Nags Head, North Carolina: July 15-23, 2006

Since the younger grandkids started rolling in, my dad has been all about the family vacation. Specifically, he rents a house in Nags Head (in the Outer Banks), North Carolina. My parents, sister, brother-in-law, step-nephew, nieces, and I all cram into the house and hang out for a week doing pretty much nothing.

It's a nice vacation for me because it's the rare week when I do nothing, and because it's the longest stretch of time I get with my family now that I am permanently elsewhere. Also, while I enjoy my nieces quite a lot, Ol' Screamy (the baby) was teething, and it was pretty great that that was someone else's problem.

Anyway, it's kind of a pain to get to Nags Head. There are no airports on the Outer Banks, and I don't have a car, so I have to fly into Norfolk, then hire a van to drive me the rest of the way (the drive takes about two hours). This year, it was awesome, because the van had to wait for an hour after I got there to pick up another passenger. To kill time, the driver and I decided to have a look at the nearby botanical gardens...except that you now have to pay, even to just go in and drive around. So we abandoned that plan.

However, lining the road to the botanical gardens gate, I had seen a lot of ducks, and a sign that said "Duck Feeding Area." So I said to the driver, hey...can we feed the ducks?

Not only did he agree, he also stopped at a gas station to pick up some bread for the ducks. When the gas station had no bread, he went across the street to the 7-11! He is a prince among men.

At the first sign of food, the ducks came running. The mob included a solitary baby duck, which I found odd, since I'm used to ducklings traveling in packs, like hipsters and cheerleaders. The driver explained that snapper turtles and big mouthed bass tend to eat them, and that is probably why there was only one baby left. Nature is so cruel!

Naturally, geese showed up. The driver was all excited about feeding them by hand:

Why geese feel the need to come along and throw down any time ducks are eating is beyond me, but this is par for the course, really. Geese are mean bastards. Here they are, in all of their sinister glory:

I have to admit, had I just fed ducks and done nothing else, that would have made the vacation for me. Nevertheless, eventually it was time to pick up the other passenger, and we made our way down to the Outer Banks.

As nice as the vacation was, this post is going to be lacking in adventure, because I didn't really do much besides hang out by the pool, check out the beach, read, and eat. I did pay a visit to my old nemesis, however:

This horrible thing spit me out last year within 24 hours of my arrival, giving me a huge bruise that lasted for days. This year, I am pleased to report that I had the upper hand, and did not fall out once. My older niece, who does not really understand the dangers of the world yet, refers to it as a 'boat', presumably because it rocks. Here it is, as if it were blessed by Jesus Christ himself for doing the good work of injuring me:

I am a big heat wuss, so I did not do a lot of beach visiting during the day. Although it was noticeably cooler this summer than last summer, it was still freaking hot (and nobody thought to try to use the beach umbrellas some woman gave me at the airport for no particular reason until after I had returned to New York). However, I did head across the street to the water a few times toward evening. On one visit, there was this collection of four dudes throwing jellyfish at each other. I sort of understand now why jellyfish sting. The throwing dudes. Although I was pretty unimpressed with the Jellyfish Dodgeball Team, I did not sneak any incriminating photos of them. I did get this gull, though. It cracks me up when they run away from the waves coming in because...can't they float? I swear I've seen seagulls float.

In addition to checking out the beach, we occasionally got ice cream after dinner. We found a place with 24 flavors of soft serve ice cream. This seemed unlikely to me when I heard about it, but sure enough, there it was. They mix flavors into the plain ice cream; contrary to my secret hopes, they did not have 24 separate soft serve dispensers, each containing a different flavor. The ice cream, while decent, was not as awesome as you would hope. I think the attraction is more the variety of flavors than the tasty, tasty nature of the ice cream.

The one actual event I recall happening during the week was the strange case of the crab who showed up dead at the bottom of the pool one morning. Since the house is across the street from the beach, I'm pretty impressed that the crab made it there to die. Did he plan it, like an American plotting a suicide from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge? Did he get lured there like the crab version of William Holden? Was he abducted and killed on the beach, then dumped in our pool to deflect suspicion? All I have are questions...

Later on in the week, I ate my weight in crab legs (which did not come from the crab above). Seriously, we got a big vat of them, and I kept asking people, when I'd finish another bunch, 'Well, don't you want some of these crab legs?' And the answer I kept getting was, 'No, no...you have them.' So, I kept eating more. By my calculations, I ate at least 115 pounds of crab legs that night. Check them out:

For most of the week, my step-nephew had been talking about wanting to see high tide, so toward the end of the week, I agreed to go down and have a look. In all honesty, it wasn't that impressive. I seem to recall seeing some high tides as a kid that really got all up in everyone's business, but this high tide was just up a little higher than the normal water level:

I think these are pelicans. They didn't seem to mind what the tide was up to at all:

That's pretty much it. We piled into my brother-in-law's family truckster on my last full day (a Saturday) to try and check out the wild horses that roam around Corolla, but the traffic was pretty heavy, so we turned back.

So that's it, kids. I'm caught up til next month, when I have to go to glorious southern New Jersey for work. Also next month? I'm going to sea!