Easter Weekend

Since Deere gave us Good Friday off for Easter Karen and I decided to head to the beach for the weekend. A vendor of mine, who’s lived in North Carolina his whole life, recommended that we visit two nice family beaches in Wilmington called Wrightsville Beach and Topsail Island. Wilmington is in the Southeast corner of the state where the climate is a little more like Orlando than it is like Charlotte. They have palm trees there and Spanish moss hanging in the hardwoods.

The distance is only about 220 miles one way but it’s through a hundred little cities and takes more like 4 hours to get there. On the way home we decided to take the interstate back which was about 100 miles further but we still got home in the same 4 hours it took us to get out there.

On our way to the beach we stopped into one those cities I mentioned to feed Lilly and get lunch at Bo jangles, the South’s version of KFC. Once we finished our lunch we got back on the road and pulled into Wilmington Beach around 1:30 in the afternoon.

We decided to see if we could check into our condo early but when we got there we discovered that the pool pump was broken and the water was all dirty. So, we asked to cancel our reservation and went down the street to the Hilton Beach Resort; which turned out to be much nicer place for about 10 bucks less so we were happy to have the upgrade.

As soon as we settled in, we dressed Lilly in her bathing suit, strapped on her sandals and headed down to the beach. Everyone that saw her at the beach kept commenting on her cute bathing suit and sandals. Once we put our stuff down in the sand we walked with Lilly down to the water and dipped her feet into the ocean. I don’t know how much she liked it but Karen and I had so much fun.

Karen bought Lilly an inflatable pool toy and we were dying to try it out. So, after a couple of hours on the beach we moved it to the pool. It was so cute, the inflatable allowed Lilly to float around in the pool. In fact, she liked it so much that she just sat back in the inflatable and enjoyed a nice lounge in the pool.

After the pool we cleaned up and went into town for some local seafood. Once we finished eating we went back to the beach as the sun was setting and walk along the shoreline.

The next morning we ate Easter brunch at the resort’s restaurant which had large south facing windows that overlooked the ocean; it was a very picturesque breakfast. After breakfast we went up to topsail beach to spend some time playing in the sand and to take some photos. Once we saw everything we wanted to there, we went back into Wilmington and toured the battleship USS North Carolina.

The tour was really fun, interesting and entertaining. The first 10 minutes of the tour was a video about the battleship which showed actual battle footage of the ship while it was at sea in WWII. After the video, we boarded the ship and took a self-guided tour that allowed us to enter the bridge, walk the deck and go even below where we toured the engine room, sailor quarters and infirmary. After the battleship tour it was starting to get late so we feed Lilly, gassed up and headed for home.



Our weekend out was so much fun, we saw a lot of things that we knew the family would just love to experience, Karen and I kept saying oh Gracie would love this or Steve and Emily would think this is so cool. So, I decided to put together a short video clip to visually share our vacation with all of you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHgYzY_SPOY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

P.S. When I saw this aligator and instantly thought of Jack, he would have died of excitement if he was with us when we stopped in at this place.