The Outer Banks

For those of you who were unaware, my cousin Brent and his lovely new wife Cori afforded us the opportunity to see a beautiful part of the country - their planned wedding August 31st in the Outer Banks started us rolling. Not wanting to bring Ava to the wedding, and not being prepared to leave her in our rental like those idiot McCann folks, we were in a quandry about how we were going to accomplish a family vacation and an adult wedding. Thankfully, our go-to babysitters, Brett and Deanna Jones, helped us solve this issue by agreeing to pitch in their lot with ours and go on a two-family vaction. As Ava and their daughter Georgia are best buds, their son is a little prince, and we all get along merrily, this worked out great!! Deanna and I, being both anal and cheap, worked together to find a suitable rental, calculating out the acceptable amount we were willing to pay to be 2.5 feet closer to the beach, etc. After much reasearch, we found a wonderful house in Corolla (same town as the wedding) close to, but not on the beach, with plenty of room for all, and made arrangements through Resort Quest, who were very nice, and completely helpful, especially considering I checked in at the wrong office, etc. In any case, by 5pm on Sunday, we were on our way down to the waves. Alas, the Joneses had some difficulties on the way down - in typical Murphy's Law style, their van decided it needed some mechanical intervention the night before they set out to leave...but some delays aside, they made it down just fine, and we were all happily esconced, with bucket #1 of margaritas icing in the freezer by bedtime.

Tropical Storm Fay gave us some worries leading up to and at the beginning of the vacation - we wondered if we were going to see any sun at all - but Monday, Friday-Monday were all really sunny and gorgeous. Tuesday-Thursday were a mixed bag of rain and clouds, particularly Wed, when we all piled in the van to check out the neighboring communities, and have a pretty darn good mexican lunch. Even on the "bad" days, we always made it to the beach. In fact, some of the crew really preferred the stormiest day, when the waves were really crashing down, and the current was so strong you could barely walk in knee deep water against the direction of the current. Guess sunny days seemed tame afterward. We all got lots of sun, and thankfully, due to the liberal application of SPF 50, I tanned instead of burned. Casey burned a bit the first day, not due to a lack of sunscreen, but because body surfing tends to wear said sunscreen off a person. He learned quickly to reapply frequently.

Riding the waves was everyone's favorite pasttime - check out video, if it works!

In the evenings, after we put Ava to bed, (we finally learned to separate Ava, whose bedtime is around 8, and Georgia, whose bedtime is around 11) we'd play games. James, in particular loved UNO, and one night we all stayed up until 2am. James, being heartless as most children are, came very close to getting seriously throttled after hitting yours truly with every horrible card in the UNO deck turn after turn (when I'd get a turn), but Deanna, knowing me well, and being a good mother, stepped in to save him from such a painful learning experience.

The only bad thing I can say about the trip was that it ended too soon! Mom and John joined us on Saturday. They had arranged to rent the same house for the week after we left, so that we'd have two nights of overlapping accomodations, but no one would have to rent hotel rooms.

Wedding was great - very low key, and the bride wore a strapless red dress, which I thought was fantastic. Their vows were very heartfelt and touching, which believe me, is harder to do than it looks! After the brief ceremony, it was time to have some fun, and we had a very nice evening dancing, drinking and speaking with family and friends.

I got a touch more beach time in Monday morning, but then it was two solid days of driving home. We broke up the trip by stopping in some Maryland backwater, then finished on tuesday. Again, Ava was SOOOO good. She didn't say so much as a peep until about 2 hours from home, when she was obviously at her limit, and even then, she didn't throw a fit, just complained a little, and increased the frequency of her inquiries about home.

Wednesday, I was back on the job (and what a day it was, I tell you!) but Casey had the rest of the week off. Being a great guy, he used it to do laundry, and get some quotes for some home repairs we've been putting off. (I hate spending money to repair the house...I'm still paying for the stuff that's broken, and now I have to fix it?)

Vacation

Well, you know what they say about the best intentions....in any case, since the last post, we've obviously gone on vacation, which was fantastic.

We left a bit early to do a quick tour of D.C. - everything worked out well. God Bless the internet, where we used Hotwire to get a prime hotel (Capital Hilton, about 2 blocks from White House) and to book our tour bus package. We set out early on Friday, and drove about 7 hours to get to our hotel. I have to say I was VERY happy with Ava in the car...I was anticipating lots of whining, and endless "are we there yet" questioning, but she hardly made a peep, at least until we were off the freeway and into D.C. proper. Granted, it was a bit hard to get her to go to sleep when we were still awake in the same room, but once we put a sleep mask on her, she was out like a light. We had really nice weather for Saturday, our main tourist day.
We got tickets on the open top double decker bus, which did a huge loop around the major sites, and featured hop-on, hop-off access, which was very nice. Casey has been known to strangle tour guides who attempt to keep him captive or restrain his movements in any way, so I felt the flexibility to plan our own tour was far safer than a more traditional tour. Plus the tickets were good for two days, so that worked out as well. Of course in the entire two days, no one ever asked to see our tickets - if we had only known.


We hit a place that looked fun from the bus, Harry's, or some such place, which was a touch seedy, on the ground floor of an obviously very seedy hotel. Thankfully, as we've morphed into ancient early-bird-special types, we were done early enough to skip out before the place became downright frightening, and crashed hard at the hotel. Sunday, we set out for the Glorious Outer Banks. Will do second post for that one - whenever I do a really long posting, something goes wrong, and I wind up having to do the whole thing over...