7 Quick Takes Friday, Vol #6

Seeing as how I've been gone for a few weeks to the beach, this 7 Quick Takes will focus on... well, the beach.

1.  Packing Lightly:  I went hardcore light packing this year.  I fit everything into two pouches on my baby carrier backpack since we were taking it anyways.  No shoes, fewer clothes and less electronics.  So did my wife!  Despite bringing a few large needed baby essentials, we also fewer beach toys and no specialized kitchen equipment or ingredients... and it was AWESOME!  Take it from two chronic over-packers, taking a vacation with less bags meant we spent more time doing what we wanted and less time managing out stuff.  

2. Beach song of the year:  Every year we go to beach we have at least one "beach song" that somehow becomes our theme for the week.  This year it was Knee Deep by Zac Brown with Jimmy Buffett.  Jimmy Buffett's lines, particularly, might be the best lines in any beach song.

Wrote a note said be back in a minute,
Bought a boat and I sailed off in it,
Nobody's gonna miss me anyway.

My mind on a permanent vacation,
The ocean is my only medication,
Wishin' my condition ain't ever gonna go away.

3.  Where to eat in OIB:  If you're specifically headed to Ocean Isle Beach, NC we did find some great places to eat.  Places in the area we'd highly recommend:

Dockside in Calabash:  Calabash-style fried seafood with nice views on the water.  The menu is a bit simple and the prices are a tad high for my taste, but the food was well-cooked.  Unlike some other Calabash fried seafood we had, you could actually taste the seafood through the batter and it was quite good.

Provision Co. in Southport:  Its a bit of a haul from OIB, but this tiny eatery is worth the drive!  We went for lunch and it wasn't too crowded.  All of the seating is outside (underneath an awning with about 75 ceiling fans) but you order your food inside.  You grab your beer and drinks from the coolers inside and you're on the honor system to tell them how much you had.  The menu is a bit limited on seafood items, but everything we had was good.  Besides, its not everyday you get to have conch fritters for lunch.

Calabash Creamery in Calabash:  This place has been an ice-cream mecca in Brunswick County for nearly a decade.  You walk in the front door and you can smell that the ice-cream is homemade... its that good.  Get there early to avoid a long wait for your Key Lime Pie, Birthday Cake, Sunset Peach or Better than Almond Joy ice cream (or try their new Salty Dog Chocolate ice cream in a pretzel cone).

Sunset Slush in Ocean Isle:  I've never been a big fan of Italian Ice; it always seemed like a clever way to charge people too much for flavored frozen water by adding a European nation to the title.  Sunset Slush has caused me to end my suspicion.  With about 30 flavors in their permanent locations and 4-5 in their push carts going up and down the beach you can always find something to cool you down.  Their ice isn't chunky.  It isn't shaved.  It is scooped and the consistency is creamy, which you don't typically find in frozen ice.  I still love ice cream, but in the middle of the day when the temperature was recorded with three digits nothing hit the spot like Sunset Slush.  They have locations up and down the Carolina Coast; if you see one, give em a shot... they're not your typical tourist rip-off establishment.  

4.  Stuff you need on the beach:  a Coozie.  I had long ignored the value of this humble, foam drink holder... but not anymore.  When the heat index is 105 and the sea breeze blows around the hot air like a convection oven your 12oz can of Coke, Diet Sun Drop or Landshark will heat up before you finish cracking the lid and you'll wind up with a mouthful of warmth liquid, wishing you drank sea-water instead.

Coozie to the rescue!  These bad boys act like a cooler for your cans, extending the life of coolness for your drinks providing me a few extra minutes of crisp, cool refreshment.  But a word of caution... don't be fooled by thin, collapsable cozies.  They are very popular in the stores these days, fold down to save on storage and are quite trendy.  But they're not only flimsy in construction, they're flimsy in performance.  Get the thick, bulky, funky ones.  Ignore my advice about packing light and saving space... get the coozie that actually coozes.  Preferably the ones with tacky colors and out of date graphics... they seem to work better.  

5.  Stuff you need on the beach:  Backpack chair.  It is what it says it is... a beach chair that has straps that folds up to wear as a backpack.  They usually feature a large pouch for storage and they've become quite popular over the past few years.  I've used mine through five years of beach trips, days at the lake, camping trips, baseball games and five seasons of corn maze supervision; mine is still holding up strong.  I've always loved my chair but now with a little one I don't know how I could get to the beach without it.  My wife, daughter and I went down to the beach every day during our vacation and never once had to take a separate beach bag.  If you have kids and any kind of walk to the beach, get yourself a few of these... and put a coozie in the pouch.  

6.  Stuff you need on the beach:  Twice the Ice.  True, Twice the Ice is a place, not so much a 'thing.'  Instead of buying your ice at the supermarket (where they can easily charge you $3 for a 10lb bag) these little stands take your money and you can get either a 16lb bag or fill your cooler with 20lb of ice for just $1.75.  We went through a lot of ice trying to keep our drinks cold so we could put them in coozies.

7.  Better isn't alway better:  If there was one thing I learned from this year's beach trip is that always doing the "better" thing isn't always better.  Usually we cook a big elaborate meal, we try to spend as much time as humanly possible on the beach and we try to eat at too many local dives and hit too many stores.

This year we trimmed back.  Way back.  Instead of cooking the elaborate meal we prepared a nice salad and ordered out pizza.  We ended up having so much less stress and were able to spend more time with our daughter Norah.  

We did spend a lot of time on the beach (I mean, that's why we go in the first place) but we didn't overdo it.  If Norah needed a nap or was running behind, we went with the program.  The last two days the heat index was well over 105 (too hot for an 11 month old) so we spent the day in AC aquariums and stores and didn't complain about the loss of beach time.

As for for eating out too much... we kept lunch simple.  We ate lunch at home and only went to the restaurants we really wanted to eat at.  Same with all of the tourist gift stores.  Again, this gave us so much more time together as a family and so much less stress.

Its funny, I've never thought of vacations as stressful, but looking back on the years and years of going all out and doing everything we could possibly could I can't help but feel a bit sad.  Doing the bigger and better things left us more tired and less fulfilled.  My wife and I have spent a long time on the drive back talking about simplifying things, not only future vacations, but also at home in our day to day lives.  

Thanks for the lesson beach!

Read the original at Conversion Diary.