I Don't Want to Wait, For Our Lives to be Over...

I'm back from North Cack-a-lack-ee, and it was fantastic. We traveled to Bald Head Island, right near the NC-SC border, and just south of Wilmington, NC, the locale where the beloved teen-opic Dawson's Creek was filmed. True to the idyllic waterside (nee Capeside) scenery of The Creek, it was a fantastic trip.

Eleven of us converged upon a large beach house on Bald Head to celebrate my friend Kate's birthday. (Bald Head is fun to say, no; although not nearly as fun as Gay Head, on Martha's Vineyard.) It was like a grown-up version of spring break, or a slightly more juvenile version of The Big Chill. We drank wine, played games, ate delicious seafood and corn on the cob, and chased each other through the house with water guns. I lost countless games of cards, and read a book in a rocking chair perched just above the dunes, alongside the ocean. Dreamy.

On the downside, I have a dreadful stripe of sunburn on my lower back from laying on a bench reading a book. No, it wasn't warm enough to wear a bathing suit. I was just a fool in low-rider jeans with an inadvertent couple of inches of skin showing between my jeans and my slightly shifted t-shirt. It never fails -- take me near a beach and I'll manage not only to get a sunburn, but a striped sunburn clearly illustrating the 2-inch by 8-inch patch where I forget to apply sun block. (Usually it's a stripe on my armpits or near the edge of my bathing suit.)

One of the most fun parts about Bald Head is that cars aren't allowed. So everyone putt putts around in little golf carts. I was content to let everyone else chauffeur me around until Saturday night, when we were returning from dinner at the Raw Bar on the island. We went to the ferry to pick up a friend, and headed back to the house. But, while we had been gone at dinner, a huge storm passed, and there were fallen branches, frogs, puddles, etc. making the roads nearly impassible for regular cars, let alone the little golf cart I was driving. PLUS, it was pitch black. There aren't any street lamps on the roads, and the headlights on the cart were weak. We would have been better off with two little pen lights taped to the front of the cart. PLUS, some of the people in the cart -- not me, the driver -- were stinking drunk and noisy, and I don't know how to park when it's noisy, let alone drive.

We made it back, though. While I may be a sucky card player, I'm an awesome navigator and driver, with a sense of adventure and direction that needs neither map nor clear road. (Okay, my friend Debbi, even when drunk, is an awesome navigator and numerous times kept me from my going in the wrong direction, even though I was absolutely positive that I was right and she was wrong.) But the important thing is, we made it back.