Ryan and I had a wonderful celebration of our country's independence. We decided to go camping in Wilmington, NC for the holiday and spend some time on Wilmington beach. I was thrilled for the weekend. After spending an entire summer with Jennette and her family two summers ago, and helping prepare for beach and camping trips several times, I thought I would have a very easy time preparing for our trip. I made tin foil dinners, bought supplies for s'mores, reserved a campsite and packed the car. We were ready.
We drove to our campsite on Friday and set up camp. We even had two camping chairs that we could put by the campfire pit. We asked around to find out which was the favorite beach out of the several within a 20 minute drive of where our site was, and settled on Wrightsville beach. After we had parked and were halfway to the beach, I realized that not only had we forgotten our chairs at the campsite but we also forgot the umbrella we were going to use and half of the food we were going to take onto the beach. Uff da!
The beach was wonderful. Sure we didn't get to sit and watch the waves in our brand new chairs that we were so excited about, but we could sit on our towels and watch. We read, we dug for sand crabs (with no success), we walked along the beach, swam out to sea to get a close up look at pelicans diving for fish (very cool), and even went body surfing.
Last summer when we were on the Outer Banks with my family, Ryan tried several times to boogie board with little success. He is quite dense and simply could not catch many waves. We were ecstatic when he was able to catch almost every wave simply by swimming this summer. The waves were incredibly powerful and could carry Ryan, even with no boogie board, several yards. We were having a wonderful time! As the afternoon wore on the waves became stronger and stronger. I was completely knocked over and pulled under several times by the waves. The last wave we caught was the most powerful I have ever felt. I was walking in when an unexpected wave capped. It was almost as tall as I am. It picked me up, carried me several feet and knocked me completely down, and tumbled me around several times. I hit my hand pretty hard against the shells on the sand floor and got slightly cut. Of course I was upset, my hand hurt, and I had to go back into the ocean to wash off...again. I was not happy. Ryan, on the other hand, had been expecting the wave and swam with the wave. Even though he had been expecting a strong wave, he had not anticipated how strong it would be. He was caught in an undercurrent that pushed him farther onto the beach than any wave had pushed him thus far in the day. The undercurrent dragged him across the shells on the bottom of the shoreline and cut up his chest in several places.
As I was freaking out and trying to get my bearing so I could go wash off in the ocean...again, Ryan was making sure I was okay and thinking nothing of himself. I was in the process of complaining about my small cuts on my knees, shoulder and hand when I saw his chest. The entire upper part of his right chest was red and bleeding. Of course seeing his chest pulled me back to earth and realized how wimpy I was being. Needless to say that was our last wave and left as soon as we could gather our things. I do have to say that Ryan's wounds looked a lot worse than they actually were. It turned out to be several small scrapes and healed rather quickly. It does make for a fun story though. Even though we left with a rather bitter taste of the beach in our mouths we are looking forward to spending another day a the beach within the last two weekend of our stay in North Carolina. I am confident that we will remember to bring our chairs and we will be better prepared for the waves to come.
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