OBX

Lucky for us, we had a pretty "socially distant" vacation planned this year and I'm sop grateful that we got to take it! I'd been wanting to do to the Outer Banks in North Carolina forever, so this year we went for it. Since we're used to driving sixteen hours at a time, eleven hours felt just easy breezy. And bonus, there's LOTS of bridges...

...including the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel which was SO COOL.And by dinnertime, we were there. Our condo had a great view!On Sunday morning, we hit the beach. The surf was a little intense, but fun!

Audrey loved collecting special OBX shells and showing them off to me...

...and our houseguest. 😳 (Apparenly this spider is super common in the south, and completely harmless, but it looks terrifying!)

After a relaxing afternoon, we went for a drive to see what was at the end of the Outer Banks (Currituck Lighthouse, Corolla) and also convince Bob not to drive our car on the beach to look for wild horses (we'll save that for next time)

We also  went to buy our souvenirs T-shirts, boogie boards and beach chairs,  a brilliant idea, as the stores were empty. We also had to run into a grocery store for the ONE THING I forgot (coffee filters) which was a less brilliant idea as the store was OVERRUN to a scary degree, thereby validated my initial brilliant idea bringing nearly all our groceries with us. COVID sure doesn't let you stop planning for even one second!

And then back for evening dip in the ocean...

...and in the pool. Audrey announced to me that she was going to do a "back flop" and then proceeded to do a pretty good back dive (right on top of the "No Diving" sign).

Cannonball!

(The first day of vacation always feels endless, and awesome!)

Monday was a little gloomy, but we perservered.

And we tested out our bikes. Sadly, the verdict was OBX bike paths are not as nice as Hilton Head's bike paths.

After our bike ride, we tested out the new boogie boards.

On Tuesday, we took a little roadtrip to see the Wright Brothers Memorial

And then we did some rambling around, exploring the other end of the Outer Banks and found the Bodie Island Lighthouse.

Up until this point, poor Bob had been working on and off, trying to win a project for his office so on Wednesday, after the job interview we celebrated him being DONE with some Duck Donuts. (And ABA won the project too, so his hard work paid off!)

For people who's been living on top of each other for six months, this was a pretty awesome vacation. There was plenty of time to relax, spread out and do what we each wanted to do. The kids watched 

about two dozen episodes of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Bob read in the hammock and I got to paint.

On Wednesday evening it was low tide, so we thought we'd walk to the pier we could see in the distance and let Audrey collect more shells.

I don't know what natural phenomenon was going on, but there were hundreds of jellyfish on the beach. At least I THINK they were jellyfish, but they didn't really have tentacles.

And Audrey decided to rescue them all, and put them back in the sea.

It was a beautiful evening.

By Thursday we had our routine down. Pool in the morning, relax mid-day beach in the later afternoon. The waves were a little calmer and the kids finally figured out how to catch a wave on their boogie boards. (I caught exactly only one wave and learned my lesson about forty-six year olds and boogie boards!)

The last day was another perfect weather day, making it really hard to leave.

It was a wonderful week. I hope we make it back someday!