Day 8: Back to the Beach

After the game, we made our way back to The Mayor’s around 1 a.m. for a few hours of shuteye before heading back to the coast. By the way, there is no easy way to get to Hope Mills from anywhere but Fayetteville and, likewise, no easy way to get from Hope Mills to anywhere else on earth. I’d like a more direct route please. Mr. Mayor, please make that happen before my next visit. Even with the zigging and zagging across the Tar Heel state, we made pretty good time and got to The Mayor’s beach resort around 10 a.m.

The group had grown since we left and they were now up to 47 people staying with them. Okay, so it was really The Mayor’s other babysitter for the twins, Bryanna. Bryanna goes by Bree (that’s how I’m spelling it) and is Brook(e)’s BFF. You may remember Brook(e)’s corny jokes and snort laughing from a previous post. Multiply that times two and hilarity ensues. Brook(e), that means it was even funnier with Bree in the mix.

Julia chose to join the group heading to the actual beach, while I stayed behind with The Mayor. Due to the fact that I am a living vampire, I am, thus, afraid of the sun. The fact that I cannot swim and there is the ocean at the beach does not factor into my anti-beach tendencies. It’s more the ghostly white vampire skin and the gallons of sweat that gush from my pores. Heat makes Dave uncomfortable. See how I used “Dave” in the third person there, a la Rickey Henderson?

While they were on the beach roasting chopped pork style, The Mayor and I visited local antique and used book stores as well as a produce market. No, I am not a 70 year-old woman. As many know, I collect, but do not often read, books on the subject of baseball. I’m not sure if y’all knew that I'm a fan of the game, but I am. Let it be known.

Antique malls, flea markets and yard sales are great places to boost the collection for not a lot of cash. The Mayor took me to a few spots, one where I got first editions of Death of a Salesman and a Lou Gehrig book in pretty decent shape, for $2 each! We stopped to get fixin’s for The Mayor’s cucumber salad, which Julia would enjoy, and something called sidemeat. Sidemeat comes from a pig and is a combination of bacon and fatback. Holy God, this was a delicacy to behold. I could not wait for that pound of salty, bacony, fatbacky joy to be fried and presented. I picked up some peaches and a Goliath-sized bag of BBQ pork rinds – aka God’s gift to snack foods.

The Mayor saved the best stop for last – a used book store with a small sports section tucked back into a corner of a walk-in closet sized room. It was like finding the Holy Grail. As we walked in, the clerk informed us that there was a buy two, get one free deal and that meant three books for $6. I got 14 books and a Christmas with Colonel Sanders album on vinyl for $30. It was a joyous find, indeed, but now the Avenger is low on cargo space. The crosses we must bear.

After the haul of baseball joy, The Mayor drove me past a place called Fort Apache. You’ll see the photos, but HERE is a local news story that gives an explanation of this strange place. Since the article describes it aptly, there's no point in me trying to reinvent the wheel.

The Mayor and I eventually made our way to the beach for about an hour. It was enough time to see Julia’s sunburned skin, the twins and friends hunting small crustaceans, and Brook(e) and Bree cooking beneath the sun’s rays with the help of an unhealthy dose of hair oil spray (back in the 70s and 80s, known as Afro Sheen). I’m not sure where they got this idea, but I did consult The Google and found many posts about using it as a tanning spray. I’m pretty sure all of those people have melanoma by now, but keep on tanning friends! Add it to the list of baby oil and Pam cooking spray as items not to use for safely tanning the skin. Is there even a safe method to tan one’s skin? As a vampire, I would not know. Anyway, they are probably dead by now due to the intense baking they endured on the beach that day. So Brook(e) and Bree, RIP. At least they used sunblock beneath it for whatever reason. Doesn’t one cancel out the other?

Once all left the beach, we got ready to go to Calabash, NC for dinner. It was also around this time that the source of a “smell” in the house, which was believed to be something to do with the stove, was located after several days of cleaning and searching. Apparently, the kids brought in some crabs in a cup from the beach a few days before and there you have it. Decomp in a Solo cup. Yum. Makes you just want to have some seafood right now, doesn’t it.

Apparently, Calabash is famous for their style of preparing seafood. It’s also called “fried.” I think the Gorton’s fisherman and Mrs. Paul do something similar, but not being a seafood connoisseur, I would neither know, nor care, for certain. While I did not partake of the fried water creatures, I did have a tasty 12-ounce New York strip steak. In my book, the earth walkers outrank the sea swimmers every time.

After dinner, we visited a touristy gift shop in Calabash that encompassed at least 1,000,000,006 square feet. Seriously, I felt like I was roaming the asphalt walkways of Disneyland instead of a store. This place had nothing on the Wal-Mart superstores in terms of square-footage. After that bout with crazy, we headed back to the beach house for homemade ice cream and fried sidemeat. This bacon plus fatback combo did not disappoint, but my heart did wither a bit from the high concentration of sodium I ingested. I’d love to see what Crown Candy Kitchen could do with that on an SLT (sidemeat, lettuce and tomato) sandwich.

Once again, it was late and we had to get on the road by 7 a.m. to make a 2 p.m. game in Asheville. I think we got 13 minutes of sleep that night…

And HERE are the photos from Day 8.