Welcome to the first blog crossover with Chip's blog (at this point it's less of a cross over and more of a guest spot though). Why are we doing this? Sweeps? Nope. More viewers? Doubtful (although there might be a grand parental unit view I suppose). But mainly because we happen to be down here on vacation the same time as Chip and Kellie. We met up at the house they're staying in. We were running a bit late from the kids being up so late the night before visiting the sound and we were scurrying about to get ready quickly (this comes back to bite us later). And then once we got on the road we got stuck in traffic Saturday leaving the area. Luckily we only had to go about a mile or so south on Rt 12, but even just that took what felt like 10 minutes (although in reality it was probably less than five).
Then to make matters worse once we arrived and headed to their beach area it started raining. And I'm not talking raining like it was sprinkling / misting back on Monday or whatever day that we went out, but it was a downpour. I opened up our beach umbrella, but that thing either had sheer lining or so many holes it was basically worthless. So we all got completely drenched. Which was really bad for those of us wearing shirts (this too will come back to bite us).
So once the downpour quit we set up our area. We tossed our drenched shirts and tested out the water. Here's the thing I don't understand, the day before was a red flag day in which they said the undercurrent / riptide was so strong they prohibited swimming. Today felt about ten times worse when we got there, and yet as you can plainly see by the empty flagpole there was no warning. I wouldn't even let Quinn do his boogie board when we first got there because the pull was so strong. I tested it by walking out a bit and had to really push to keep from getting pulled.
After a couple hours though the tide changed a bit and wasn't pulling out as much. And it was probably close to low tide so I could stand in some areas a ways out. With that knowledge I felt a bit more confident in taking Quinn out on his boogie board. Quinn loved it, to the point where we were ready to leave and he still wanted to be out there.
Throughout the day we would have hot blistering sun for a while, then a minor downpour for couple minutes, then more sun for a while (you can probably see the lighting difference in some of the pictures). Funny thing, even if there's a ton of cloud cover and the sun isn't out, you can still get sunburned. Yep, this was a bad one. The soaked shirts we were wearing earlier must have rubbed off a lot of the lotion that had been applied, and earlier when we were hurrying to leave the house on time we had completely forgotten to put lotion on Ginger's back. So Ginger's back is completely red and she's in a ton of pain now and I have small burn splotches all over (and I can't really complain, because as bad as mine looks and feels, I can't begin to imagine how bad Ginger's is).
As we were leaving we managed to get caught in another downpour that was about as bad as the one we experienced when we showed up. Funny how ten minutes later getting there or ten minute earlier leaving and we would have missed both, but that wouldn't have been as much fun I suppose. Once we got back to our place we played in the pool for a bit knowing it would be the last time in that particular pool this trip. After that we started the moving process of packing everything up and moving to the other house. This is a process that makes one question the wisdom of staying for two weeks if you have to switch houses to do it. Amazingly enough we almost managed to get everything transferred in one trip.
The new house is nice enough, just enough bedrooms for us. It's nowhere near the beach or the sound though, and much further south than we normally stay. The neighborhood has this Bermuda vibe going on with all the various houses painted various bright colors. But we didn't quite manage to get everything from the old house on that one trip and no one relished the idea of heading back Sunday morning and fighting the arrival and departing tourist traffic, so we headed back that night and cleaned up everything with kids in tow. This means the kids didn't get to sleep until just after ten which is way past their normal bedtime. In theory this should work out though since there's apparently some big storm off the coast (I had no idea until Chip told me and explained that's where all the intermittent showers were coming from) so if it's raining tomorrow we might be able to stay in for a day (and those of us sunburned can use the time to recover a bit).
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