I can’t let the night go by without telling about our beach trip, so here goes.
We arrived Wednesday afternoon, leaving home right after my meeting was done. It rained on us from Raleigh to Carolina Beach, so rather than checking in immediately we drove further south in an effort to visit the aquarium. Big mistake! More than half of the vacationers in the area were at the aquarium. We drove around jam-packed parking lots before throwing in the towel and heading back to our condo.
Though it was still drizzling we went out to explore the beach. Both kids had an absolute ball being on the beach again! In ten seconds we knew the beach was a winner with the kids. Travis ran around, cackling and Hallie was glued to the surf’s edge. And this was when it was still raining!
After a few photos and video taken of the kids running around the beach, we got cleaned up and went out for dinner at Kure Beach’s Jack Mackerel’s restaurant. We opted to eat on the patio to be served quicker but got a bit damp from the windy, rainy weather.
After a fine dinner, we got the kids tucked into bed and called it a night ourselves not long after. Had there been internet access, we likely would have spend the evening writing blog posts.
The next morning began earlier than we would’ve liked, as the condo’s vertical blinds were missing slats from about every fifth position and the Atlantic sunrise hit us in the face at 7 AM. It worked out well, though, as the kids were soon ready to hit the beach and so were we. I think we were settled in our beach spot by 8:30 that morning, long before the guy setting up rental beach chairs arrived and long before the guy fishing in the surf was ready to pack up.
The kids were hesitant at first to go into the surf, having done nothing more but dance around it the previous evening. It took some time for them to warm up to it. Before long, though, both were knee-deep in waves, each one carting buckets of water up the beach to use on sandcastle projects.
I’ve got a long history of building sandcastles or sand creatures. This time I opted for a wolf. While I originally planned for it to be a Wolfpack wolf, Travis immediately dubbed it “paleo-wolf,” after a book about the first dog we’d recently read. It was much easier for me to build a perfect paleo-wolf, as it was much less familiar, so I ran with it.
Though it didn’t much look like a wolf, but more like a cat, it didn’t matter to Travis. He was thrilled to be helping build this wolf and his motor-mouth was going full speed talking about it. “ThisisthegreatestwolfDaddyandyouandIareworkingonitisn’titthebestwolfyou’veeverseenDaddywe’rebuildingpaleo-wolf!” was a typical expression from him.
Hallie busied herself by taunting the waves. She would step out into a receding wave, wait for the next one to break in front of her, and then proceed to trash-talk to it.
“You’re no match for me, wave!” she’d say, wagging her finger. “You’d better grow bigger than that!”
On and on she went, big goofy grin on her face. She didn’t care who was watching: for all she knew it was just her and the ocean. Boy did she lap it up, though!
The kids would also get hoisted out into the deeper surf by Kelly and me. Hallie would grip our hands so firmly that our fingers would hurt! She would normally wade out to where the waves were chest-high to her, always holding (firmly!) onto one of our hands.
The low-pressure system that had brought the previous day’s rain was making the surf was a bit rougher than I would’ve preferred. We got beat up pretty hard by the crashing waves. Hallie was always game to go farther out, though, whenever I’d suggest doing so to keep the waves from breaking on us. Frequently I’d be on the beach with Travis and see Hallie and Kelly well off the beach and apparently enjoying every minute of it.
We came in for lunch and then headed back out for Round Two. The beach was more crowded now. A gentleman in front of us sat with his chair at the surf’s edge, a book in his hand and a wide-brimmed hat on his head. His kids played in front of him in a giant sand-pond that he and they built. Travis soon wandered down to check out their activities and before long the man, Kelly, and I were all talking.
Brian was his name and he was here with his family for a family reunion. Home for Brian and his family is northern France as he works for the United Nations Refugee program. He and his wife Angela had traveled the world with the UN, even starting their family when they lived in Tanzania. I was captivated by the stories of how they raised their family in such a different environment. I had to laugh to myself, too, thinking that the last thing I expected at the beach was a cultural improvement.
Once we’d had our fill of the beach, we again had dinner at Jack Mackerel’s, after which we wandered across the street to get ice cream cones. We finished those off at the foot of the Kure Beach pier before returning back to our condo for an early bedtime. Kelly and I fell asleep by 8 PM, though we didn’t stay asleep. I read my book while she watched the Olympics until about 10 or so.
Friday was our check-out day, so after breakfast we all set about cleaning up the condo. The surf had calmed considerably and we considered going out again for another swim but decided it would be too hard to reel the kids in once they got started with it. The condo was clean by our 10 AM check-out, so we packed up our stuff and headed south to the Fort Fisher Aquarium for a few hours.
The aquarium was where we went before checking in Wednesday when we were faced with a rainy day at the beach. Bad move. Rain drives practically the whole beach down to the aquarium, and cars were parked along the road up to a 1/4 mile away from the building. We took a look at the zoo in the parking lot and did our wet beach thing. Fortunately for us, Friday morning was much more manageable.
The aquarium is nice, but there is something not quite … complete about it. Sure, there are tanks of fish and other animals, but there is seemingly little education that takes place. For instance, you’d look at a tank of fish and it’d be nice and all but nowhere will there be any sign telling you what fish you’re looking at or what those fish do or eat or whatever.
One sign about lobsters struck me as so bizarre I had to take a picture of it. “Isn’t it beautiful to think of the taste of a lobster meal?” the text began. Uh yeah, unless you’re the lobster, I thought. I like a good lobster meal like anyone but I don’t think an aquarium is the right place to discuss cooking them.
I kidded Kelly about this. As we walked by a model of a whale I deadpanned “isn’t is beautiful to think about slaughtering this animal for its blubber?” Kelly hushed me pretty quickly!
It wasn’t all without education, though. We listened as an “educator” named Jenn gave am entertaining, 20-minute presentation about sharks, followed by a question-and-answer session. She and an assistant named James held up shark jaws for us to appreciate and told us many little-known facts about these fish. It was the highlight of the trip.
After our aquarium visit we turned the car west and drove back to Raleigh. It was a great mini-vacation, with all the variety that the mountains and the beach can bring. Its hard to believe we packed all that fun into a mere five days!