Beach Week 2009

August of last year Allison and I made a promise, as we were heading back from our beach trip John Grayson noticed Digger's Dungeon on the side of the road. For those of you who are not in the know, Digger's Dungeon is the home base of the best (and John Grayson's favorite) monster truck in the whole world, Gravedigger. So of course this year we had to stop on our way down to the beach. Upon our arrival, we were surprised to find that Digger lends space in his Dungeon to other monster trucks such as Superman (the monster truck).



After spending some time walking around the garage we made our way to the field of old Gravediggers. Gravedigger has gone through many iterations since its inception, in fact they are now on Gravedigger XXII (I am beginning to scare myself with my knowledge of Monster Trucks). Right after this picture was snapped some other Monster Truck afficienado walked over and said, 'Boys, this here is Gravedigger I, this is a piece of American history right here', indeed it was.

For the first few days of our beach week this year, the weather was not great. You know those vacations where you spend a bunch of time watching the Weather Channel trying to figure out when you are going to get your first ray of sunshine...that was us, learning a lot about the low pressure system sitting off the shore of the outer banks. During the breaks from the rain we took the chance to walk down to the beach. Delia was a huge fan of the beach almost immediately.
Just like last year John Grayson was facinated with the ocean. Seeing that this year we had to fear him running out on his own we institued a 'hold Mommy or Daddy's hand' rule whenever touching ocean water.


As the cold and rain prevented us from even using the pool at our house, we took the chance to take the kids to do some other activities. On this occasion we took them to paint the wild horses of Corolla. While we didn't see any real wild horses, we sure painted the crap out of some cardboard ones.
On a seperate note, if I offered a program where I had kids painting cardboard horses that were likely to be thrown away soon after, I would use water soluable paint. Well, the folks who run this program obviously don't think like me because we all now have clothes that have permanant reminders of our horse painting experience.


Later in the week the weather got much better. The waves were still pretty fierce from the weather earlier in the week so we spent most of our time in the sand. In addition, there were all kinds of flags telling us to 'not swim'. We found out later that some did not take that advice.

Delia was a huge fan of the sand, after she learned that it was not something to be eaten she spent the rest of week crawling around, often times toward the ocean but we are still able to catch her.

While digging and playing sea turtle, Delia managed to cover her entire body in sand. In fact, upon further investigation when we returned to the house we found that she managed to cover her entire bottom as well (still trying to figure out how that happened seeing that she was in a diaper the entire time).



While we had designs on hitting up the dungeon again on our way out of town, our desire to get to kids home before nap won out. While the weather was not ideal, it ended up being a great week with our friends and the kids and really look forward to going back again next year!