Our annual family beach vacation was last week and what a week it was. We've had plenty of perfect beach vacations over the years with beautiful weather, no rain, great temperatures, awesome places to stay, beautiful views and lots of fun. Keeping that in mind, along with the very awkward weirdness going on daily in our world and our country, I'm very grateful to have had the week we had. And while I'm grateful to have had any vacation at all with family, I'm sure at least G would have wanted a couple of things to have been a little different. So let's have a look at a few of the week's happenings by category:
Playing in the sand...
Yes, I'm a grown adult man and I still love playing in the sand. I'm sure this seems weird to other adult men on the beach, but I think it's just as weird to stand in the sun fishing for Lord knows what or drinking your red belly larger by consuming all the cans of beer in sight while your evil spawn squeal and scream all day. (Please note that where we have been staying the last several years, we don't have any of this nonsensical behavior. Our beach neighbors were stellar, even the kids! But I've seen it and it's one of the reasons we've continued to migrate south on the Grand Strand.)
My internal clock wakes me up early on vacation. I don't understand it. Maybe it's because I've always been very excited about going to the beach and my brain is so happy it just wants me to be up to enjoy everything. Either way, around sun-up, I'm up and headed out for my run. When I get back, I shower and have a nice little breakfast on the balcony. Then I'm out on the beach early to beat the heat and I spend a few minutes (hours) playing by myself in the sand.
After the photos, I get to drink water, sit in the chair and relax for the rest of the day. Most days I'll go in for lunch and from the balcony I'll notice people walking by and taking photos of whatever I made. It's a nice feeling. I'm sure some of them don't know exactly what it is or why it is, but they seem to smile and enjoy seeing it. The last couple of years I've been signing them with my IG handle and sometimes I'll get nice messages and even a photo from strangers like the one above. It's really nice when strangers go to some trouble to thank you for doing something like this.
When we get to go back out on the beach in the evening, most often the sculpture is still there. It's always nice when people like it enough to not destroy it. Last week, we had the pleasure of recognizing some of the families from previous years and they felt comfortable talking to me about things. A few asked if I was the guy from last year and some will ask me what I made on a certain day. The truth is, I have no idea. The days blur together on a good vacation and once I make them, I turn them over to nature and forget about them. I understand that after that photo, they don't belong to me anymore.
When we went out on our last night of vacation, we found this note on the back of my final sculpture. It made me very happy. Make no mistake, making these things is hard work. I started the week thinking that I'd make maybe 4 sculptures. I had a sand sculpture thing planned for the day after vacation and I didn't want to overdo it. Oh, another fun little note is that Walter the crazy puppy dog somehow destroyed my pinky finger a week before vacation and it was still very swollen and painful when vacation started.
Including this one, which is obviously not the best, I still made 6 sand sculptures during the week. This one is what it is because the day started out rainy and we ditched the beach in favor of a day of shopping. When the sun came out, I escaped the shopping and spent a couple of hours on the beach in the afternoon. This one only took about 45 minutes. So yeah, they're a lot of work, but there's also a lot of satisfaction knowing that you made someone smile when they saw it.
Running like a crazy person...
My running insanity is well documented. You know I run 3.1 miles every day. One of my favorite things about vacation or travel is being able to run in new and beautiful places. I mentioned we've stayed at this location before and one of my favorite things about it is it's proximity to Murrell's Inlet. This little stretch of beach is the last bit before the big stone jettys and the inlet. If you leave our little beach walkout and head south, you'll run just around the edge of the peninsula when you hit the 1.5 mile mark.
Fewer humans go this far down so it's quiet and I'm often one of just two or three people out during this time. The views there are almost other-worldly. I often see dolphins in the ocean and all sorts of birds out looking for breakfast.
The running is also cool, but it's the time alone out there with the surf and the sun rising that does it for me. It's the best.
Everyone in our family appreciates their own time and space. We all know that during vacation, we're stuck a little closer than we want for a little longer than we want. We love being together and we're a pretty tight family, but we need our space. This is the time that keeps me from going off on the family on these trips. It's so beautiful and so quiet. I love it. The running is also good for me, I guess.
We all have those moments when we question our life choices. I've ran during some crazy and I do mean CRAZY times. All sorts of weather conditions, including hurricanes on the beach and all sorts of weird times of day. I've been up at 4:00am running before but each time I do something like that, I wonder if I'm really not well. I don't have an answer on that just yet, but I do know that I had to get up at 4:00am on the last day of vacation. The beach was so dark I couldn't run there, so I went out onto the street and ran the roads in the dark alone.
You wanna go out in the ocean?...
We've taken our tandem kayak with us on our beach vacations for the last several years. First, Blue and I would kayak the inlet and explore on a day when we had grown weary of sunburn. Then Violet started loving the kayak and Blue took the opportunity to escape. For the last couple of years, I've woke up one morning of vacation and looked out on a very calm and flat ocean from the balcony. I've done my best on those days to talk one of the kids into going out into the ocean with me in the kayak. They've always emphatically declined. This year it was early in the week and I sent the text to Violet telling her I was going out in the kayak and asked if she'd like to join me. As I was talking Blue into helping me carry the kayak out to the beach, she responded "yes".
It was on. Now, if you're not a kayaker, here's the significance of this: Our kayak is an open kayak with no spray skirt. This means it's just a little plastic boat that holds people. Which means it also holds water. So if something like a wave crashes over your boat, it fills with water and you sink. Violet knows this well because once, a million years ago, Blue sank his kayak in a lake. Thus her reluctance to go out in waves.
Whatever made her say yes, I wasn't questioning it, I just went with it. Blue and I dropped the kayak in the sand and I had Violet in a life jacket and holding a paddle before she could second guess herself. I knew the biggest danger was getting out past the surf and I simply told her that when I said go, she needed to get in and start paddling fast. She did, I followed quickly and we paddled as hard as we could...right into a breaking wave. It crested right over Violet's lap and filled the kayak about half full of water. We paddled a little more and we were safely in the open water. I hadn't thought about bringing anything to bail water, so I used my hands to get a few gallons out.
Apparently it was quite the show for those on the beach. We were told that everyone was watching us and they all seemed surprised when we didn't topple over or sink. We didn't really have a plan past getting out in the water, but we quickly decided to paddle down to the inlet and back. We didn't see any dolphins but the view was incredible. These photos and a couple of funny videos are from Blue on the shore. When we decided to go back out in the ocean a second time, we grabbed an old disposable waterproof film camera and took it with us. It was Violet's first time using a film camera and it was a little different from the ones I remember, so we'll see if we get any photos from that in the next couple of days. On our second trip a few days later, we rode the waves into the shore and they kept crashing over the back of the boat before we could get out. We were already beached but the boat filled with water and we had to get Blue to help us turn it over the dump the water out just so we could pull it ashore. 10/10 amazing experience. Highly recommend and would do it again.
Random family moments...
We've developed habits when we go to the beach. After beach things in the sun during the morning and early afternoon, we all go inside and get cleaned up at various times. Then we often head out to find food and visit some of our favorite places. Violet and I usually walk a good bit to look for sharks teeth and to people watch but her hip injury kept the walking to a minimum this year. We did accidentally walk to the inlet one day.
We all have different favorite places to eat and we spread those out through the week. I love a good lobster roll and Violet loves a crab pot. We always pick the place on the inlet that has both along with great views.
The lobster roll is so good. I can still taste the butter. Mmmmmmm.
Part of the fun is walking around the inlet. There's a Marsh Walk and a little pier. Lots of pelicans around and I do love a pelican. It's a beautiful place.
This was our first time seeing my brother's new place. My brother owns The Tangled Web in Spartanburg and he's getting ready to open the second location in Surfside Beach. We stopped by to see him and to see the new place. Later in the week we got to have dinner with him and see his apartment.
We're always on the lookout for fun sunglasses and great mirrors for photos. This was going to be a family portrait until Blue and G took off across the store.
It was a good trip for stranger photos. Every time I walk by a photo booth machine, I check the bin to see if someone left a copy of their pics. From the looks of my collection, most people do. If you want to bring me some joy, be sure to leave one of your copies in the bin for me to find. Or, if you happen to find some strangers' abandoned photos, send them my way.
After the sand sculpting is done, this is my view for the rest of the day. I've had enough sun at that point, so after lunch on the balcony, I settle into the shade of the umbrella for a nap or a long, quiet meditation. I can just sit here and stare out into the waves for hours.
I apparently do weird things in public. When we took this photo in Drippy's Ice Cream, I noticed my head looked like the second scoop on Violet's cone.
So I spent the next few minutes trying to recreate the idea with my own cone. It was deceptively difficult to line it up. The whole time, Blue was taking photos of me trying to take my own photo. This led to a whole rabbit hole of a conversation about making stickers with photos and being able to drop them into text conversations. That led to all of us trying to add stickers to the family group chat at once. The activity locked up my phone and then Blue's phone. Messed them up so bad we both had to delete the chat and shut down our phones.
We've driven by this place for 15 years or more without ever trying it. Last week we found out it also has a bakery inside, so we finally stopped and tried it. It was amazing. Tiramisu, cannoli, and all sorts of really great sweets. We also tried a pizza and were impressed.
One of my favorite things about where we stay on vacation is the sunsets. The sun goes down over the marsh and it's beautiful from our door. Our week started out with an odd haze that hid the sunsets completely on the first couple of nights. Then there were a few nights we were out later and missed the sunset. There was a cloudy night. Over the first several days, this was the only sunset I got to see over the lake at Broadway.
But at the end of the week, I finally got my marsh sunset. I know, it sounds like a perfect week and like I said at the beginning, I have no room to complain. The part I left out was that our little brown dog Timmy started getting sick just before we left home. His sickness worsened while the dogsitter was there and we got pretty worried about him. So much so that G had to get up very early one morning and drive home with the intention of taking him to the vet. She got him some medicine and he started to improve so she was able to come back to the beach the next day. As soon as our worries started to fade about Timmy, the next report from the dogsitter was that now Walter was sick with similar symptoms. A new medication was prescribed and luckily the dogsitter was able to pick it up without us driving back home again. By the end of the week, we were exhausted from worry and the dogs were both exhausted from the sickness.
But also, we're lucky to have those goofy dogs. Even when they break your pinky finger and interrupt your beach vacation. So there we are on our last night of vacation. A little more tan, sort of rested, kinda tired and full of ice cream and cannoli.
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