The Crystal Coast, Salt water on my feet

Making it across the bridge

I like to think of a move being like crossing a bridge.  It is a good metaphor

When I think about crossing bridges, the one that comes to mind is the Cameron Langston Bridge from the mainland at Cedar Point and Cape Carteret to Emerald Isle.

It is about two miles from the stop light on the mainland at the intersection of Highway 24 and 58 to the stoplight on Emerald Isle at Highway 58 and Coast Guard Road.  Some days it can be a long ride if you happen to be on the bridge during one of those handful of days when we have lots of people checking into rental homes.

I love crossing the bridge because it renews my spirit.  I was excited today when we were briefly caught in stop and go traffic.  The stop meant that I could stick my camera out the window and take pictures of Bogue Inlet from the bridge.

Crossing the bridge is one of the high lights of my day.  I tend to forget everyday concerns when I am on the bridge.

So far I have not forgotten that I am driving like people often do when they cross the bridge the first time.

Bogue Sound and its blue waters symbolize the infinite possibilities that we face.  It is hard to tell what the waters hold just as it is hard to tell what life has in store for us.

However, I have to believe in myself and my abilities to make the decisions that will guide my life or on another level my skiff when I am out riding on Bogue Sound.

It might be easy to fear crossing the bridge, but I have been crossing them all my life from the time I left home at the age of fourteen to go to military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  When I went away to college, I packed my car and headed off to Boston with no fear.  At the end of college, I ended up buying a farm and moving to Canada to raise purebred cattle. It was a huge journey into the unknown for a history major.

I have crossed a lot of bridges.  While I might have made some different decisions along the way, I would cross all the bridges again without hesitation.  I have learned something with every journey.  My life and my family's life is richer for having living in such a diverse batch of places.

When making a decision to move, you eventually get to the point where no amount of making lists or calculations is going to solve the issue of whether to go forward or stay where you are.

It takes a leap of faith to make that first step.

Maybe some of us are just wired to take that step onto the bridge and soar high above the water where we can see the possibilities.  Others are happier with fewer unknowns and staying where life is comfortable.

There is something exciting about moving to a new place, making new friends, and seeing new horizons.  Maybe it can give you a knot in your stomach if you let it, but it can also free you from the ties that bind you to a routine that might not let you or your family reach its full potential.

I hope that age does not take that lack of hesitation away from me.  It has served me well.  I might be richer if I had been more cautious, but my soul would have been far poorer if I had feared to cross the bridges of my life.

I know the decision to move is hard, but few good things in life comes without some sacrifice.  I would rather see what life holds around the next bend than watch reruns.

If nothing else it is something that makes you stronger in the longer run.

The pleasure of early tomatoes on the Crystal Coast

Our annual tomato contest ended on June 5 this year when I decided to pick my first two tomatoes. Over the next few days, the two challengers to my throne eventually admitted defeat.

Victory came a little later than last year's June 1 tomato, but after all the years of barely getting tomatoes in Canada in August, June 5 looks pretty good.

I first wrote about our tomato gardening in the spring of 2005 in a post called, The Spring Tomato Ritual.

Growing tomatoes is often thought of as something done mostly by aging southern women.  I suspect that idea is kept alive by the media.

There are southern women who do grow tomatoes, but in my opinion most of the tomatoes are grown by the men of the South.  That is the way it has been for as long as I can remember.  The ladies might grow a few plants, but the men would often put in rows of tomatoes.  My mother was a great gardener.  Tomatoes were one of her favorite crops, and she would always plant four or five plants each year.  My wife's father, however, planted row upon row of tomato plants.  He often had them growing up the side of his house.

My mother continued growing wonderful tomatoes into her nineties, but I picked up most of my tomato skills trying to convince tomatoes to grow in the cool Nova Scotia and New Brunswick climates.

While I am now limited by space to four or five plants, they produce so many tomatoes that we are often searching for people who want tomatoes by early July. Our tomatoes do make a significant impact on our summer food budget.  The return on investment on a few tomato plants is huge.

During the summer, a tomato sandwich is often lunch at our house.  Sometimes it becomes a BLT, and often it ends up in salad.  It is amazing how little work it takes to grow such a large number of tomatoes.

Now that our contest to see who got the first tomato is over.  I can relax and enjoy the tomatoes, and plan my next year's victory.  The next thing is to see if we can beat last year's giant tomato which weighed 1.33 pounds.

Fall lobsters hopefully in sight

This post was originally written in October 2008.  I figured that re-posting this might remind the folks who organize the lobster dinners, that there are people who count on this happening each year.  I am looking forward to the first advertisements of this year's festivals.

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There are foods that come with special association in your life.  Lobster has particular meaning to me.

My first meeting with a lobster took place in the fall of 1967 when I went off to college in Boston.  I remain convinced that my first lobster was eaten in Union Oyster House near Faneuil Hall.

I went on to eat several more lobsters during college.  Some of the best were ones we cooked ourselves along the shores Maine.  We would eat them almost like cavemen, needing only the handle of a Buck knife to crack the shells and something to hold the melted butter.

I can remember having some in fancier surroundings like Anthony's Pier IV where I remember taking a few dates during my college years.

Of course in New England lobster was not just a meal available in fancy restaurants.  There were plenty of less expensive spots to get one of the tasty creatures of the deep.  I can remember stopping at the reasonably priced Valle's Steak Houses for inexpensively priced lobster dinners.

Then there is also Legal Seafood which started out as a humble restaurant, and I remember enjoying lobsters in their spot near Cambridge.

After college, I moved to Nova Scotia, and lobsters were even cheaper during certain times of the year.  When the lobstermen had filled their quotas for the year, you could get lobsters for a couple of dollars a piece.

While this might sound like I ate lobsters at every meal, that certainly wasn't the case.  However, in those early years of the seventies, I probably had a lobster at least every three months.  I even got very good at cooking them.  I can remember the simple recipe, cook lobsters for 16.5 minutes after coming back to a boil.

Probably the most memorable lobsters were the ones I cooked for my wife on our first date in 1973.  I was visiting Mount Airy, NC where my mom lived.  In an attempt to keep me home for another few days, my mother arranged a blind date for me.  Having just come from a college roommate's wedding, I was in an accommodating mood and said yes.

I ended up driving 70 miles round trip to get the lobsters.  I had a great time instructing my date on how to eat lobsters, and 35 years later I am still cracking the claws for her and making sure she gets her lobster properly eaten.

The picture in the post came from a Lobster fest that we attended in Salter Path, NC Saturday, October 25, 2008.  It's an annual event.  The lobster was as good as any I have had recently.  I am down to two or three lobsters per year now.

That Saturday, my lunch date, which was my wife of course, and I had another memorable lobster meal.

Last year I wrote more about the Saint Francis by the Sea Lobster Fest.

How things have changed at the beach

My things have changed at the beach.  In the late sixties and early seventies, I spent a lot of time on Ocracoke Island.  Mostly I camped at the National Park, but I can still remembering checking into the only motel on Ocracoke to have a television so I could watch Neil Armstrong step on the moon.

In the nineties we used to frequent Buxton down on Hatteras Island.  The place we stayed did not even have phones in the rooms.  Of course cell phone service was almost non-existent.  The idea of Internet service in your hotel on the Outer Banks was only a gleam in someone's eye.

Fast forward to today.  Many beach homes here on the Crystal Coast come with computers, and if not, wireless computing is available to those who do not carry iPhones or Blackberries.

The one thing that has not changed besides the beautiful waters is that most area businesses are not on the Internet.  Even if they are there, they mostly have a static presence.  Some are trying to supplement their static website with a Facebook presence.

Unfortunately most people do not look at Facebook when they want to find out something about an area.  People typically Google for information.

Yesterday, I spent much of the day handing out fliers at the Bluewater Rentals Check-in.  My goal was not to sell any real estate but to build awareness for CrystalCoastNorthCarolina.us as a source of local information.

We have many people who want to know about our area, and it helps to have a central place to point them for information especially for events and business information.

I suspect that there will always be a place at the beach for strategically place hand lettered sheets advertising events, but I hope that we can get more businesses interested in the Internet.  It is a powerful tool.

One thing that has already changed for the better is the rental check-in process.  Even some of the visitors commented about how well it worked to have two drive through lanes to pick up keys.  The girls handing out keys also had a wirelessly networked laptop that let them check to see if the cleaning crew had finished or if repairs were still ongoing.

Over three hundred people were scheduled to check in yesterday at our location. It ended up being a very smooth process with minimal waiting.

The minimal waiting was a good thing since people were spending a lot of time on the bridge getting to Emerald Isle.  On the grand scale of things fifteen minutes to get through town is not much, but after a long ride of up to ten or twelve hours, any delay is tough to take.

I hope that the weather hold this week.  The last two weeks have been nearly perfect beach weather.  It is always helps when creating great memories to have great weather.

While we might have Internet in the houses and beautiful waters, we still have not figured out how to manage the weather.