First Trip to North Carolina's Coast- Wrightsville Beach

July 03, 2013

It was a boys only weekend. My wife was away in Chicago to see her friends, so EJ and I hit the road. I figured since it's summer time it'd be the perfect opportunity to hit the beach... and it was. We got to Wrightsville beach 2-o'clock-ish. I drove around for about 15-20 minutes just to get a feel for the place and see where the best place was to park.

My goal was to take a care-free approach to this trip. That means: NO schedules, No agenda, just free-styling. So with an empty cooler in the truck and bottles of hot water, I free-styled my way into a grocery store and picked up some ice -- fed the meter a littler more change and walked down the street. We stumbled into a surf shop. It looked a little too pro for me.. so we went a little further past an ice cream shop --that looked like it had been built by hand -- and into a souvenir shop. We brushed past all the cheese t-shirts and magnets and headed straight upstairs where we found snorkeling gear, wake boards and what I was really looking for -- body boards. We picked up two.. and marched back to our car which thankfully didn't have a ticket on it.. even though the meter had dipped into the red.

Now it was off to find a beach-side parking spot. It turned out to be much easier that I had first thought. I actually passed one parking space and found another. We paid our parking fee and pressed on toward the beach. The wind nearly blew us away... but EJ and I weren't playing in the wind.. we were focused on getting a good spot and getting into the water with our new found boards of fun.

Once we were settled, I tried to become a quick study and teacher at something that I had never done before -- body boarding. I guess you can say I made it up as I went along. I must have gotten something right, because we had a blast. Ethan took a break to make a sand castle. I kept going with my body board An hour felt like 20 minutes and before I knew it, it was time to go back to the car and head home. Let me just say, ... the four hour round trip drive was worth it. And even though I was trying to make it back for a church service that night, it was a very relaxing and enjoyable trip with my little mini-me. The only think missing was his mommy.