HOLY CRAP.  This is different then the last time I posted.  What did you do Xanga?!  I don’t know, but my first impression is: I like, I like.

At any rate, I have a sad announcement to inform you all of.  It is very sad.  The end of an era.  Almost.  One of my oldest cassette tapes is no more.  That’s right…. Audio Adrenaline – Don’t Censor Me.  Holly and myself were in my car driving home from picking up our subway sandwhiches, and I was excited about hearing Jesus and the California Kid.  Big House was ending… silence…..  more silence….  some fast forwarding…. play… silence…. fast foward… play… silence… eject… look at tape….  no tape was running through the head anymore.  It broke.  Jesus and the California Kid will never be played again.  It seems at least a little ironic that Audio Adrenaline just released “Adios” which I assume to be their final cd, as it is a compilation of previous albums except for I think 1 or 2 new songs… but I haven’t listed to any of their albums after Underdog… so…  I wouldn’t know.  It’s very sad.

So I have been sick and am mostly recovered now… hence the lapse in posting.

I have one more long story to tell that was a little bit ago now, but I guess getting to it eventually is better than not getting to it at all.  So go ahead, get yourself a drink, and then come back to be entertained.  Get the bathroom out of the way, there will be no breaks after this, so do it while you can.

Done?  Ok.

So our first day at the beach we had gotten settled in and everything… went down to walk on the beach a little bit and check it out… then came back inside for dinner, etc.  While we were on the beach I spotted the thing I always look for when I am at the beach, because for some reason I like them…. a pier.  So I had decided that after dinner we should walk to the pier.  It was quite a ways off, but I figured that we could do it, and that it would be fun. 
So off we went, me with a nice LED flashlight (not too small, but it fit in my pocket).  We walked, and walked, and walked….  finally when we were seeing we were getting pretty close we were starting to get kind of sick of walking.  But of course, we still had to walk the whole way back.  Right before we got to the pier there was this building that was much closer to the ocean then all the others….  like it was pretty much ON the beach.  They had a bunch of sandbags out in front of it, and the waves coming in were basically crashing up against them.  So we stood there a moment and timed it…. It seemed there was plenty of time to cross, so we waited for a wave to come in, then just as it pulled out we darted across.  No problem.  We then proceeded to go up to the pier.

Upon going into the little store at the front of the pier we got some ice cream and were ready to go out to the pier… walked up to the cashier to pay for the ice cream and the $1 walking passes for the pier….  only to see a sign that said they couldn’t take credit cards.  Apparently there was a problem with their phone line that was preventing it.  And neither of us had cash.  We were almost very disappointed, but the guy was very nice and asked if we had just gotten in, and we told him we had.  He asked if we’d be back, and we said yeah.  He proceeded to tell us that we could go ahead out, and take the ice cream, to just come back and pay him later in the week.  We were very grateful and enjoyed our ice cream and pier walk at night.  The pier was pretty cool…  it did some moving, and some of the boards were kind of loose, which never makes one too confident.  After a little while, we had our fill and decided to head back.

Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Outer Banks area, at night, the beach is pitch black.  There is no light at all.  I mean none.  The dunes block off the light from the houses along the beach.  This posed an immediate difficulty for us, because that was going to make it difficult to get past the beach by the  house with the waves crashing up against it.  so we thought maybe we’d walk along the road next to the beach… but the road we were on ended, and so there went that idea.  (Note: Should you ever have this same experience at the outer banks, walk out to the highway, there is only the one, and walk alongside it.  All the little rental communities are completely seperated from each other, so you can’t walk from inside one to another.  We didn’t really know about the highway yet, it was our first time, and we just got there.)

Instead we went down a path from one of the houses to the beach.  Now, in addition to it being dark, allow me to explain to you another problem.  As I said, you can’t see the houses from the beach.  The entire beach looks EXACTLY the same.  There are no distinguishing features at all.  The marker we had been planning on using was a log we had put up.  In the pitch blackness with my led flashlight that only worked for maybe about 10 feet in front of us, this made knowing where we were impossible.  The light did allow us to see the crabs that were walking on the beach, which freaked out Holly and thus made traveling along the beach yet harder.  So to get her away from the crabs, I decided to take the next exit from the beach, and see if we could take the road again.  We ended up coming up in a KOA campground.  We walked around it for a bit, then saw the edge of the fence, and decided hey, we’ll go outside the fence and walk to the road.  Bad idea.

Something for you to keep in mind at the outer banks is that there are cactii on the island.  So where there is not a path, you do not want to walk.  Now, we weren’t really aware of how many there were though we were somewhat aware of their presence because we had seen one or 2 earlier that day.  We jsut kind of were walking along the fence when I stepped on something that kind of hurt.  So we stopped and I shined the light.  There was a cactus sticking in the back of my heel.  And there were cactii all around us.  So I got myself to a clearer area and then pulled it out.  We then slowly made out way out, I got stuck one or 2 more times, I think Holly made it out pretty much unscathed.  So at this point we were like… whatever I guess we have to stick with the beach at least until we’re passed the campground (which, since we found the edge of it, we knew wasn’t far.)  We also resolved never to go off of paths again.

Back to the beach for awhile until finally seeing another entrance (they are hard to see).  Came up it and had no clue where we were, except that we both felt we hadn’t walked far enough to be at the area where the house we were staying at was.  So we decided to just walk out to a main road and follow it.  So we did.  Neither of us was really that sure if we would be able to figure out where we were going, but we got to the highway and turned to follow it the same direction we had been walking on the beach.  I was starting to get rather frustrated not knowing where I was and at the prospect of being lost all night.  Finally we crossed paths with a large group of folks whom I asked if they knew where the place we were looking for was.  One of them said yeah, and pointed out a lit sign in the distance and told us that was it.  So we thanked him and continued on our way, feeling much more confident.  Finally, we got there, and all was well.  But we were very tired from the incredibly long walk…. and cactii pricking… and crab…. frightening.

The end.