Turtles and Such

One of the things we enjoyed seeing during our vacation was a large group of turtles in a pond near the lighthouse. As we drove along the road by the pond, we saw a multitude of turtles sunning themselves on the bank; but by the time we had pulled over, the vast majority of them had taken to the water as if to hide from us! After that, we could only see a bunch of "bumps" in the water which were the heads of the turtles, and a few of the bravest souls (or dumbest, I guess) left on the shore.

~ after we got back to our cottage, the artist in Josiah popped out and came up with this rendition of a mommy turtle with her baby

This and that:

~ Remember our plan to leave our house at 6:00 a.m. the first day of our vacation? Wellllll...we actually pulled out of the driveway at 6:42 a.m.--not exactly "on time"--but it didn't really matter because our main goal in leaving so early was to get to a family favorite restaurant(Fisherman's Wharf in Wanchese at which we always used to eat) before they stopped serving their lunch menu and the prices jumped higher for dinner. Yeah, we're cheap. :) Imagine our shock and disappointment to pull up to the restaurant at 1:45 p.m. and find it closed, shut-down, no longer in business. Argh, the ending of a tradition! Our shock and disappointment only increased when we drove to another family favorite spot, the Christmas Shop, in nearby Manteo and found that it too was closed and out-of-business. How could it be??? Things aren't supposed to change that much in 10 years, are they? :) Another tradition bites the dust...

~ Want to know the temperature here at home the morning that we left? 38 degrees. Yikes, that was crazy! Not normal at all for mid-September around here. We had let the boys sleep in shorts and t-shirts to make it easier to load them into the car in the morning; needless to say, we had to wrap them in blankets as we started our journey. It definitely made us grateful to be heading to the beach and away from the cold weather (although I realize it didn't stay that cold here during that week)!

~ One tradition we did manage to hang onto was stopping at Kitty Hawk Kites, and we bought a kite for Josiah there. Another tradition that still held true was shopping for groceries at Conner's Grocery Store in Buxton. It was nice to know that although a lot of things had changed, some things were still the same. :)

~ Dad figured out that our first year vacationing on the Outer Banks was in 1982--25 years ago. As kids, we never wanted to go anywhere else for vacation, so we went almost every year as we grew up. What a wealth of memories we have from that place! It was so nice to be back after quite a few years of not being there.