The day before Thanksgiving

 

A quiet couple of weeks between The Wedding and now, with one big milestone – I taught my first private, for-pay pilates lesson to Elizabeth yesterday. A big deal for me!

Dave got a message from the property manager that we could check in as early as noon, so we headed out a little before 11 and had Bill’s for lunch (where they had one fewer beer on tap than usual – “They’re drinking us dry” said the server). Dave had Google mapped the house and knew which cross street to take, and the house is right next to where we were last year. So we pulled up and there is no Captain Kellog next door, just an empty lot. The power of belief is so strong – we were told when we tried to rent Captain Kellogg that it was “undergoing some major renovations”. So we figured that we must have been wrong about the house being next door – we checked the house number and everything before going in.

I’ve been a little worried about the house, because while the pictures on the website look nice it’s not very nice looking from outside – you can see into two of the bedrooms and they’re both small, and one looks very bare with many beds crammed in. And in fact the bedrooms are kind of small, although the master is good sized. Here’s what though: the kitchen and living room are on the second floor in a big open plan area with giant windows and it’s fantastic. There’s a dune between here and the beach so you can’t really see the ocean from the ground floor – that was the drawback to Capt Kellogg – but up here it looks like you could just walk out the balcony door and be on the beach. It’s lovely. The balcony door was very useful when a giant Herd of Helk (the second H is silent) walked down the road that runs between the house and the dune.

We had many cancellations, so it’s a big house with a lot of bedrooms (and THREE bathrooms) with just us and Josh and Jen, who didn’t get here until after 6. Dave and I unpacked, then headed out to the Fresh Market for fresh things (milk, firewood, etc) then had some down time (I worked on the blogs from the wedding). In the late afternoon we decided to go for a walk, so we headed towards the beach (directions to the beach are included in the instructions for the house: go out the front door and keep going). We stopped for a moment to look for Capt Kellogg and suddenly it hit me: the empty lot with the foundation in it next door *IS* Captain Kellogg. It’s not undergoing renovations, it’s been demolished and they’re building something new there. I can’t explain how it felt, like everything shifted. I was so sure it was being renovated that it couldn’t get through that the foundation was where the house used to be. During our walk we recited the Litany of Change: Midtown, Heather’s, Calypso, 7C’s, Irish Table…

Our walk turned into a 5+ mile walk to the Rock Wahii. The sand is crazy low, lower than I’ve ever seen it – the lettuce garden that’s sometimes in front of it is now a boulder scramble, which we decided not to do as sunset was approaching. We ended up walking back mostly after sunset, and the sky kept turning more and more amazing colors. When we got back to the house it was still gorgeous. We were stopped by a woman from Virginia Beach who was here with her sister-in-law who had heard about the King Tides Thu-Sat and was telling her she couldn’t go on the beach at all, so we explained what they were and she was much relieved.

More downtime. I started knitting some socks. Josh and Jen arrived just in time to head out to the Bistro forour 7:15 dinner, where they greeted us like old friends. It was locals sing-along in the front room, and we got our big table and had yummy food and especially drinks. They have a full bar but no cocktail menu, so I was going to have a daiquiri but apparently the fullness of the bar doesn’t include a blender. I was at a loss when Josh and Jen recommended a Bee’s Knees. The server went away and some time later I heard the bartender working the shaker and then say “It’s a bees knees”. When it came out, the server said they’d had to look it up on the internet, and then said, “this is a special local dark honey”. It was a bee’s knees, with an amazing blob of the yummiest honey ever, which I stirred around and ate and it was fantastic. I had a second one, and Jen ordered one also, and each time there was the sound of the shaker and the bartender saying, “It’s a bees knees”. It was the bees knees indeed.

After dinner we came right home – with a quick stop for giant Helk in the road – and watched Bottle Shock on Netflix (no laptop needed!) and then it was well past our bedtimes. I finished half the ribbing on the socks.