few hours (festivities are starting at 10:00 with an airshow
). We'll be back with more photos (and maybe a short video clip?) tonight...Brad and Jon
Kitty Hawk, NC
, have fun and ill look forward to seeing some video fotage 
We're staying in Duck, which is about 15 miles north of Kitty Hawk yet still on the island. There was a stiff premium ($300 extra in most cases) to stay close by the event, but it would have been nice - yesterday several people were on their decks across the street from the memorial watching the airshow. 
