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magidI don't know who exactly came up with the idea of a family reunion, one of the California cousins, I think. And the location was suggested by cousins from D.C., who apparently have a holiday there every summer. The house rentals in the Outer Banks run Sat urday to Saturday, so I decided Sunday to Friday would be the best my mom could get me to agree to...
I flew from Logan to Norfolk, VA, on a tiny plane: 13A was a window seat, an aisle seat, and in the last row of seats. I was rather impressed with the airport at the other end, though, with decent lighting, reasonably interesting shops, clear signs, and actual trees close by outside, not just acres of parking.
The parents rented a car, and we (well, my dad) drove to Duck, passing fields and fields of corn and some other low crop (peanuts?) on the way. Also some egregious misuses of the poor apostrophe: a sign for produce at a farm stand was
Straw'
berries
(and the parallel construction for blueberries). This after seeing, in the in-flight magazine, an ad for something or other that had both "Men's and Ladie's" versions. Just horrible.
The Outer Banks are a series of long thin islands just off the coast of the mainland. We drove over a long bridge to get there. And there's pretty much one road that goes anywhere, so there just aren't any alternate rou tes if there's traffic. Once we were headed north again, I saw huge palatial houses. These are pretty much all rental properties, as I found when we got to our destination.
Our house had 9 people in it, and was the smallest of the three rental houses our group had. Still, there were lots of similarities. The ground floor was one or two rooms only, the rest of the space being open, with room for parking, etc. This is so if there is flooding, it's not as expensive to rebuild: as long as the main supports stay intact, all you'd need to do is replace some lattice and one room, maybe a bathroom. The second floor has lots of bedrooms, each with its own bathroom as well as access to a porch. We had four bedrooms on the second floor, and laundry. Mine was the on e with the huge hammock just outside on the wrap-around porch. The top level had another bedroom, and all the common areas, as well as another wrap-around porch, and a reading nook up another half-flight of stairs. The kitchen was well-stocked with implements and appliances enough to cook for a crowd. Two of the bathrooms had Jacuzzis, and out back there was a hot tub, a pool, and a beach volleyball court. I can't really imagine living in a place like this.
The rhythm of the days was set already by the time I got there: leisurely day doing whatever, punctuated by phone calls back and forth about dinner plans, and dinner with everyone at one house, which took up the whole evening.
The first night there was distribution of the T-shirts my mom had organized, and it was helpful that most of them had names on them (when people chose to wear them), for all the relatives who were a blur to me.
Food turned out to be relatively easy, between salads and fruit and ice cream and double-wrapped fish on one of th e three grills, also the kosher cheese mom had brought. The supermarket was reasonably well-stocked with the usual stuff, too.
We'd gotten in late enough that there hadn't been time to go to the beach before dinner, what with getting settled and catchin g up with the cousins we were sharing the house with, so we walked down one of the boardwalks to the edge of the beach after dinner. There wasn't enough moon to go walking by, especially not on a beach I hadn't even seen by daylight, but we could hear and smell the ocean, and there were so many more stars visible than at home, not just lower on the horizon, but more dense across the sky, even the Milky Way visible to me. It was beautiful.
Other loot than the T-shirt: a necklace of Eilat stone from my mom, and a cool triangle black and white puzzle from my aunt. Both cool, in completely different ways.
I slept in, missing the coolness of the morning. I'd bought two skeins of blue cotton yarn to crochet, and finished a relatively big cylindrical bag, designed to hold all the junk I was likely to want to schlepp around, except a book.
I ended up going on the first trip of the day to the supermarket, then a local farm stand, which had locally grown melons that had ripened on the vine. Yum. I read some, then ended up on the next food run, to the fish market for mahi mahi. Most of it was marinated, but I put a bit aside in foil for me (I suppose I am in the right family: there were multiple trips for food every day.).
I ended up talking with relatives I don't know very well, and it was easier than it might've been. And then it was my first time to the beach: down the boardwalk, over the dunes, and onto the sand, which was nice to walk on, no need to watch every st ep. One of the kids was fishing in the ocean (from the shore. I still find this somewhat odd, for some reason.), and caught a fish. I don't know what kind it was, but there were beautiful rainbows on its scales when the light hit it. They kept it in a water-filled cooler for a while, but in the end, returned it to the sea.
And then, the dinner event. I joined the "kids" in one of the bedrooms to watch Moulin Rouge. I thought the story somewhat sappy, but the storytelling style much fun.
Rest of the week soon (I hope).
n
I flew from Logan to Norfolk, VA, on a tiny plane: 13A was a window seat, an aisle seat, and in the last row of seats. I was rather impressed with the airport at the other end, though, with decent lighting, reasonably interesting shops, clear signs, and actual trees close by outside, not just acres of parking.
The parents rented a car, and we (well, my dad) drove to Duck, passing fields and fields of corn and some other low crop (peanuts?) on the way. Also some egregious misuses of the poor apostrophe: a sign for produce at a farm stand was
Straw'
berries
(and the parallel construction for blueberries). This after seeing, in the in-flight magazine, an ad for something or other that had both "Men's and Ladie's" versions. Just horrible.
The Outer Banks are a series of long thin islands just off the coast of the mainland. We drove over a long bridge to get there. And there's pretty much one road that goes anywhere, so there just aren't any alternate rou tes if there's traffic. Once we were headed north again, I saw huge palatial houses. These are pretty much all rental properties, as I found when we got to our destination.
Our house had 9 people in it, and was the smallest of the three rental houses our group had. Still, there were lots of similarities. The ground floor was one or two rooms only, the rest of the space being open, with room for parking, etc. This is so if there is flooding, it's not as expensive to rebuild: as long as the main supports stay intact, all you'd need to do is replace some lattice and one room, maybe a bathroom. The second floor has lots of bedrooms, each with its own bathroom as well as access to a porch. We had four bedrooms on the second floor, and laundry. Mine was the on e with the huge hammock just outside on the wrap-around porch. The top level had another bedroom, and all the common areas, as well as another wrap-around porch, and a reading nook up another half-flight of stairs. The kitchen was well-stocked with implements and appliances enough to cook for a crowd. Two of the bathrooms had Jacuzzis, and out back there was a hot tub, a pool, and a beach volleyball court. I can't really imagine living in a place like this.
The rhythm of the days was set already by the time I got there: leisurely day doing whatever, punctuated by phone calls back and forth about dinner plans, and dinner with everyone at one house, which took up the whole evening.
The first night there was distribution of the T-shirts my mom had organized, and it was helpful that most of them had names on them (when people chose to wear them), for all the relatives who were a blur to me.
Food turned out to be relatively easy, between salads and fruit and ice cream and double-wrapped fish on one of th e three grills, also the kosher cheese mom had brought. The supermarket was reasonably well-stocked with the usual stuff, too.
We'd gotten in late enough that there hadn't been time to go to the beach before dinner, what with getting settled and catchin g up with the cousins we were sharing the house with, so we walked down one of the boardwalks to the edge of the beach after dinner. There wasn't enough moon to go walking by, especially not on a beach I hadn't even seen by daylight, but we could hear and smell the ocean, and there were so many more stars visible than at home, not just lower on the horizon, but more dense across the sky, even the Milky Way visible to me. It was beautiful.
Other loot than the T-shirt: a necklace of Eilat stone from my mom, and a cool triangle black and white puzzle from my aunt. Both cool, in completely different ways.
I slept in, missing the coolness of the morning. I'd bought two skeins of blue cotton yarn to crochet, and finished a relatively big cylindrical bag, designed to hold all the junk I was likely to want to schlepp around, except a book.
I ended up going on the first trip of the day to the supermarket, then a local farm stand, which had locally grown melons that had ripened on the vine. Yum. I read some, then ended up on the next food run, to the fish market for mahi mahi. Most of it was marinated, but I put a bit aside in foil for me (I suppose I am in the right family: there were multiple trips for food every day.).
I ended up talking with relatives I don't know very well, and it was easier than it might've been. And then it was my first time to the beach: down the boardwalk, over the dunes, and onto the sand, which was nice to walk on, no need to watch every st ep. One of the kids was fishing in the ocean (from the shore. I still find this somewhat odd, for some reason.), and caught a fish. I don't know what kind it was, but there were beautiful rainbows on its scales when the light hit it. They kept it in a water-filled cooler for a while, but in the end, returned it to the sea.
And then, the dinner event. I joined the "kids" in one of the bedrooms to watch Moulin Rouge. I thought the story somewhat sappy, but the storytelling style much fun.
Rest of the week soon (I hope).
n