Things I Learned While On Vacation At The Beach

When I was in middle school (Jr. High we old-timers used to call it) and in high school, my family took to going to some beach area for summer vacations. It was Myrtle Beach for a year or two, then we went to north Virginia Beach for a year and finally ended up going to Sandbridge (south of Va. Beach). In any case, when you're young and living at home you don't think much about vacations, what they cost and the thinking that goes into them.

This year, my wife and I decided it would be good to take our family of 6 to the beach for a week. Here are some things I learned in no particular order:

1. The pictures you look at on the rental web sites make rooms and houses look much larger than they are in reality. What looked like a set of very large rooms in the living area, turned out to be a set of medium sized rooms when we got there.
2. Being across the street from the beach makes medium or even small sized rooms a lot less of an issue. To get to the beach we had to cross the street on our cul-de-sac and cross over a couple of sand dunes and we were at the ocean. If you stood on the deck on the ocean side of the house you could hear the waves crashing on the beach. Hard to beat that.
3. If you aren't careful to plan when you'll arrive at the beach you might just end up sitting on the road in your car crawling along for hours on end. And there very well might not be any other option for getting there. (In our case we needed to get onto the string of islands that make up the outer banks area in North Carolina. While technically, we could have headed further south and taken a ferry over from the mainland, in practice it was too late by the time we got stuck in traffic.)
4. You can get a really bad sunburn by trying to teach 4 kids to windsurf in a single day using 2 rigs.
5. Whatever sunburn you get teaching your kids to windsurf is totally worth it.
6. Avon, NC is a pretty good place to visit if you like the water. There is a great place to launch your windsurfing gear just south of Avon (about a mile or so). It's formally named the Haulover Day Use Area, but generally known as Canadian Hole. What's really nice about sailing in Pamlico Sound is that the depth of the water is generally under 5' in depth. Except in the Canadian Hole; there it gets deeper since it was formerly used to haul boats from the sound to the ocean (hence the name Haulover). Shallow water makes it very easy to jump back up on your board when you fall off and it doesn't tend to freak people out that aren't used to being in deep water and away from shore.
7. It costs a lot more to go to the beach for a week than I would have thought! There's more to it than just the rental unit (duh). Although we did do a lot of fun stuff like rental of ocean kayaks and wind surfing gear.
8. When there's only 1 convenient grocery store to choose from, it's going to be crowded at all hours of the day and night and not have particularly good prices.
9. Buying expensive groceries and cooking for your family is WAY cheaper than eating out all the time.
10. Restaurants at the beach where there are mostly rental houses don't have to have very good food or service. (As one of my daughter's quipped "Fast, cheap or good - pick none!")
11. If you wear eyeglasses and you're playing in the surf with your kids without Croakies, even if the surf seems to be gentle, you're likely to surprised by a big wave. In my case, I managed to hold onto the Waboba ball ($8.25) and not onto my glasses. Duh!
12. A Waboba ball is lots of fun to play with in the ocean or the sound or the pool. Although you need a lot of space to play in.