We made it home from the Beach yesterday afternoon, not to mention home to a clean house (thanks to hosting a baby shower before we left). I have a tendency to leave things in a bit of mess when we leave town, only to return to a laundry list of things to clean up, not to mention actually doing all of the laundry from our trip, so this was a welcome change.
We headed to Oak Island, NC where my family has a beach cottage in the true sense of the word. It was build in the 1960's; and it's literally a rectangle house cut up into three bedrooms on one side of the house with an open kitchen, eating, and living area on the other side. We do also have a nice sun porch with a wall of windows on the beach side of the house.
View from the beach front of the house.
Paper thin walls, no dishwasher, finicky light switches, and kitchen cabinets, hardware and counter tops that are older that I am. The furniture is all left overs and most of the work we have done down there has been less cosmetic and more necessity. Adding AC, new windows, not to mention major structural rebuilding to the utility/garage/shower area after Hurricane Floyd in 1999. But as I told someone today. It's our house and it's beach front so I'm not complaining.
Hurricane Floyd took out several homes on the island when it hit the NC coast on September 1999. I can't express how difficult it was to watch the news coverage of the storm and not know if our house survived. No it is not any one's primary residence and no one was down there in the storm, but this house does hold 40 years of family and friend vacation memories for 3 generations. It would have been devastating to loose it.
A little google search and I was reminded of some of the damage Floyd caused from
these pictures. Our house is only about 11 houses down the beach from
this shot. We lost our entire front porch and huge gazebo, as well as the utility and shower area below the house, not to mention the utility connections. The main living area is on stilts and actually sustained little damage on the inside. There were limits to what was able to be built back and clean up took the better part of 9 months not only for our little house but also for rest of the island.
The past few days have been a reminder how important this spot is for my family. We spent most of our time as well always do eating, playing cards, napping, sunning and relaxing on the beach. The pup even got out of the house to play in the water with Carolina Husband and chill in a shady spot next to me under our beach tent.
We typically have pretty low key beach trips. Packing usually consists of making sure that we have bathing suits, PJs and a toothbrush, nothing fancy. Usually the only place we venture out to is
Provision Company Restaurant in Southport, NC. Which is so good I think it deserves its own post later on this week, so be on the lookout.
On the docks waiting for our table at PC.
Four days off is a a nice break, but not to long that I will spend the next week catching up. We are already counting down to more visiting and vacationing later this month with my sister in Baltimore. So let the travels continue.
