Travels

We recently escaped. Had ourselves a little getaway, to a tiny little town in a remote area that we didn't want to leave. I will avoid boring you with the 178 pictures I took, so I'll just hit some highlights. Afterward, I bet you'll want to visit, or at least will dream up a little weekend away yourselves.

As you may know, we are drawn to the water.

We love old houses, so we stayed in one. I wish my driveway looked like this.

And that I had giant magnolias flanking the house. Seriously, they're huge.

Anyone who can keep their gardens this well tended in the middle of a July drought clearly works herself to the bone. I know.

But what I really fell in love with was this abandoned house. I'm not talking a little love, I mean I fell in LOVE with this house. Instantly. Head over heels. I want to move in tomorrow. I want to strip it down to the bare floors and windows and paint the walls white. It would be my dream weekend getaway, we'd sleep on the floors for a while, barely add any furniture, have the basics only and canoes, bikes, kayaks, long summer days. Sigh.

I had a favorite boathouse too. It rained a couple of times while we were there and the family would gather on the benches under its cover and watch the storms come in. It's the little things a place like this makes you remember.

Of course there were the sailboats.

The one in the middle below was from Topeka, KS. I thought that was funny.

The green of the grass gets me.

The houses were old and spread far from one another.

I'll be back to visit the hundred and some odd year old lighthouse. The water was too rough to go all the way there, the sun was setting with not enough time for us to climb to the top, but we will be back. We'll go to the top and I'll try not to think about scary movies when we do.

Isn't it hard to plan a trip away? It is. It is. Especially when there are kids and you leave them behind. But each time we do it we are reminded how important it is to remember what we are, what we used to be, what we can be still, even in the midst of crazy, busy, life.

Slow

Finally a slow morning. A full weekend with just a few plans, rather than one packed full with running and going and doing. A chance to wake up easy, bake, listen to music, stay in pajamas for a while, to play with pictures and go back to warmer days.

The clock will speed up again soon enough, but for now, enjoy.

The art of getting away

Even if it takes ten months when it should only take ten minutes, plan it anyway. And if you meant to go in time to see Fall in full color but know you've missed your window, go anyway.

Because I know you'll find something beautiful that you've missed.

And that has missed you. It's been waiting for you to come back.







This time only better, together.

Early

"Wake up," he said. "You've got to see this." So I rolled out of bed and over to the window, where we sat and looked, and looked, wondering for a moment if we were seeing islands in a calm sea, or the mountains from the night before, peeking up through the low clouds that had rolled in overnight.

And we watched the sun come up. Quickly. By mid-morning, the valley, uncovered. "To think," I said, "this happens every morning. If we'd only take the time to see."

Going away

It's hard sometimes to take a good look at your life when you're right in the middle of it, and the best thing to do, maybe the only thing, is to take a big break. A stay at home break or a vacation sort of break, either will do and we were fortunate enough to have had the latter this past week.

At the risk of showing the neverending vacation slide show or telling story after story about what happened this past week, I'll just try to hit the high points and not drag you through every detail.

For the first time on a vacation since having kids I feel like I actually found time to relax. Deep, long, winding down to the bone relaxation, the kind I really needed. I read a few books, put down the knitting, took pictures, played, watched tv, and even dozed a bit on the beach once or twice. Bliss.

The kids had non-stop board games going of one kind or another all week. My favorite is to watch Lauren and John play chess and listen to how they bargain with one another.

"Okay, well, if you take my pawn then I can get your castle, do you want to do that?"

"Yeah!"

Don't ask. Somehow they get along much better than a brother and sister should.


Legos were still everywhere.

The kids had a ball finding hermit crabs in the Bay, that was a first for all of us. John made them a little corral one day.

Then there was the relentless search for blue crabs. Their only motive is to catch them and release them back into the water, not eat them. That may change over the years, but for now they don't understand the whole appeal of the blue crab, they just know they're tricky and fun to catch. I could pick crabs all day if I had enough. Hmmm. This might be a good system, they catch, I eat.

Fishing was all around us.

Nearly consuming some of us.

And astonishing the rest of us. Below you can see John reeling in his five-foot shark. Yes. Shark. Chills.

We ate plenty of seafood. Just not the sharks.



On our last day, a hike through the woods to an unadvertised part of the beach,

yielded a jar full of sea glass, and an impromtu scavenger hunt. I love those. And I love sea glass especially when I find it myself.

But perhaps what will stand out most in my mind was the calm, the slowing down, the change of pace and the chance to reprioritize, to plan for the future, and soak up the present. Now if I can just carry on the vacation mentality we'll be getting somewhere.

Surf

I know, I know, it's kinda getting like the never ending slide show of your friend's vacation pictures that you never really wanted to see. But I promise it's almost over.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to serve as a little online scrapbook of sorts since I'm not the kind of girl who takes all the time (not to mention money) to actually make them in hard copy. So it's family memories as well as knitting, the business and all my other typical ramblings.

I've also been playing around with Picasa2 which I actually think is fun. Imagine that, fun on the computer. Who would have guessed?


Big daddy kayaker. He even got me out on that thing! It was fun but I'll keep those pictures to myself. I'm a bit wary of the big wide ocean, especially when I'm sitting just a few inches above it far away from land. It's really Jaws that did it to me. That, and the huge purple jellyfish I was riding over and the feeding sting rays that were launching themselves a foot or two out of the water. I wasn't out there long. I do however wish I'd gotten a close up of the dolphins that made their way up and down the length of the beach every day. Just like clockwork. What a sight.

Sand

Jockey's Ridge never fails to amaze me. How all that sand wound up there and how it all stays there is a mystery to me and I don't really want to go read about the science of how it works. I'd rather see it as a wonder of nature. The kids don't really care either, they just think it's awesome to be able to fly and jump or roll down a huge (I mean huge) pile of sand. The hanglider and kite watching entertains them as well. This time I mainly had fun taking pictures and video of it all.

Off the beaten path

While on vacation we do the usual stuff. We go to the beach, we eat seafood, we watch movies, play cards, eat more, go sightseeing, buy cheesy touristy stuff, but it seems we also find ourselves in the less typical vacation haunts.

Our dinner out led us to Wanchese, NC to the industrial section of town which of course is an industrial fishing area. It was some of the best seafood I've ever eaten and this includes shrimp right off the back of the boat on Bald Head Island and picking crabs on a picnic table on the Bay in Easton Maryland. But here you pull up, right in the middle of the working boats, near a fishy smelling dock and can see exactly where the boats pull in and bring their catch directly under the restaurant. Fresh. Yes.

We had to go back near the end of the trip to try a little fishing and crabbing for ourselves. Luckily there was a public area where we could do just that. No luck with the fishing but,


the kids had a ball with the crabs.


If you look closely you can see John whistling. Lots of whistling going on. He's getting Lauren hooked on it too.