Saturday, June 21, 2008

Trek to Camp Lejeune - Day 2

(This blog is for the day of Friday, 6-20-08, but as you can see I am up so late, it is already Saturday) I have been up since 7:30am...I think I woke myself up snoring because when I woke I was sleeping on my back and my mouth was very dry. Of course, the sunlight streaming in through the cracks of the drapes didn't help. I could have slept at least another hour, but as soon as my eyes popped open, my stomach started grumbling. Story of my life. Anyways, I went to gather food from the continental breakfast - that was a joke. I came back with two blueberry muffins and orange juice. Courage actually liked the bb muffin! We ate and got ready to go to the beach. After a few false starts we finally found our way to North Topsail Beach about 25 miles away. We had to cross over a bridge (I have such a fear of bridges!) to get to the beach area, and it was so beautiful when we crested the bridge and saw all the gorgeous houses along the coast and the ocean beyond. The beach itself wasn't all that impressive. The beach was littered with ocean debris - shells, stones, bits of driftwood and of course some bits of trash. The shells were neat and I found some really cool wave-smoothed rocks that I might paint. There were little crabs scurrying all about. We found one rather large dead jellyfish of some sort. Man-o-war maybe? We walked down the beach as we found that laying on it attracted bumblebees. Yep, bumblebees on the beach! I never heard of such a thing! But they kept at us so we walked from our spot on the sand all the way down almost to a pier and then walked back. When we returned to our towels the bees came back, so we packed it up and left. The 'OFF' just wasn't deterring the bees.

Around 4pm we met the reason we came to Camp Lejeune, Courages BF (boyfriend) at Jacksonville Mall. What a reunion that was,! About 20 minutes before he arrived Courage started grinning from ear to ear and couldn't stop. When we finally saw him in front of the Great American Cookie stand and into his arms she goes. I couldn't help it, I had tears in my eyes. I hate being so emotional! Must be the hormonal stage of a woman's life I am surely entering. But we all gained our composure quickly and off we went in search of some good seafood! We drove all the way back out to North Topsail Beach, but no restaurants there. Finally, we found a place in Surf City called Mainsail. The food was so-so. The high-light of the meal was the lovely fire display one of the young male waiters presented. He sit a basket of bread on the table and the paper napkin covering the bread promptly fell across the candle that was in the center of the table and caught fire. After BF threw what bit of coke he had left in his glass over it and the waiter slapped at it with his hand, the flames were still raging, so finally the waiter placed his tray over it and it was extinguished. No one was hurt and we all had a good laugh. The waitress came over to check on us and exclaimed how 'that happens all the time! I don't know why we have candles!'. I then noticed how the restaurant did not have a sprinkler system. How strange! I am pretty sure in GA almost any building these days are required by code to have a sprinkler system.

We rounded out the evening with another trip to the mall and then to the movies to see Ironman. Wow! Robert Downey, Jr. is BACK in all his glory! God is good!

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