My plan was to wake up and leave the hotel really early. But with 4 young children, things don’t always go according to plan. By the time we finished breakfast and loaded up, it was 9.
As we were driving, Kingston was coughing nonstop. I had just mentioned to Don that I thought we should pull over to give him some cough medicine. About that time, he threw up. Fun! So we pulled off the highway to find a place to clean up. We found a gas station called Sheetz. I thought I had remembered the Lees mentioning their love for Sheetz so we stopped there. It was pretty impressive, but Don has a bit of company pride and kept saying the QT Gen 3 stores are so much better.
However, I think the boys were impressed.
After driving a while longer, we needed to fuel the van and our bodies. So we stopped at another Sheetz and ordered some hot dogs and a pretzel to share.
As you drive to The Outer Banks, you have to drive over a few loooong bridges that connect the islands. They were pretty neat but hard to capture the neatness in a picture.
Finally, we made it to the beach house at 4:30! We quickly made ourselves at home.
We unloaded everything as fast as we could so we could drive to the beach and watch the sun set over the ocean.
The beach is only about a mile from the house!
Liam went straight for the water, Kai was very excited to play in the sand, and then there was Kingston….
He was terrified to even lift his head from the towel for the first 15 minutes. It sure did keep him out of trouble!
I think Don and Liam could stand there letting the waves hit their legs all day if they were able to
Kingston was slowly warming up to the idea
You see that dark cloud in the background? We chose to ignore it, just figuring that’s what the sky looked like at sunset. And the sun? Oh yeah, it doesn’t set on this side of the banks 🙁 But the lighting was gorgeous!!
I found this log and obsessively started taking pictures of the boys with it
Those clouds are normal, right?
Kingston is now totally converted to a full on beach lover! He was pouring sand on his head
A few minutes after this last picture was taken, Don came over to me to suggest leaving. Then he said “oh no!” At that point, I felt about two drops of rain. A few seconds later, the sky opened up and poured out every last drop, all at once. We grabbed all our belonging and kids and tried running back to the van as quickly as possible. However, with short legs and pouring rain, we didn’t get back to the van very quickly. Kai and Evangeline were screaming and crying. By the time we made it to the van, we were soaked.
We just couldn’t stop laughing. I’m not sure why we chose to ignore the storm cloud rolling in, but we did. It wasn’t ideal but it was a memory!!
We drove back to the house for everyone to bathe. Kai was scared because the bathtub was too big. Liam and Kingston splashed around and played for a while.
It was such a fun evening! We love the beach!! And we were excited for a few more days of Outer Banks fun!