Not much to update with today. Ginger had a migraine this morning, so we ended up staying at the house and not going to the beach. Ken, Karen and Amanda went, but weren't there for long before they returned (something about the undertow being pretty strong today). So we ended up spending a lot of time in the pool instead (as you probably already guessed from the previous post).
When someone says they're going to beat you with a wet noodle, think of this picture. The kids all starting pounding on Ken.
To try and get some exercise I decided to pull the kids across the pool on boogie boards by strapping the boards to my feet.
Then I decided to make it more challenging by swimming across underwater.
After that the kids spent a whole lot of time playing inside the house. Then we decided to head back up to Timbuck II to let Quinn have a go at driving the Go Karts solo. I thought I was going to go insane yesterday. All day long Quinn kept telling me he had an 'idea'. And his idea was that we would build our own Go Kart that he could drive. And even after explaining that back home we have no place to keep a Go Kart must less drive a Go Kart, this didn't deter his expounding on this idea at all. All day long about every five minutes it was "I was thinking about the Go Kart..." or "So what if bought the parts on the internet..." So I thought if we distracted him by letting him drive one, that might keep him from asking about building one every five minutes.
We got there 15 minutes before the end of the junior races, but due to line length and us being the last people to purchase a junior race ticket Quinn didn't even get to race until almost five thirty. Once his race started there were four cars racing with him. He started out in second because the first car got a 30 second or more head start on him. But after 10 laps or so he managed to pull away from the second and third place cars and catch up to leader. And after one failed attempted at passing (he got bumped but the other kid) on the next lap he managed to get by on the inside. *sniff* I was so proud. It was fun listening to the crowd, they were all rooting for Quinn since he was coming up from behind and the crowd let out a collective "Ooooo" when Quinn got intentionally bumped on his first pass attempt. Of course right after Quinn got past the kid on the next lap he almost ran the kid off the track. The crowd thought it was intentional as payback after the initial bumping incident, but I know he probably was just looking over his shoulder after he had passed him to see where he was and wasn't paying attention to where he was going.
The photo above is on the lap where he finally caught up to the other kid. You can see Quinn trying to get that inside line, but then the other kid bumped him and managed to keep the lead.
Next lap, same corner. Quinn managed to get sneak into the inside lane again, but this time has is a lot further ahead and managed to keep the lead.
Now he's just smokin' the kid pulling away from him.
I managed to get out to get more sunset shots tonight. Nothing spectacular like last night. And yes, I know I still haven't posted last night's shots yet, but I'll get to those at some point. I tell you, if it weren't for this whole needing sleep thing, this would be a lot easier. I can tell the reason tonight's shots didn't turn out so good. There's some low clouds in our area that are so low they weren't being illuminated by the setting sun (you can see some of the clouds stay black / gray in all the photos).
Extremely busy day today. Ginger had this idea to go visit Jockey's Ridge. I was skeptical, but she really wanted to do it because she had been there as a kid herself and had fond memories of it. Not wanting to stand in the way a trip down memory lane I reluctantly agreed, even though it meant getting up just after 8 when I hadn't gotten to bed until almost 3 (oh Zelda, how you vex me so).
So off we went this morning, and I have to say, I am soooo glad she wanted to go. Let me just say, if you're ever in the Nags Head area on vacation, you really should stop by this park. It's incredible. And it's almost impossible to take a bad picture (one of the other reasons I liked it so much).
And it's probably one of the best places you'll find to fly a kite in the Outer Banks (it must be true, it says so on the park's website). And it's seriously cool. There's these massive expanses of sand. Kind like a desert without having to actually go to one. Bring water with you though because it can get hot. I mean really hot. Quinn drank two half liter Deer Park bottled waters while we were there. Unfortunately he also ended up wiping his head a lot which I think wiped off the sunblock we had on him, so he ended up getting a little burned by the end of the day (we didn't get Curt's message about reapplying it until later in the day once we got home, and by then it was too late).
Anyway, back to the park. This place is huge. You can watch some hang gliders. It's not overly impressive hang gliding though, since the dunes are only so tall. And it's nowhere near as impressive as the hang gliders Ginger and I saw in California when we were out there (at least I think we saw them in California), but the kids still thought it was really cool to see them since they hadn't seen anything like that before. Add to that the ability for kids to climb on the dunes and run down the dunes and you have a fun filled park visit.
One of the things about this place is it's so big. The only problem is that even if there are only a couple of other people you can accidentally get them in your shot and ruin the illusion of solitude. So I was running around to various locations to take pictures so other people in the park wouldn't be in the framed shots. It's totally worth it though once you get a shot that gives the impression of no one else being there. I especially like the one of Catherine off in the distance on top of the dune.
Once we finished up at the park, we had the kids take off their shoes and clean them out. I don't know how, but the when you tilted Catherine's shoe back the entire back part of the shoe filled up with sand. I don't even know how there was still room for her foot in the shoe with that much sand.
After we left the park we decided to go see the Bodie Lighthouse since it was so close to the park. When we got there Catherine claimed it was the first lighthouse she's ever seen. Which is odd since I have photographic proof she saw the one in Corolla last year.
We wandered around the grounds for a bit and then decided to head across the street to the local beach access. The beach down there is really nice and calm. And there's a lot less people on it than up here in Duck. The beach itself down there is larger than the one in Duck also. Plus there are also all kinds on sea shells along the beach, whereas in Duck there's so many people on the beach all the times you can never really find any decent shells.
On the way home we stopped by a Brew Thru in order to get some drinks for Ginger and the kids. Now I had suggested just buying it a convenience store when we bought gas, but Ginger really wanted to go through the Brew Thru. She said it was all about the 'experience'. Not sure what that meant, but what the heck, we went through the Brew Thru and got the kids some lemonade and Ginger some Starbucks drink (and a Coke for me). So now whenever we drive past a Brew Thru Quinn points out that there's another "drive through lemonade place".
Believe it or not, I still have a ton of pictures from today to post, but it's already past 2 am, so I'm going to wrap this one up and try to post the rest later. I literally think today I got some of the best shots of our entire two weeks here (your opinion may vary). I say this with still having a couple days left to get more shots. I ended up taking about 550 pictures today, which is more than I've been taking per day normally, but only about double what I normally take. At this point I think I've taken well over 9 Gig worth of pictures. I've already more of less filled the laptop (it has less than a Gig free, and it's using that for virtual swap space, so the more pictures I take the slower the laptop becomes). For backup purposes I have burned several DVDs of the pictures also (in case something catastrophic were to happen to the laptop).
Everyday we seem to be getting motivated and starting out later and later. Today we didn't even leave for the beach until almost eleven. And I've learned that if you're already sunburned, you can actually make it worse.
Quinn finally showed some signs of rebounding and wanting to get in the waves some, but still most of the time he just sat in the sand and had races with some plastic cars. He's just not as interested as running around in the waves as he was at the start of last week. Guess the novelty has already worn off. Maybe two weeks in a row is just too much beach time for them. Last year we went twice for a week at a time versus this year we decided to see what it would be like to go for two weeks straight.
The waves weren't anywhere near as strong as they had been for the previous three days. Guess we're finally done with seeing the effects of that storm that was off the coast.
Since we're in a different house, we're accessing the beach from a different location. So far both Ginger and I liked the old area better. She liked the old area because it was less crowded. I liked it for that reason plus the 'scenery' was better (seemed there were more college kids). You can tell the beach area we're at now is a family oriented area beach. And it is crowded like nobody's business. Before it was pretty easy to move around the blanket / umbrella and get some shots of the kids that didn't have people in the background or unwanted elements in the shots. Not so at the beach we're at now.
Catherine and Amanda picked up a friend to play with for a while. But then the kids got on each other's nerves as everyone had their own way they wanted to put sand into the buckets and would get upset when one of the other kids did something different.
We visited the Go-Kart race track again today. Quinn got pretty upset when we got there, because he wanted to do the junior cars again so he could drive solo, but they stop doing those at five and we got there well after seven (we didn't know that before we went or we would have tried to convince him to wait until another day). Earlier in the day when we had been talking about who was going to be driving, Catherine had wanted to drive with me since Quinn was going to be riding by himself (or so we thought at the time). So once Quinn couldn't go by himself, Quinn got really upset when he we suggested he ride with Ginger (something about her not driving fast enough). Luckily Ken was there and agreed to go with Quinn and Amanda would ride with Karen. Ginger was then designated the official photographer for the event.
Check out Ken doing his best Micheal Jordan driving impersonation up above. When we got onto the track, Catherine had picked a car for us at the very back of the pack, so we started out a couple cars from last (two cars behind Karen and Amanda and I think three behind Ken and Quinn). That didn't last long though as Catherine and I tore through the track. There were a couple of kids in single cars that were faster than us, but we managed to pass everyone else we came across.
We passed Karen and Amanda on the second or third lap. Karen claims we bumped her, but really what had happened they took the turn pretty wide and that allowed us to take control of the inside lane. They didn't see us and ran into our side (so really they bumped us). It took us a lot longer to weed through all the other cars to catch up to Ken and Quinn though (since they were passing cars also). And once we caught up to them we got stuck behind them for several laps, but we finally managed to sneak by with help from a slower single car that was blocking them. Too bad the race ended like one lap after we got past them.
Catherine and I were basking in our victory we when left the facility. Outside there was a kid siting next to his dad and I overhead their conversation. It went something like this with the kid saying "I'm never doing that again." And the dad asked "Why not?" And the kid responds with "Some of those people were driving really aggressive, the yellow 38 car and especially the blue number 12 car." I thought about it for a second and realized Catherine and I were the blue number 12 car. I felt kind of bad and tried to apologize to the kid (although to be honest, I didn't even remember seeing the kid on the track, so we must have smoked him pretty early in the race).
By the time the racing was done, it was clear I wasn't going to be able to get to anyplace to take a really good sunset picture. So Catherine and I walked down the pier to see if we could salvage any sunset shots while Ginger and Quinn watched the next Go-Kart race.
Not sure what the deal was, but conditions for sunset shots just weren't that great (there wasn't exactly a lot to work with there on a pier with no railing or anything either though). And the sun wasn't really cooperating either. Not sure what the atmosphere conditions need to be to get that golden glow, but whatever they are they definitely weren't there tonight.
Ginger and Quinn joined us just before the sun finally set. The camera obviously has some trouble trying to determine what area to use as the exposure setting when you put people in the shot as well. I might be able to fix that some by applying a filter of some type to the background, but I'm just not motivated to do it right now.
