Days 1 and 2: In which we listen to and prove upon our own skins “The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas”

I woke up this morning, day 3 of our trip, in a tiny 1950s looking beach hotel in Nags Head, NC with turquoise blue faux-leather chairs that delighted me even at 11:30 p.m. when we managed to finally get settled into this hotel room.

We are extremely sunburned, enough to get me the bad mom of the year award, probably. But we’ve had 2 great days of swimming and driving.

We left Marietta on Saturday at the time we actually planned, 9:30 a.m., and those of you who know us will understand how amazing it is for us to both be on time and to be on time early in the morning. We listened to music, sang, and talked all the way to Charlotte, NC. We focused our efforts on Bloodhound Gang, They Might Be Giants, Waylon Jennings, and the soundtrack from O Brother Where Art Thou.

We spent the afternoon with a group of lovely friends at Cynthia Roeth’s pool. Cynthia was there and Faye and Tim and Henry Cheadle and David Baucom, basically the Charlotte ATLOSCon crew. We were sorry to miss Neil and the smaller Roeths, but they were on their own trip. Livy swam and swam, wetalked and talked, and we ate yummy burritos.

We left there at about 7 and made it nearly all the way to Wilmington, NC by 10:30. We dropped exhausted into our beds.

On Sunday morning, we made the rest of the trip to Wilmington to go to the beach with Aaron’s sister Lisa and her two kids, Theory and Marissa. It was a stellar beach day. The slope of the beach was very gentle, so Livy got to go much farther out that she had on our last beach trip, and, because there wasn’t a ginormous storm, the waves were much more fun for her to play in. She hardly got out of the water the whole 4 hours. Aaron and I played in the water, chatted with his sister, and watched the kids.

Apparently the amount of sunscreen I think is good enough is not good enough for a sunny day from 11:30-3:30 on the beach. We are cooked, especially Aaron who reapplied sunscreen a bunch of times. Burned though we are, we had a wonderful late lunch after the beach at a delicious seafood restaurant (where I got Mahi stuffed with a crab cake, Livy got shrimp scampi and spinach over pasta, and Aaron got a steak—it was all lovely) and then we drove toward Kitty Hawk, listening to Sherlock Holmes stories most of the way.

We wanted to spend the night on the mainland and drive out to the Outer Banks in the morning so we could see how pretty all the bridges and water were, but there was no room at any inn until we got out onto the island and up to Nags Head. By the time we finally got checked in, Livy was very tired and too sunburned to really sleep comfortably in the car, so we had much whining from her and from Aaron who is not used to sun and its effects. I got them rubbed down with aloe and tucked in, ate my delicious seafood leftovers, and went to bed myself.