Another incredible day!

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Thankfully, the weather reports have been wrong!  We were expecting thunderstorms all day.  It was a bit gloomy in the morning, but didn't rain.

We have been lucky enough to stay in 2 other rental homes in the Outer Banks, in Avon.  Both are a bit back from the beach.  We had driveways and pavement.  Here is a look at our stairs going outside:

Beach.  Nothing but Beach.

Brad and I took a walk while everyone was still sleeping.

A few houses down is the house from the movie "Nights In Rodanthe."

It was a beautiful walk!  But very hot and steamy today.

Before we left, Brad staked our claim on the front of our house in the hopes that our "neighbors" will get the hint.  The hint being "We paid a lot of money for this house and would like to sit in front of it.  You can sit in front of your own house."

We returned home to find they had indeed picked a new spot to camp out.  Yay!  It's not directly in front of our house!  But it IS right next to us.  In fact, as you can see in this photo taken from our window, they set up a canopy and tied it to our house.  Yes, they did.

That is our house on the left.  That silver thing is their canopy bag.  Hanging off our house.  Would you EVER???

And they did still decide to sit right in front of our house.

They are in front of our house.  See all that empty room to the right?  That is in front of THEIR house.

Then this happened.  It happens a few times a day.

Keeping the Outer Banks safe.

Everyone went swimming!  It was so hot, and the water is so nice and warm.  We had such a blast!

Hi.  I am crabby.

Ha this one is funny!  Looks like Lea has a super long body.  Those are Lainie's legs.

Lainie and I took a walk in the afternoon.

This one said "Happy 24th Anniversary Robert!" As we stood there reading it and going "aw!," the tide came in and washed most of it away.  But we were left with happy :)

I was standing on our deck during high tide.  That is the ocean going right under our house.  I am still amazed at this location!!!

After a nap for me, and a yummy dinner of burgers and dogs, we drove a bit down the island to the Rodanthe Pier.

Hey, Lainie.  Pay attention.  Stop SnapChatting.  Sheesh.

That's better.

What the heck kind of fish is that?

The pier is a great place to meet puppies.  LOL. This guy was Pepper.

Our house is over there somewhere!

 Back home, sat out front for a few minutes until the mosquitos found us.

Some things I didn't get pics or videos of include jellyfish swimming at the pier, and some giant white-ish blob that we never saw clearly, but it was swimming under there!  We also saw sting rays jumping!  I mean, they flew right out of the water and landed with a huge splash!  Very, very cool!

Now it's only 10 pm and we are totally exhausted.

Night night!

Outer Banks 2014

Monday, August 18, 2014

Our first full day of vacation!  We took 2 days to drive down here and stayed the night in Breezewood, PA.  The trip was (thankfully) uneventful.  Just a very long way.  About 850 miles.

We arrived at our rental house in Rodanthe, North Carolina Sunday evening at about 7:30 pm.  Since we had only the seen the house online, we weren't sure what to expect.  We have rented another house down here, in Avon, twice before.  It was a bit of a walk to the ocean because you have to walk over the sand dune.  In Rodanthe, there is no dune.  So we rented a house right on the ocean!

We drove up and parked, in the sand, and ran inside.  We were overjoyed to see it!  It was so much better than the pictures showed.  This is our deck off the master bedroom:

Note the fishermen...they will come into play in a bit...

We can hear the ocean even with the door and windows closed.  We all got settled in our rooms and unpacked.  We had a great dinner of fresh veggies that we bought at a market in Nag's Head, the biggest town nearby.  We put our feet in the ocean and admired it for a bit.

I woke up early and saw a beautiful sunrise.

And then I went back to sleep for 2 hours.  Hey, it's vacation!  (OK, I do that at home if I can.)

Brad and I left everyone home asleep and picked up plenty of groceries for the week.  We came back and found the girls swimming, and Brad joined in.  The girls were in the water for about 2 hours!

Since I don't like to swim, I just sat and enjoyed watching everyone else do their thing!

Brad looks so serious, but I look cute.  So it goes in the blog.

So our house is right on the ocean.  I thought that meant the area in front of our house was ours to use, like a patio!  Wrong.  Some neighbors next door liked our house better than the HUGE open space in front of their house.  So they set up camp right there.  Fishing, drinking, smoking, music blasting from their house.  Right in front of our house.  And they were keeping some of their fishing crap under our house.  We were like, WHAT?  Well, the beach itself is public property so there is really nothing we can do.  We can certainly kick them out from under our house, though!  That just seems so confrontational.  Lainie and I faked a selfie to get a picture of them.

This is after they moved over a bit towards their house.  That is our house in the pic.  Since the tide was coming in and under the house, they moved over.  Tomorrow Brad has a plan to wake up early and stake our claim with our chairs.  Muahahahaha!

Lea went in to get dressed and the rest of us took a little walk down the beach.

Brad has lost some weight recently which means his bathing suit is too big and keeps almost falling off in the huge waves.  LOL!  So we went to buy him a new one.  We came back and went swimming.  Even ME!  What?  OMGee!  Yes it's true.  There is no photographic evidence (Thank God) so you will have to take my word for it.  I was out there for about an hour!  It was a blast!  Last year, I got sucked in by some waves and freaked out.  So I was nervous.  But I did it and it was the best!  I didn't just stand in the water, People.  I SWAM.  I went under water.  On purpose this time!  At one point, I dove into a wave, came out, and Lea said "It's like I don't even know you!"  Ha ha!  It felt so great.

While swimming, Lainie found some strange things.  One is a very weird blob of clear rubbery stuff.  We didn't get a picture so I will lift one off the magic internet.

They are everywhere.

After some Googling, Lainie discovered it is what happens to a jellyfish after it dies.  It kind of shrivels up into these blobs.  They look like silicone.

We also found tons of these things:

It's alive.  It moves.  The reddish thing is inside that clear blob, the blob is not water.  Here is a video:

Weird.  Still Googling that one, because nothing I find online looks like this.

Seriously, our "front porch" is a busy place.  This happened.

This is not zoomed.  You can see my knee.  I am actually leaning BACK to fit it in the frame.  

But it's nice to be able to do this by just walking down the stairs:

We got very lucky and spotted a narwhal.

Come on, you know it's funny.  It's Brad with a giant horseshoe crab tail.  That is his narwhal face.

We relaxed a bit and then made tacos for dinner.  Except I forgot to buy any seasonings.  These rental homes come with salt and pepper and that is IT.  Made it work.  It was delish!

We had a huge thunderstorm!  It's very cool to watch that over the ocean from safe inside our house.  This location is so amazing!

Lainie wanted to catch some of those freaky blobs in a bucket and went swimming after dinner.  I think she may have gotten stung by a jellyfish.  A small one, but it hurt quite a bit.  I have her all oiled up, of course.  We won't let this get bad!

While the girls had their evening swim, I sat under the house because it was drizzling a bit.

And of course, there was this:

It's the fishing gear of yet another person.  *sigh*  It's like if you were sitting on your deck at home and strangers came and dumped all their stuff and hung out with you.  Yay.

I will now spend the rest of the evening Googling jellyfish stings, remedies and trying to find that living blob of weirdness on the internet.  And listening to the ocean, right outside my door!

On a scale of 1 to 10, today was a 576.