Beach Trip 2018

Eric grew up vacationing in the exact same place each summer: Litchfield, South Carolina.  Litchfield is a Grand Strand beach community, nestled between Myrtle Beach and Pawley's Island, and it provides gorgeous views, great wave riding and sand castle building, interesting animal explorations, and, most notably, very few crowds.  There's always plenty of beach, plenty of ocean, and plenty of families enjoying both.  The Comptons have trekked out to Litchfield for over 40 years.  The Whomptons join every other year, and this summer we had all of Eric's immediate family able to go!

As always, the Whomptons drive to vacation and, normally, we'd do a huge driving chunk of Friday and follow-up with a small amount of driving on Saturday to finish the 14 hours and 930 miles journey.  This year was different.  Raina performed in a Summer Stock theatre production, where she and her cohort wrote a one-hour play, staged it, and performed it over the three weeks.  Her final performance was Friday night at 7 p.m., so we decided to do a long Saturday drive and try to make it in one go.  If not successful, we'd stop off in Columbia, SC, and finish up Sunday morning.  New plan, go!

We were up and at it by 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, in the car by 3:45 a.m., and headed east.  Driving in the dark, no traffic, and with plenty of groggy excitement, we celebrated at each milestone.  We reached Mt. Vernon, Illinois, around 5:15 a.m., and grabbed some coffee.  We turned south before the sun rose, so we avoided the sun-in-the-eyes terribleness of driving directly east in the early morning, woohoo!  We traversed through Illinois and Kentucky, and reached Tennessee by 9 a.m., woohoo!  We pottied in Metropolis and turned into Super-People, woohoo!

Audiobooks made the trip go by quickly.  We listened to The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and almost finished the book when we pulled into the rental house on the South Carolina coast at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time.  Leaping out of the car, we hugged Mama Jo and Papa Bill and raced over to the beach for a nighttime stroll.  Stephanie, Emily, and Atticus arrived an hour later (and Jerry the next day), and the house was abuzz with family energy.  Folks crashed at various points that night and we enthusiastically planned the next day's activities.

Each beach vacation day has a routine: morning/sunrise walk on the beach, breakfast, sunscreen application, romping in the ocean (body-surfing, splashing) or on the sand (digging holes, endless building), lunch, quiet time (reading, board games, grocery store trips), sunscreen round two, romping in the ocean round two, showers, Happy Hour, dinner, evening/sunset walk on the beach, quiet time round two, bed.  The later in the week we got, the less likely a "sunscreen and romp in the ocean, round two" trip occurred, but otherwise this is how we occupied our time.

Eric and his sisters Emily and Stephanie coordinated the trip.  They scheduled activities and meal planning and did a wonderful job of being inclusive of everyone's interests.  The Whomptons pulled Sunday night dinner duty, so we went grocery shopping that afternoon.  We arrived at the Bi-Lo and laughed hysterically at a bakery selling boogie-boards.

Other major activities of the week included exploring Huntington Beach State Park, watching The Graduate (in honor of Bill and Jo Lynn's 50th college reunions), completing a 1000 piece puzzle (Raina effectively did this by herself in one day), watching the Independence Day parade (pictures below), having a water gun capture the flag game, watching Moana, sharing personal stories, reading LOTS of books, playing LOTS of games, and enjoying each others' company. 

Raina and Lola really improved their body-surfing technique.  Lola preferred using a boogie-board -- she was inseparable from it the whole time she was in the water -- and she caught wave after wave.  Using a boogie-board means getting rolled by the ocean at least once per outing and Lola gamely headed back out into the water each time.  Raina, Eric, and Krystal preferred to body-surf and successfully caught waves without sacrificing hats or sunglasses to the ocean.  Success!  In fact the only sacrifice was Lola's Body Glove rash shirt, which she's worn for the past 6 years; it still fit but it developed holes in the arms on this trip, so we tossed it in the trash before leaving.  So sad.

Litchfield's Independence Day parade is a unique experience.  The floats are decked-out gold carts and bicycles and everyone throws candy.  Lola and Atticus collected an incredible amount of sugar and we proceeded, for the remainder of the week, to tell them "no, you cannot have candy with your breakfast."

Notice Lola's hustle here.  She and Atticus raced out to the road to claim the best candy pieces.

No Compton family trip is complete without family pictures.  Papa Bill is all about the pictures and, with all of us together at the beach for the first time since 2004, we posed with all the various family arrangements.

Raina (age 13), Lola (age 9), Atticus (age 9).  This picture captures their personalities so well. 

Best picture, hands-down.  Emily, Eric, and Stephanie.

A little known fact:  Eric and I have the same length in leg but he's 4 inches taller than me overall.  I'm all leg and he's all torso, and you can mostly see that here.  In later pictures I tried to make myself taller by standing on my tip-toes; he retaliated by doing the same, which made him even taller with his big feet.

Aunties, nieces, nephew, fluffy clouds, beautiful sunset.

The fireworks display is a major benefit of a July 4th beach vacation.  Not only did we watch municipal shows by Pawley's Island, Murrell's Inlet, and Litchfield-by-the-Sea, but we also enjoyed the incredible firework displays given by families on the beach itself.  We stationed ourselves on the beach at sunset and oohed-and-aahed for the next two hours. 

The explosions directly overhead were spectacular and were a multi-sensory experience: screeching ascents, vibrant colors, booms that shook the air and ground, ashes and debris that fell to the ground, smell of sulphur and sand.  The tide moved in over the two hours; the distance between one family's fireworks launching space and our seats kept narrowing.  Our adrenaline pumped dramatically with each BOOM overhead.

A major highlight of the trip occurred Thursday afternoon.  Each person reported out something about their life and answered questions about it.  Atticus shared about battle/war shows he's watching, Stephanie about her Mongolia trip, Lola about music (choir, piano, violin), Eric about his and Raina's design for Lola's birthday party that year, Mama Jo about research she's conducting about her neighborhood, Papa Bill about his Chichen Itza trip, Krystal about aging, Jerry about concerns for the world, Emily shared ancestor discoveries from her genealogy research, and Raina talked about her theater work.  Raina immediately popped up, went to the front of the room, pulled up her A/V display, and gave a full unprompted presentation.  I was surprised and impressed that she confidently chose to share information in that way. 

Typical creatures we see at the beach include sea gulls, brown pelicans, plovers, dogs (so many dogs!), sand crabs, fish, and bivalves.  Alligators live in the inlet area, along with herons and cranes.  When we're lucky we see sea turtle tracks (but not the turtles themselves) and dolphins out in the water.  On this trip we saw a shark!  A young kid went fishing for the very first time and caught this shark.  The shark was too weak to get back to sea on its own but was strong enough to fit attempts to help it.  Finally it got back to the water and swam away.  [Research makes me think it was a blacktip shark.]  WOW!  We delayed getting in the water that morning, for sure.

And then our beach week came to a close.  The Whomptons listened to Symptoms of Being a Human and A Walk in the Woods to get us back to Saint Louis and we broke the driving into two days.  Overnighting in Nashville seemed better than getting home at midnight.  We so enjoyed having the whole family together and we hope we're all back together for summer 2020!