A Week at the Beach...

This week, we took a vacation! We were invited by two friends, Monty and Dinah Love, to accompany them to Holden Beach, North Carolina. Monty and Dinah are celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary! We were thrilled to be invited and even more thrilled to be going to the beach for a week.

We drove in two separate cars -- Monty and Dinah leaving from Huntsville and us leaving from Fayetteville -- and we joined each other for dinner enroute to Charlotte, where we spent the first night. We got up early and headed for Holden Beach, which is on the North Carolina coast between Wilmington and Myrtle Beach. Monty and Dinah had rented a beach house through a local realtor. It is called "Bryan's Dream" and is a four-bedroom, four-bath beach house built on posts, as are all the houses here. It's a perfect place for a relaxing week.

We've had to focus our attention on highly stressful activities -- walks on the beach, shell gathering, jig saw puzzles, dominoes, and food. We gave the oldly-weds a jig saw puzzle that is topographic map with their home in the center of the puzzle. This took us two days of spare time effort:
Monty has been taking a class in digital photography and has gotten some great photos, including this picture of a wave in which you can see individual fish swimming (click on the image to see a larger version):

Yesterday, Mary Ann and I went shopping for seafood and we all cooked a seafood feast of scallops, shrimp, and crablegs. We prepared fresh rice and red potatoes, and had a real feast.

It's going to be tough going home. Dear friends like Monty and Dinah are a genuine gift in our lives. The beauty of the sea brings back some fond memories of my days in the Navy. And the beauty of God's creations is a never ending spectacle in a place like this.

This afternoon, Monty and I went kite flying. Talk about a great, mindless diversion! We were like two little kids. What else is new???