Wrightsville Beach, NC

My mind is very fragmented lately. I have struggled to write complete sentences and the truth comes to me in snippets, much like a bulleted list. Without numbers. Without a specific order of events. 

These are my random thoughts on our recent trip to Wrightsville Beach, NC. 

• Hotel beds are the worst. Why do they make them so back-breaking soft? 

• Off-season beach season should be the most popular. Who needs the heat, the noise, the sand when you can have the beach to yourself to roam and any restaurant open with no waiting time? But I guess if this would be the peak season, this all would change?! Hmmm ... 

• Falling asleep to the sound of the waves. Who needs a noise machine? 

• I still love the cheap t-shirt beach stores where everything is always on sale. You can never have too many cheesy painted t-shirts (for the days when you decide you’re bored enough you want to start painting your cabinets) and too many $1 thong flip-flops. Summer is long in North Carolina. 

• Overheard in a coffee shop (paraphrase): “All I have left is to prepare for class this semester. Which is basically a lot of reading. But it’s kinda odd because all I have to read are heavy books. Like, you never thought you’d ever say ‘boy, I am really pumped about reading this book on ... suffering!’, ya know?!” Laughter follows. (Drift restaurant in Wrightsville Beach)

• The best seafood gumbo vegan outside of the fish is at The Oceanic at the Crystal Pier. Best view in town too, right on the ocean.

• It’s a mystery to me where birds go when we go to the beach. You see all these gorgeous waterfowl photography everywhere from the fancy hotels to your dentist’s office and you’re thinking: “sure, I can do that! Just get out there on the marsh, point and shoot.” Only you can’t. Nope. Not birds at any rate. I watched the sunrise from my 7th story hotel room and there were hundreds of water birds on the beach. I get dressed and get out there to “shoot them up close” ... not a one! Ridiculous! And that curse followed us everywhere else all weekend. Almost. A small pond in the middle of the Airlie Gardens saved the weekend. 

  Finally birds! At Airlie Gardens.

• I have never found so many absolutely perfectly whole sea-shells in a 20 minute walk on the beach. And I didn’t even pick up all the ones we spotted.

• When coming out of The Oceanic, a random gentleman with a zoomy-zoom camera propped up on the railing told us he is waiting to see the launch of a SpaceX rocket somewhere South from where we were standing. Now, we were about 600 miles (more than 8 hours) away from where the rocket was launching, so this sounded highly dubitable, but we decided to wait for the rocket. 

And oh, wow!, were we in for an experience! The rocket, like a crisp white beam of light, came out from low on the Southern horizon and ascended so incredibly fast, leaving behind a thick and luminous train, so long that given the distance we were aware it was from us, might have been hundreds of miles long in the sky.
At one point, we could see it drop its boosters that had propelled it into space, and then the two boosters, like mini-rockets themselves, made their own train of light from the dropping point all the way back towards Florida where they eventually landed.
At some point, it looked like the rocket stopped “writing” on the sky with its white, luminous train, and it kept only a short “tail”, almost like a comet flying high above the water. Although we could not hear the launch nor feel the earth shake, it was still breathtaking. Definitely the highlight of this weekend, regardless of however many successful pictures of birds we might have gotten. 

Sometimes what you get out is not what you go there for. 

When we left our house, we were not too eager to be on this trip, for various reasons. But once seeing this miracle of human engineering, just a token of what is possible once you venture out beyond your front door, you realize that no matter how sad or poorly you feel, as long as your body is still able, you should get out and take in the amazement that the world still has in store for you. 

The synchronicity was moving:

We saw the SpaceX Falcon Heavy on January 15 - a Sunday - outside The Oceanic Restaurant in Wrightsville Beach, NC. The rocket launch had been scheduled for January 14th (the day before) and it had gotten delayed till the following day, for “reasons not immediately disclosed” (if you follow the SpaceX launches, they have a good record of punctuality). We knew absolutely nothing of this, as we don’t follow rocket launches. 

We had come to The Oceanic the day before, but we could not get in because they were too busy, so we decided to come the following day a bit earlier to have a chance at eating dinner there. And a place we picked totally randomly, and a day and time we picked totally by accident paid off in a big, big way. We took the experience as a reminder to stop making plans (or hiding from them) and get out there and embrace life and wonder just as they are: always there, always waiting, always in need of nothing but eyeballs to enjoy it.

The rocket and the two boosters putting on a spectacle as seen from Wrightsville Beach, NC on January 15, 2023. Who needs New Year's fireworks when you can have this?!