Sunday, July 27, 2008

After hearing all the fuss about Outer Banks (NC), we finally got to go check it out today. A friend of mine from Arkansas rented a house in Corolla for a week for her and her two kids. She invited us to come down for the day, have lunch and go to the beach. The 90 mile trip to Corolla took us 2 and a half hours to get there. We paid a $2 toll to get on the Chesapeake Expressway (each way). We passed some quaint houses right on the beach, went through the town of Duck, and winded through a gated community in Corolla to get to her rental property. The houses were incredibly new and nice and I learned that she paid $2500 for 7 days, quite a shocking price, we thought, even for such a beautiful area. We had lunch at the house and then took the community-provided trolley down to the public access beach. We swam and relaxed on the beach for about 3 hours. The beach itself really didn't seem different than the Virginia Beach beach, down on Atlantic, but the community, the area, the stretch of road leading through each town was what was different. It was like being in Key West, a quaint beach town, where people were clearly on a vacation with their families, vacations that to me seem like such a thing of the past - they are clearly not in Outer Banks. Kids and grandparent riding bicycles, teenagers riding skateboards, couples inline skating, beach umbrellas and those roller beach carts with big wheels designed to carry all of your towels and picnic belongings across the sand with ease, families having ice cream at the local ice cream parlor after gathering groceries for the week from the neighborhood grocer. It all screamed family vacation. After only an afternoon enjoying this life, we decided next year we'd be one of those families spending a week of our life on what seems like a whole other planet. (On our way home, we stopped at Andy's Cheesesteaks & Cheeseburgers in Currituck, one of a very few restaurant options on a Sunday evening. Decent food, terrible service. $20)