Vacation #1: North Carolina

Posted by Mark **WARNING** This is a very long post, but its entertaining. Stick with it!

I think it goes without saying that It's been quite a while since I posted anything new... and I know its the usual cop out to say that the reason lies behind the fact that we've been busy, but its true this time! We've been very busy and had a lot of things going on as of late, which I will talk about later I'm sure. But yeah let's start off with our vacations that we've been fortunate enough to go on this past month.

THE OUTER BANKS:

In my family there are four kids.. all of us except for my 18 year old brother have all moved away from Utah and thus we don't all see eachother at the same very often... maybe once a year (if we're lucky) we'll all be in SLC for events like general conference or something. Even then we'll all be together for one evening at best. Therefore, someone in the family had the genius idea to organize a family vacation where we'd all be together for a whole week...I guess you could call it a family reunion. The plan was to rent a house out on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My sister and her family would drive down from Connecticut, my parents, little bro., Kimmi, and I would fly over and my older brother who lives in North Carolina already would supply us with the transportation to get us all out to where we were going. We had an extremely fun filled week which would take way too long to write about. Thus I'll just post a bunch of photos and chronologically explain what we did. Sadly, I don't have ALL the photos of what we did. Some pictures are on my siblings cameras and I haven't received my copy's yet. Either way I'll just post some of what we have.

Kimmi and I decided to fly out a day early so that we could spend some time exclusively with my brother and his good wife. Kimmi's never been to NC so it was fun to see around town and just hang out. Especially see Alan and Lindsays house with all the personal touches that they've made.

This is my older Bro. and me. We woke up that first morning to go to their ward 4th of July breakfast. Funny story here. You wont be able to tell unless you zoom in but Alan has a beard in this picture! Now those of you who know my family know that having facial hair is pretty much a carnal sin! Alan decided he was old enough to try it out after about a week of not shaving due to a important project he had to finish at school. He decided to keep it the rest of that month as a joke until everyone in the family saw him at the reunion. It gave me quite the shock when he picked us up from the airport.


Being the 4th of July Kimmi and I made it quite clear that we demanded to see fireworks. Lucky for us Durham, North Carolina has this outdoor concert every year at this really cool amphitheater. The North Carolina Orchestra comes and plays before they put on a big firework show. Its an amazing show.


As you can see by the picture above, it gets REALLY busy so we had to make sure to get there really early. I think Alan and I showed up to save spots around 2pm when the concert didn't start till 7pm. But that was OK. We got a great spot in the shade of some pine trees and we had plenty of games, books, and snacks to keep us entertained until it all started.


On Sunday we went to Alan's ward for church. On the way however we wanted to stop at Duke University so Kimmi could see the Campus. Gorgeous place. We started at Duke Gardens and made our way up to the campus cathedral before we had to get back to the cars in order to make it to church on time.




After church we had a quick snack before hopping in the cars and making the 4.5 hour drive to the Outer Banks. The house we had was awesome and the weather was perfect. Hot, of course, but not too hot. We spent most of our time that week on the beach.

Alan bought a bunch of kites in a bunch of different designs...it was great kite weather. I of course went with the Shark.



Alan of course wanted one that a lot more assembly was required (its a viking ship)


How many doctors does it take to assemble a kite made for children?...Two apparently....this is about 20 combined years of higher education hard at work.


Now that its done lets see if it flies


Turns out it flies very well...even better then my shark


One day we rented Jeeps to go drive on the beach and look for wild horses.... we didn't find any horses, but none of us cared because we just had fun driving in the sand.



Alan felt Jeeps were a bit to girly for him so he brought his own car.... you can kind of see it in this picture... look for the headlights


Great action shots of Alans classic GMC Jimmy which did suprisingly well in the sand.

Alan also thought it would be fun to rent some surf kayaks for a few days. I definitely have to say that it was one of my more favorite activities at the beach. There was a big learning curve trying to figure out how to ride the waves without capsizing but after some time, lost sunglasses, and a left lung full of sea water I got it down packed!




Now whats going to the beach without building sand castles! Here are few pictures of the family's projects.

Alan built a scale model of a castle in Spain....Show off!



I headed in a different direction and wanted to see how deep a hole I could make


My cute nephew wanted to help but he mostly just ended up beating the sand with his shovel


He also liked climbing into my hole to keep tabs on my progress



I dug as far as I could before I hit water and really couldn't go any further because the water made it counter productive.


My niece Emi and her castle


Probably one of my favorite castles was this one . Its a drip castle



What else did you do other then the beach you might ask? Lots of stuff! Among other things that I'll mention.... we swam in the pool that our house had, we played a lot of board games, we took naps, gained 10 pounds from eating all the great food everyone made every night.

We went on bike rides around the housing community



We went and saw Kitty Hawk (where the wright brothers had their first flight)



We attempted to play vollyball, but didnt try very long seeing the Dibb family is cursed with poor athleticism...it didn't go to well.


Ahhhh shuffleboard.. this is definitely more our style



We went and climbed to the top of a local light house. Lots of stairs. I can't believe that back in the old days before electricity the light house keeper had to climb to the top every 2.5 hours to trim the wick and check the fuel levels!





One of the last family activities was going to take family pictures at the beach. Heres the ones of just Kimmi and I.



And that was our trip! As you can see we had a great time. Now all we had to do was get home.

Another reason we flew out a day early is because we had to fly home a day earlier in order to get Kimmi back to work. To make sure we got home to Twin Falls by 5pm I set up a flight out of NC at 6:50am. Now thats early as it is, but tack on a 4.5 hour drive from the beach on top to get to the airport. Thus I pulled an all nighter leaving the Outer Banks at midnight and driving till we got to the terminal. We made good time so we had some time before our flight took off. This is what I did to keep busy....needless to say I was exhausted! It was a full flight so Im sure the other passengers were pretty ticked off that I was taking up a whole row but I really didn't care. I'm glad Kimmi took a photo of me it made me laugh after I woke up.