Turns out, vacation is not that different from home. I was awakened by a five-year old monkey staring at me. There I was, sleeping (not necessarily peacefully, as vacation beds are NEVER comfortable, but I was asleep, nonetheless) when I came to a certain consciousness. I could feel the eyes before I saw them. Then, I opened my eyes and looked at the most beautiful pair of big, brown eyes that exist.
“Oh good! You’re awake! Can we have breakfast?”
I mumbled something like “Shmurf hurf, five more minutes, mumph,” and Monkey in the Middle smiled and ran out of the room yelling, “Mom’s up! She’s gonna get our breakfast!”
I got up, poured the cereal and thought about going back to bed, but once I’m up, I’m up. So, I poured my own bowl and listened to the monkeys chatter about what they were going to do at the beach today. Looking out the window at the gray sky, I thought to myself ‘not likely’ but didn’t say anything. I don’t like being the crusher of dreams. At least not at 6:30 in the morning.
The good news is that although it did rain a bit in the morning, it cleared up by 11, so we put on our bathing suits and all headed out to the beach. We plopped down our chairs, put up the umbrella and Real Man walked down to the water with the Baby Monkey, who loves the water, but only if he’s firmly attached to the hand of an adult. The two big kids splashed around in the surf, and I pulled out trashy paperback #1 and started reading. We were at the beach for about four hours, alternating being the hand-holder and looking for shells with the kids.
It was windy. I don’t mean windy as in “Ah…what a nice refreshing breeze coming off of the water.” When I say it was windy, I mean it in the “better put down the umbrella” way. I’d say that the wind was coming in at about 10 mph for the first two hours. Somewhere in the third hour, it ramped up to about 20 mph, and at the end of the 4th hour, I think it’s safe to say we were between 25-30 mph. We were the last people on the beach, doggedly determined to squeeze every minute of beach out of this vacation. But, when the Baby Monkey was actually blown over from a standing position, we figured it was time to go. Also, by this time, so much sand had blown onto us, we resembled a box of 5 powdered donuts.
On our 100 step walk back to the house, night descended on the island and we no sooner stepped inside when the thunder and rain started. There are great French doors in the living room, and so we watched the storm for awhile, then gave the kids baths and took our showers. It was evident that there would be no more beach today, so we pulled out our board games and decks of cards and got to having some indoor fun. My Monkey Girl asked for help as she laid out her pattern for the new quilt she’s making, so she and I holed up in my bedroom for awhile, getting that pinned together.
We decided to go out to dinner, as we didn’t want to pull out the charcoal grill and grill the London Broil we had planned on in the rain. The owners of the house left a notebook with all of the menus from local restaurants in it. We chose a restaurant just over the bridge, on the mainland, called Batson’s Galley.
A few other interesting details about the restaurant:
1) The bumper sticker on the front door of the restaurant that said something like “I love Jesus Christ.”
2) The enormous, carved wooden sign of the 10 Commandments on the wall behind the register.
3) The other sign behind the register, advertising the hours of the local “Church by the Sea.”
Nothing wrong with any of that. You just don’t get that a lot in New Jersey.
I keep forgetting that we are in the south, until we go somewhere where there are natives. I can’t imagine what it must be like in the deep south, as I’m already bowled over by the accents here. Baby Monkey continues to be fascinated by the southern accents. I’m fascinated by the amount of fried food. The only thing on the menu that wasn’t fried was the spaghetti, so that’s what I got. (The food was all delicious and the place had a super friendly atmosphere. Anyone heading to Surf City, NC…I’d recommend this place…we wound up eating there twice.)
While we were looking at the menu, the waitress (who was delightful) brought out a basket of fried spheres. We said ‘thank you’ and then looked at each other, wondering what the heck these things were. Real Man is brave, so he took one, took a bite and said ‘Not bad.’ There was some type of bread inside. Monkey Girl will try anything, so she tried one as well. She liked it, which was not a surprise. When the waitress returned, Monkey Girl said,
“Excuse me, what are these?”
“Hushpuppies,” the waitress replied with a smile and walked away.
We all looked at each other again, wondering what the heck these things were. Our final guess is that it was fried cornbread balls. We enjoyed looking at all of the food and seeing how different it was from what would be served in New Jersey. Not bad, just different. The “roll” that came with Julia’s spaghetti was a hamburger bun. The “garlic bread” that came with my spaghetti was a piece of toast that had been buttered and sprinkled with garlic powder. The “hushpuppies”… well, I don’t really have an equivalent for that.
I keep falling further and further in love with North Carolina.
