Beach Report

 Travel  Comments Off on Beach Report
Jun 222014
 

I just got back from a week at Wrightsville Beach, NC, with my extended family. We’ve been doing it for years, with only one missed summer (when I graduated from high school).

As the years have gone on, the number of participants has grown. I think we’re at around 14 people, and when my dad’s cousin and his family come, it goes up to around 21 people. (Depending on who’s coming, who’s bringing a significant other, etc.)

It can get a little nuts.

Fortunately, my dad’s cousins only visit for the day. If they spent the night, sleeping would become… interesting.

The house we stay in has 6 bedrooms, each with a bath. That makes it manageable for 14. It’s essentially two town houses glued together in the middle, with a giant common area. Each side has its own kitchen. On one side is the living room/den (kids’ side), and the other side is a big dining room (old people side).

What makes the house great is that it’s oceanfront, and that we can rent it, rather than dealing with the hassle of owning it. Owning a beach house is like buying a sick pet. You need to pour in a ton of money and attention to keep it from falling apart, and at some point, it’s going to leave this world anyway.

Why? Hurricanes. They eat beach houses. And if the hurricane is bad enough, and moves the mean high tide line too close, you won’t be able to rebuild.

So we rent, because it’s easier.

Regardless, it’s great that I know for sure I’ll have a chance to spend some time with my extended family every year. That means catching up with my cousins, aunt and uncle, and my little second cousins. (Not so little anymore, though!)

Wrightsville Beach

 Food, Travel  Comments Off on Wrightsville Beach
Jun 202013
 

I just got back from the annual family trip to Wrightsville Beach, NC, where every year for the past 30 years or so, my folks and my aunt’s family all get together and take over a beach house for a week.

It’s a great time to catch up with family, play setback, eat, kick back and relax. My dad’s cousin and his kids and grandkids all visited, too. They usually come for dinner one night on the weekend. The house gets crazy crowded, but it’s fun.

I made sure to visit the Trolly Stop (yes, that’s the correct spelling) for the best hot dogs in N.C., and we went to Genki Sushi for lunch. Sugi-san makes some wicked good food.

The only thing we didn’t get to do was go to Britt’s Donuts in Carolina Beach, N.C. It was a little far to drive for donuts, even if they’re some of the best donuts in the country. We’ll have to go next time.

I feel recharged… I also feel like I need to eat nothing but raw vegetables for the next few weeks.

Feeling Genki

 Travel  Comments Off on Feeling Genki
Jun 182009
 

I had a really nice lunch with my sister, brother-in-law, nephew, and my cousin Tuesday at a great sushi shop in Wilmington called Genki Sushi. It’s my new favorite Japanese restaurant in the state of North Carolina. It’s sort of like a cross between a sushi bar and an izakaya (which is a Japanese pub).

Coming here really does feel like coming to a real Japanese restaurant, and Sugi-san and his wife do an excellent job of making you feel right at home. The menu is full of good stuff, too. From good fresh sushi to those dishes that make you feel a little 懐かしい (natsukashii) for good old Japanese food.

It’s not the stuff you get in the steak houses, and it’s not some fancy fusion stuff. This is good, solid 和食 (washoku), which means traditional Japanese food (like sushi), along with some good 洋食 (youshoku), which is the more “modern” Japanese food (like tonkatsu). It’s all good stuff.

I had some tuna sushi (nigiri, of course), with fried squid legs, and a great tonkatsu plate. And of course, a bowl of Sugi-san’s excellent rice. He makes the best rice I’ve ever had. (And I’ve had some excellent rice.)

Hot Dog!

No trip to Wrightsville Beach is complete without Trolly Stop hot dogs either. I had a couple of  Carolina Dogs on Wednesday for lunch. Those are the best hot dogs in the world.

And I’m not biased at all because I was born here.

A Carolina Dog is a hot dog with chili and cole slaw on it, but for some reason, the chili and cole slaw at the Trolly Stop just goes really well together.  I love to add a dash of mustard and ketchup. (Not too much.) And the steamed hot dog buns are perfect.

Oh yeah, the beach was wonderful, too.

Hey, it’s the beach. Of course it’s great. The beaches in North Carolina are hard to beat. (Except, of course, when you’re in the middle of a hurricane…)

It’s good being with the whole extended family, but it will be good to get home and take a break from all of the traveling for a few weeks. It’ll also be time to stop eating so much, and get back on a more sane diet.

Jun 142009
 

I made it safely to Wrightsville Beach, NC, where we have a big family get-together every year. It involves eating way too much food and a lot of staring at the ocean. There’s also a lot of setback involved.

Setback is a card game that apparently only the people in my family know how to play. I’ve never met another soul who knows how to play it. More importantly, it requires four people, and that means it requires a family gathering of some sort to get enough people to play it properly. The best way to describe it is “Redneck Bridge,” and I’ll just leave it at that.

But getting there is half the fun, or so they say.

I managed to get out of the hotel in Baltimore at about 12:30, and made it on to the highway okay, only to get caught in the usual Sunday gridlock just south of DC on I-95.

Of course, as I approached DC, my TomTom tried to tell me about all of these great shortcuts, but this time I ignored it. No more shortcuts through hospital parking lots, thanks.

Why do I use it then? Mostly as a trip computer, or for when I get lost. It’s really handy for those sorts of things. I also use it to find places I don’t know how to get to, but I don’t particularly like relying on it alone.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling not knowing where I am, and just relying on a random black box to tell me where to go. I always keep a few maps lying around the car. I don’t use them, but I have them, just in case. (And AAA gives them to me for free.)

As I fled DC, I got stuck in the usual I-95 southbound gridlock. It lasted for about 10 miles, and can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to get through. There’s no particular reason for it, other than that there isn’t any other way to get out of DC and go south.

After crawling through Northern Virginia, I wound up grabbing some junk food along the highway south of Petersburg at some anonymous truck stop that had a Burger King nearby. Sometimes hunger trumps common sense. At least I won’t have to eat there ever again.

It was a good reminder that making your own food is a lot smarter than trusting a faceless corporation to do it for you.

Have You Seen I-795?

As I headed back into North Carolina, I started looking for the exit for I-795, which is a shortcut. It cuts about 30 minutes off of my travel time to Wilmington, and, more importantly, gets me off of I-95, which is full of people falling asleep at the wheel or driving like maniacs at this point.

If you’re not familiar with I-95, it’s the main freeway from Maine to Miami along the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.

For people driving from New York to Florida, North Carolina is the state where many of them tend to fall asleep and run into things. The news here is full of reports of these kinds of accidents. The results are not usually very pretty.

So while I was looking for I-795, I wasn’t seeing any signs for it. The problem was that nobody in the NC Department of Transportation had decided to put up a sign for the road until the last second, so I missed my exit. The sign was actually nailed onto the exit sign as an afterthought.

Thanks, guys. Way to put my tax dollars to work.

Actually, I could have made the exit if somebody in a van from NY would have let me pull over, but instead she honked at me and gave me the finger.

Thanks. You’re a giving person, aren’t you?

Of course, the GPS wanted me to stay on I-95. It wasn’t convinced that I-795 would save me any time. So I took the next exit, pulled out my free AAA map, and managed to find I-795.

Or so I thought.

When I saw the signs suddenly saying I was on US 264 East, headed to the Outer Banks, I realized that the score was now NCDOT 2, Rich 0.

At this point I admitted defeat, and started listening to the GPS.

Fine, I give up. Just get me back on a road that will lead to Wilmington. I’ll even go on your stupid I-95.

The little box started leading me on all kinds of back roads for about 15 minutes, until by some miracle, I wound up on I-795. Amazing. It really does exist!

And this time, I didn’t have to go through a single hospital parking lot.

About 20 minutes later, I was on I-40, zooming towards the beach.

So I guess these things do eventually work out… sometimes. I finally got to the beach at about 8:30 that night, so I only lost about half an hour overall.

I highly recommend taking I-795 as a shortcut.

If you can find it.

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