A day and then paradise

Tomorrow we'll get ready to go to Oak Island.,

We'll take the dog to Holiday Pet Lodge in Wallingford (if you live anywhere near Wallingford you should kennel your pets there--wonderful, even for bad dog Bela). Then we'll come home and pack (packing in front of Bela is anxiety producing for us all). Zoe from next door will look after the cat and bird and hopefully bring over her little sister who is the age of our twin granddaughters to love on the cat. Eva is her name.

We have to be in New Haven, at our friend, John's house at 7 for the limousine to Leguardia for the less than two hour flight to Myrtle Beach, SC. Me and Bern and John and Sherrie, another friend will be on that flight.

To be a second driver on the car John rented--huge and cumbersome I think--I had to join Costco. Is this any way to run an airline?

We always drove, but it put two days on the trip and wore us out both ways. And last year John's car broke down on the Jersey Turnpike and I rode with the tow truck driver to New Haven to get my car and go to get the dog. (Getting the dog is always an issue. Bern loves the beast....) Meanwhile, a friend of John came to get them.

Mimi and Tim will fly to Raleigh and get to Oak Island around 4--later than us.

This is what we do every year on the week of Labor Day. John and Sherry and Bern and I get to Oak Island and Mimi and Tim arrive too and we spend a week reading and eating and loving each other and drinking a lot of wine and beer (Tim and Mimi and I mostly).

The first time we went to Oak Island, with friends of ours from Virginia Seminary, Bern was pregnant with Josh. He's now 40, just to put Oak Island in perspective. We went with the kids and sometimes a baby sitter and sometimes a friend for each of them, for maybe 18 years. We even bought a house there, on the inlet rather than the beach and rented it instead of staying in it so we could stay on the beach.

Even after the kids wouldn't go, Bern and I went for a year or two. Then didn't any more and went to Block Island instead. Josh and Cathy, pre children, joined us there, as did Mimi and Tim.

Then, 7 or so  years ago, Mimi called and asked where we used to go on long vacations. (We went for three weeks or even a month when they were small.) And we told her.

She and Tim went and when they were back in NYC called and said we'd be going every year together.

And we have.

Our house this year is the most spacious and amazing of all the houses we've stayed in. I can't wait.

Saturday we go, flying on Spirit, which has been a bone of contention for Bern and John and Sherry--but not for me. I stay out of all the money stuff and just go to Oak Island to sit facing the ocean for a week.

I really can't wait--though Bern has been over loving Bela all day, feeling guilty for leaving him.

The last Puli we shared, Finney, went to the Beach with us once, rushed into the waves, was bounced around and never again went near the water. Pulis aren't ocean dogs. He would hate it.

But Bern hates to leave him ever.

That says something wondrous about her as a companion of animals.