Cara Christian and I spent a week on the beach this year. My cousin Mark Sowa recommended Oak Island and Cara found us the perfect spot, from the thousands available. The beach starts at the south end of the NC outer banks beaches, and tracks pretty much straight west from there.

We checked all the boxes of a perfect sea-soaked getaway, from skim boarding and boogie boarding and frisbee and paddle ball on the beautiful wide beach right outside our door, with a huge tented umbrella as our base, to surf shops for sunscreen and board shorts and skim boards, from sun burning to bronzing and browning, to recuperation on a perfectly shaded second-story-balcony view over the dunes and grasses to the beach and nightly sunsets, to a breakfast at Old Bridge with all the locals, to Italian dinners at Castucci’s, to endless breakfasts lunches and dinners from the trunkload of groceries we brought in, to tons of multiplayer Beeswarm Simulator and Gary’s Mod (Christian you rock!), to a spontaneous adventure to Bald Head Island that turned into an amazing DOT ferry ride to an incredible natural maritime forest tour via golfcard (where we stopped to see a family of small deer cross our path, including a curious fawn, before they disappeared into the reeds…) to a 5-story run up to the top of the oldest lighthouse in NC, to fresh Raleigh-roasted Larry’s Beans and locally-roasted The Rooster and The Hen french presses, to Frosty’s frozen goodness, to the healthy and local goodness we found at Inergy, to the best tacos and burritos ever at Kai-Joe’s, to a boat tour of the Atlantic and the Cape Fear River and the Intracoastal Waterway and all its sights, ending with the most beautiful sunset. Blissful.

Cara and I love the NCMA Park and have walked it many times, but this last weekend we made a new discovery hidden within: the Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky. Basically a huge vertical camera, a pinhole in the roof lets the sun and stars shine through to the floor and walls of the small yurt-like stone hut. We went in the middle of a blazing sunny day, and were rewarded with brilliant laser-like sunbeams. Which we of course used to comic effect. So fun.