Last Friday night we were having an off-night, after an off-week and just feeling blah.  A bit before 7PM John suggested we go to the beach.  I said yes!  He said really?  I said let’s do it!  I’ll Pack!

We packed in about five minutes.  Set out enough food and water for the kittens, packed up Rory’s things, and hopped in the car.  Rory is always up for a road trip.  Truthfully, I wish our dog behaved as well at home as she did when traveling – she’s a dream to travel with, which makes her 90lbs easier to manage.

In the car we listened to the audiobook of Catching Fire because we love the audiobooks of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire is my favorite of the three by far.  We are audibook people when it comes to road trips… no radio, no cds, just books.  Music is everyday car-listening, not long trip-listening.  My favorite road trip audibook is At Home by Bill Bryson in case you were curious.  Love that man, love that book.

Originally we were going to go all the way to the OBX (approxmiately 4.5 hours from us) but we didn’t wanna drive that far since it was already 7 and we had a pup with us and most of the hotels on the island are ClosedForBusiness in February.  So we took the easypeasy route and traveled the 2 hours to Carolina Beach instead knowing that there’s always rooms available there and we can still see the ocean and it’s close! And it’s cheap!  And we just need to pick a destination so we can drive.

The hotel we found on the beach was cheap and everyone there was two sheets to the wind hanging out outside on the decks and staring and talking and conversing with way drunk voices.  It wasn’t even late and everyone was super wasted.  This is when I thanked my stars that we had a huge dog that looks/sounds super intimidating with us.  Oh Rory — her only crime ever in life is loving things TOO much, but dear darling Rory sounds like she would rip your legs off in two seconds when she barks.  It’s terribly hard for her to make friends.  That is her cross to bear.  So anyway — I take the dog out to do her thing while John sets up her crate in the room and lugs up our quickly-thrown-together bags.  We get in the room and we are hungry and thirsty but the only places around that are open are filled with noisy drunk people and we didn’t want to leave the dog alone.  John got provisions while I snuggled with the pup and flipped through the 5 channels on the television aimlessly and took scared looking pictures of myself on my phone because there were people right outside our room with way drunk voices yelling and such and sometimes when you’re in a seedy motel your mind wanders to all the horror movies you watch all the time and you think people have set up cameras behind the mirror so they can videotape your violent death.  That didn’t happen, but for the 10 minutes that John was gone, I was scared.

We just hung out that night in the room watching Friends dvds on John’s laptop and luxuriating in the king size bed that fit all three of us way better than our queen size at home.  So obviously by morning we were all on top of each other once again as per usual because some habits they just stick.

Morning — let’s get out of here!  We cried.  We fed the dog, packed our things, and got back in the car to head to the nearby beach park.  We walked with Rory around the park, she was too thrilled with new smells to be bothered to go to the bathroom but eventually we managed to get something outta her.  It had started to rain, so we headed south to the ferry.  We didn’t want to do anything at the beach, we just wanted to see the ocean.  Because when you go too long without seeing the ocean, funny things start happening to your soul.  We waited on the ferry and looked out at the water, then enjoyed the 20 minute ferry ride to Southport.  Southport — such a cute little gem of a town, we just drove through… most of the things were closed as it was early and the offseason.  We’ll just head back up to Wilmington.  We did, we drove around downtown, noted the changes (we’ve both lived there at different times in our lives), found some breakfast, and then said okay we can go home now.  So we did.

The rest of the day/evening we worked on a 1000 piece puzzle and had a Gilmore Girls marathon.  Sunday came and I woke John up by asking him if he wanted to create a breakfast feast.  So we did and we ate it and then we spent the rest of the gorgeous, sunny day outside.

It was a good weekend.