I hesitate to even label today an “activity day” because we pretty much did nothing.
The End.
Okay maybe it wasn’t that boring. (I’ll let you decide!) We woke up relatively early as the morning was very bright and the hotel doesn’t have blackout curtains. We had our gourmet breakfast of Cinnamon Chex and Keurig coffee. We grabbed some beach chairs and an umbrella and staked out our space on the beach. That was the biggest challenge: finding a spot that would provide the social distancing that we would be comfortable with. We got things set up with another family from our hotel about 10 feet away and then headed to the coffee shop for some REAL coffee. There’s a great cafe on the corner, Dolce Crema, that we would frequent several times today. We started with some lattes (mine iced and Frank’s hot) and settled into the beach chairs for they day.
That started the battle for space. As people started to roll onto the beach, they headed for every nook and cranny, often without any thought to how close they were getting to others. At one point we decided to put down a “spacer towel” between us and the family next to us to make it look like someone was already there and prevent others from muscling in. On the other side of us, we watched a couple spend 45 minutes wrestling with and 8×8 shelter, the edge of which was about 6 feet from us. The precarious nature of the structure and the windy conditions made sure no one got anywhere near them for fear of being underneath when it collapsed!
And so we were set for the day. Sorta. You may know that we are notoriously bad at doing nothing. We tried very hard. It was incredibly warm for the coast this far north and the water was unbelievably cold! We people watched for a while, walked along the beach, grabbed a sandwich at the corner cafe (chicken salad on a GF roll for me, a lobster roll for Frank), took a dip, grabbed some gelato (pistachio and pink grapefruit), and just generally did nothing much for a good 5 hours. Then we were done. Funny enough, we lasted longer than the couple with the shelter who packed up and left about 2 hours after they finally got things set up.
Around 3pm we packed up and headed to the hotel pool (and the hotel pool bar!) and went for a swim and had a few drinks. The wind was too strong to play cards so we got out the travel dominoes and played while finishing a bottle of rosé (yes, we are those people now!) Then it was time to shower and figure out what to do about dinner. Because we are lazy and because they have a gluten free dedicated fryer, we went back to The Shack next door for a fish and seafood fry: haddock, scallops, and clams with fries, all gluten free. YUM! One last troll through the town and it was back to the hotel to play cards and enjoy a bottle of prosecco.
The news has been all about when the hurricane will hit the area and we are looking at a rainy and grey day tomorrow for our last day with some severe weather tomorrow night into Wednesday. Given that most things around us are closed on Tuesdays, we are considering heading home a day early to avoid the worst of the weather. We’ll keep you posted!
Numbers for today:
- High temperature: 90 degrees
- Wind speed: 20mph gusting to 25
- Water temperature: 69 (brr!)
- Boogie boards and floaties that were blown down the beach and hit us: 3
- Pages of my book read: 15