June 2006 vacation

(my comments in a toledotalk.com thread)

I've had extremely limited Internet access since Friday, June 16, so new postings sit in the moderation queue a lot longer than usual. This will continue for a few more days.
posted by jr at 02:16 P.M. EST on Thu Jun 22, 2006 #

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Okay? I spent seven nights in an oceanfront home on the North Carolina coast. Just got back an hour ago. So I'm fine, except for being back. If I had known in advance that the beach house had wireless Internet access, I would have taken my laptop.
posted by jr at 02:25 A.M. EST on Sun Jun 25, 2006 #

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I didn't do any fishing. The house was on a quiet beach, so some people were fishing from shore. They sometimes caught tiny sharks.

I had big plans for birdwatching inland, but I just bummed around the house and on the beach. I watched the birds flying by the house. Some were new to me, so that was fun.

I heard about Ohio's stormy weather last Wednesday and Thursday on the Weather Channel. We spoke with someone who checked the inside and outside of our house, and thankfully, everything was okay.

No storms where we were on the southeast North Carolina coast. Just sunny skies and moist ocean breezes with daytime temps in the low 80's, and a quiet beach that was only 30 feet from the house we stayed at, which had three empty lots on one side of the house and five empty lots on the other, courtesy of hurricane Floyd seven years ago.

The weather wasn't neary as miserable as I thought it would be. I prefer the cooler weather of northern Michigan, but after a week on that beach, I can now understand why people risk living so close to the ocean.

The beach we stayed at was a south-facing beach. The winds were mainly from the south-southwest, so the daytime temps near the ocean were 8 to 10 degrees cooler than further inland. During the day, the winds blew at 15 to 20 mph. At night, the wind was around 10 mph. The humidity was over 80% most of the time, but the breeze and the 80 to 82 degree daytime temps kept it comfortable.

The sound of the waves hitting the shore, the sand, the tides, the shells, the breezes, the big sky, the brown pelicans, the constant view of the ocean from inside the house, it's easy to check out of life for a while in a setting like that.
posted by jr at 03:08 P.M. EST on Sun Jun 25, 2006 #