The non-vacation from hell

John, Jack, Sherrie, Bern and I flew into Myrtle Beach on Saturday, got the rental car and like always drove the 40 miles north to Oak Island, NC. Tim and Mimi and Eleanor flew from NYC to Raleigh, got the rental car and drove, like always, to Oak Island.

The House we've had the last few years in called 'Spoiled Rotten', and we usually are when we're there.

The first three days were full of laughter and joy and sharing and food, But the weather had been cloudy with rain and lightening. Lots of lightening. People went down to beach but only Sherry went in the water because of the lightening. The first time Bern and I went to Oak Island with two couples from seminary who grew up in North Carolina, I (who didn't grow up anywhere near and ocean and spent two years in Cambridge, where the water was too cold) went running into the water during a lightening storm. Our NC friends went crazy and got me out.

Salt water and lightening are a bad, no good, terrible combination.

Then, with a full refrigerator, on Tuesday we got a message that we had to evacuate by noon!!!

Tuesday was the first normal September day on Oak Island--not a cloud in the skies, lots of pelicans and gulls, gentle surf...and we were ordered to leave!!!

Tim and Mimi got reservations to fly from Raleigh on Wednesday, but we couldn't change or reservations in Myrtle Beach for several days and feared that the airport would close. So Tim and Mimi and little, wonderful, so smart, so delightful Eleanor left at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday. We arranged to leave the rental car at Bradley and started driving north a little after that.

Much money was lost--house rent, airplane tickets, food we had to throw away--though we brought home a lot of food in a cooler for two days. But the worse that was lost was Tuesday through Saturday together being spoiled rotten....

The five of us stayed in a great hotel just south of DC Tuesday night and drove home today.

The only good thing was we actually got back in time for us to pick up our dog, Brigit, before 5:30 and bring her home.

(On the way from the airport to Oak Island, we needed lunch and ate at a Cracker Barrel. Jack told us that in his family--southern to the core--Cracker Barrel was where you ate after a funeral. John and Bern and I thought that was weird and funny.

But leaving the beach on Tuesday we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for lunch and I said, "this is the meal after the funeral of our vacation...."

Got a good laugh at a time 'good laughs' were few and far between.)