Short trip to Carolina Beach ...

One of the big pluses to making this move to North Carolina, aside from being close to Doug, Danika and the kids, is the proximity to the ocean and the numerous beaches.  They are pretty much within a 3-4 hour drive, with some as close as 2 hours.  Not a bad drive at all.  Just hope the coastal storms and the hurricanes don't have too much of an impact over here.

So, now that the Covid crap is over, we feel unencumbered in making day trips and maybe even longer ones.  So, with a pretty good weather forecast for the next week, we thought we would check out the Carolina Beach, an area we had heard so much about from our neighbors and relatives.  Since it was still early season (school still in session) and other people were still not quite ready to venture out, we were able to get hotel reservations at the Hampton Inn on the beach.  Our bags are packed -- lets head out.  Just have to remember that most shops and eating places are closed on Tuesdays.  Don't know if it is because they can't get help or what (lots of them are also closed on Mondays.)

This is a really nice beach.  Just a short walk down the boardwalk and there it is.   (Click on this link for a short video of the beach).  Beach picture 

We took several pictures from our balcony overlooking the hotel decking area, and several shots down the boardwalks.  I wasn't all that impressed with the boardwalk area, but the beach and the hotel facilities more than made up for it.

 

We found some really good places to eat -- one on the boardwalk and one pretty nice place called Freddies.  It was a really small place, no outdoor dining like lots of the beach places, but the food was really good and servings were very large.  No excuse to go away feeling hungry. 

So, what else did we do there -- well, they were actually shooting a movie on the island, just down from the hotel.  It was a teenagers movie (some beach thing -- not like the Beach Boys or Annette F.).  We drove down past it but they weren't shooting at that time.  It was a night beach scene -- hmmmm.

We also drove down the beach to visit the aquarium that was there and then visited a place called Fort Fisher, which was a Confederate fort keeping the port of Wilmington open for blockade-runners supplying necessary goods to the Confederate armies that were inland. It was overcome by Federal troops in January 1865.  

This picture shows the mounds where the gun emplacements were.  They really had a commanding view of the river and the ocean from there.  One other nice thing about Fort Fisher is that there is an Air Force campgrounds there which has camping spaces and cabins which can be rented out by service members. 

So that's pretty much our three day trip to Carolina Beach.  Great time and looking forward to doing this again some time.  We have 3 or 4 more beaches that are on our list to visit so we hope the summer weather holds up for us.

Click on this link to see more pictures of this area.  Additional pictures of the visit to Carolina Beach.

 On these trips, the only worry you should have is if the tide is going to reach your chair.  

Hooah

Daytrip to Hillsborough, NC ...

 I have mentioned in previous entries that Pam and I plan to take bunches of day trips around our new home state.  We "kinda, sorta" started doing this last year, but COVID really put a damper on things.  Shops, restaurants, and even pretty much entire towns were shut down.  We quickly discovered that a general rule around here is that most places are closed on Tuesdays .  Hmmm. 

Anything that was open required a mask or two over your face.  We really weren't up for that, so it kinda shut down the vast majority of our planned outings.  Even then we wondered how many smaller shops and places to eat in small towns would survive.  

Well, we got our first taste of daytripping without COVID restrictions. We decided to go back to Hillsborough, NC and see if it was opened back up.  This was a risk, as that town is pretty widely known as a liberal hangout, so we really didn't know what was in store for us. We'd pack a mask just in case!

Got there and it was a mixed bag of what was open and what wasn't.  As we walked up and down the streets of the "downtown" area, we noticed lots of political statements on the store fronts and in the flags flying from light poles.  Oh well, didn't plan on spending a lot of time or money there anyway.  One place that really got my attention though was the old cemetery behind the Methodist church.  

Pam and I walked among the tombstones, looking at the born/died dates and the epitaphs -- I am always fascinated by those things.  We had been there for a little while when we came across the grave site of William Hooper. We probably wouldn't have paid any special attention to him or his stone if we hadn't noticed the sign at the head of the rather large slab.  William Hooper was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Now this isn't something you run into every day.

Hooper's signature is to the immediate left of John Hancock's at the top of the second column.

I have read that the original group of signers to the Declaration of Independence faced multiple death threats for many years from British loyalists.  Their businesses were ruined and their lives were very hard from that point on.  Hooper was a lawyer, so I wonder what happened to his practice and what he went through.  Well, anyway, before we left, I thanked Mr. Hooper and told him, "Well done."

OK.  So following that part of the visit, we walked by a very nice section of old, historical homes and came across a very nice looking Inn and B&B.  It featured several rooms in the main house and an attached section of guest suites (see second picture).  There was also a very nice dining room on the first floor of the main house.  Unfortunately they did not begin serving until 4:00.  Knowing traffic would be the pits on the way home at that time of day, we decided to pass.  Maybe another day.

Pam was really looking forward to having the salmon they featured on their menu.  Again, they weren't serving yet -- but no worry.  My sweetie wants fish for dinner, I'll make sure she gets some.  We stopped at McDonalds on the way home and each had fish sandwiches !!! I really know how to take care of her, right!

Oh, one more thing.  We checked the GPS for food places on the way home and came across an interesting diner, so we thought we would try it out and maybe get lucky.  After all, Charles Kuralt used to do this on the back roads of the country all the time.  Guess what --  it was closed!  Oh well, Mickey-D has always been a good fallback.  (Not this time -- the fish sandwiches were many hours old and the fries were cold!) Oh well ..........

Overall, it was a great day.  Out in the sunshine, no doggone masks, a couple of really interesting "finds" and a day together with my sweetie!! Doesn't get any better than this.

For more pictures of this day trip, click on this link: Day trip to Hillsborough, NC pictures

“Live with no excuses and travel with no regrets”  (Oscar Wilde)

Hooah

Great father & son evening out ...

Last week, Doug and I had two tickets to the Durham Bulls baseball game -- great seats -- first row behind home plate!  We were both excited about going to the game.  The only trouble was it had been raining all day with a 90% prediction of continued showers throughout the evening.  What a bummer.  It was a 6:30 game but the radar was showing lots of holes in the storm front.  Well maybe those highly-paid weather guys don't know what their are talking about.  

We sat around at home trying to figure out how to turn our tickets in for a future game should this game get cancelled.  Strangely enough, though, the longer we sat around, the more the percentage of rain kept going down until finally around 6:00 it was down to 30% and we said "what the heck."  So I told him I would be down to pick him up and we'd take our chances.  Glad we did.

We got to the ball park about 6:40 and it was only the 3rd inning...no score, so didn't miss anything.  FRONT ROW, here we come!!  

Of course, I had to make a short stop at the hat store ... had to have a Bulls hat for the game, just in case it did rain at some point.

So here are some pictures of a couple of guys enjoying a night out.

Probably wondering about the game, huh?  It was tied going into the bottom of the 9th.  Bulls had one out and the next batter was supposed to be the designated hitter.  Well, the Bulls manager decided to pinch hit for him..The batter came up to the plate and with one strike on him, promptly hit the next pitch out of the park for a walk-off homer to win the game. The crowd went wild...what a way to end the game! What an exciting night at the old ballpark. 

So glad I got to share this with Doug. Something special about a father and his son going to a game together, regardless of their ages.  Next game we'll take the grand kids.

could be, it might be… It is, A home run! (Harry Caray)
"All the way around if you know what I mean" (me)

Hooah

What a trip ...

Well, it was Memorial Day weekend 2021 and we have not been back to visit friends in Ohio for over a year and a half, so we decided it was time for a road trip :-).  

This would be a very busy trip, so we decided we had better do some careful planning.  We also decided that we had better put this down on some sort of agenda so we would be sure to get all of the things we wanted to do done and not leave anyone or anything out. I brushed up my Excel skills and created a spreadsheet of days, times, places and people we would visit on the trip, and it really came in handy and enabled us to make this a very stress-free excursion. We even managed to squeeze in a bonus visit with my old buddy, Dave M. and his wife ;-).

So rather than making this an extremely long entry, I am going to put in some links to some of the places we visited so you can look them up if you wish.

To begin with, we established certain "must do/see" things and then built in everything else around those items.  The trip was planned for five days "on site" and two days of traveling. We got everything on the spreadsheet and checked our reservations and decided this was doable. Charles Kuralt didn't have anything on us (I suspect lots of you will have to look up Charles Kuralt to understand this reference)!

The complete list of "must do/see" items included a visit with our sister-in-law (Mary), some of our old neighbors and friends, Dylan S's graduation party, lunches with family members, church and breakfast with Warren T. (old WWII friend who just turned 95-years-old), me playing golf with my old golfing gang at the Shelby Oaks Golf Course, playing cards one evening with some old Veteran/VFW friends at the Sidney Veterans Center, driving around our original home town (Zanesville, home of the Y-bridge , Zane Grey and Tom's Ice Cream Bowl ), and dinner with my old Sergeant-Major (Dave B.) and his wife.

The trip consisted of 1,228 "travel" miles and another 200 or so miles of "in and around" miles.  So I figured we drove just around 1,500 miles +/- with gas being generally $2.89 per gallon, and stayed in hotels for 4 nights (gotta build up those loyalty points and cash-back bucks for later trips!).  BUT IT WAS CERTAINLY WORTH IT!!!

I have included a link to a few pictures (forgot to take more pictures than we could have -- getting old and forgetful apparantly). Roadtrip to Ohio 2021 !!

This COVID year has certainly been a trying time for all of us.  Things you used to do, people you used to see, places you used to go  -- all of that was pretty much taken away from us, even more so being seperated by 500+ miles.  Zoom and Facetime only go so far, so this trip really hit the spot.  Sometimes, visiting people (live) is all the therapy we need.

They say travel can leave you speechless but then turns you into a storyteller.  This certainly was the case here with us -- we had great stories to tell, old stories to retell, and notes for future stories not yet told.  

Hooah