saxikath

I'm baaack.

Random thoughts and observations from a week on the North Carolina coast:

My mom's cousin, his wife, and their teenage son came down from Virginia to join us for our first couple of days. I last saw his wife and son ten years ago when they lived in Washington. (The cousin was at sea -- he's in the Navy.) I last saw the cousin, we figured out, nearly 25 years ago when he visited us one Christmas. I would never have recognized him. Their son -- my second cousin -- is a very pleasant young man.
Curse my northern European ancestors for their pale, easily burned skin! My shoulders are still pretty pink.
That said, it turns out that it is in fact possible for me to get a suntan. On me, it may be more of a cream than a tan, but it's still more color than I've had in a long time.
Ocean. Mmm, ocean.
The view from the top of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse is well worth the 268 stairs up.
There are 7 lighthouses along the North Carolina coastline. We saw six of them: Bodie Island (close up), Cape Hatteras (climbed), Ocracoke (close up), Cape Lookout (from a boat just offshore, pretty close up), Oak Island and Bald Head (both from a far distance). The only one we didn't see was the northernmost one, Currituck Beach.
People who are in other circumstances perfectly rational adults (insofar as I or anyone related to me can be called such) revert to happy 10-year-olds at the seashore.
Dream Park is a good read. (Thanks, bookishfellow!)
Lodging recommendation: the Carteret County Home B&B in Beaufort, NC. Lovely room, pleasant innkeepers, and fresh muffins delivered to your door every morning.
Restaurant recommendations: Bushwacker's in Nag's Head; The Pilot House in Buxton; (apparently unconnected) The Pilot House in Wilmington; that seaside place we had lunch on Bogue Banks whose name I can't remember
Favorite beach: The one off Old Nag's Head Road. But there wasn't a bad one in the bunch.
Highlight of the trip: Hard to say, but probably the catamaran trip from Beaufort to Cape Lookout. Nice people, lovely boat trip, and some superb whelk or conch shells found underwater. Scrambling up a sand dune on Ocracoke to watch the sun set over the sound was pretty good too.
The people we met and dealt with were, almost without exception, among the most friendly I've ever encountered.
My mother and I travel together well. My having lost some weight defused the one real issue that tends to arise between us. We had some good conversations, and laughed a lot. And she never seemed to get sick of my tendency to spout random snippets of information I learned while doing the North Carolina social studies textbook.
I ate so much seafood. Almost all of it excellent (and what wasn't excellent was certainly okay).
Jockey's Ridge really does have enormous sand dunes. Fun to climb -- though I imagine they would have been less so on a hotter and less cloudy day than the one we were there.
Coquina clams (tiny little ones) burrow into the sand as the waves go out, then re-emerge. Fun to watch.
It is possible, though difficult and extremely inelegant, for two adult women to change from regular clothes into swimsuits in a Dodge Neon without flashing the neighbors.