Trying to emerge from my beach daze…er…days (7 Quick Takes)

My husband, sons, and I spent last week in Rehoboth Beach with my sister Maureen and her family. We hadn’t stayed in Rehoboth since 2018, and it is a place full of many beach memories and traditions and more Kohr’s soft-serve cones than we could count. It felt so good to be back, and we enjoyed a beautiful week of cousin craziness.

Here are a few glimpses back at our vacation:

~1~

Last summer our younger son got his first taste of surf fishing, and he couldn’t wait to get back out there this season. He and my husband went fishing three times, and our young fisherman caught two fish. He was quite content. I walked down to visit them each night they were fishing.

I think part of what our son enjoys about fishing is the experience with nature. As I stood on the beach and watched the sky transforming in the fading light, I could see why he wanted to be part of it.

~2~

This set of cousins are 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, and 19 now, but you never outgrow sand play. On the first day on the beach, I found myself trudging through the sand to the boardwalk to find a shop selling large shovels so our teens could dig trenches for water or themselves.

Those shovels saw quite a bit of action, and so did a broken purple shovel that a passerby tossed toward the diggers at one point. They even found a little sand crab, and we all marveled at this tiny little life form making its home in the sand.

We also saw lots of seagulls and some porpoises and the prettiest shimmering white fish leaping out of the waves in the evening light. The beach is a place that holds so much beauty and wonder.

~3~

When I am on vacation, I don’t want to spend the whole trip in the kitchen. But I am happiest when I am creating something, and there is nothing like a household of hungry people to inspire you to cook a big breakfast. Besides, when we vacationed with Maureen and her children a few years ago on Long Island, I threw a canister of cinnamon buns in the oven one morning, and I was blown away by the accolades.

I can take a hint.

So, when we went to the grocery store at the start of our trip, I snagged some sausage, bacon, eggs, English muffins, and cinnamon buns. Maureen added to our kitchen the largest bag of pancake mix I’ve ever seen. And I cooked breakfast most mornings.

On the second to last day, when Maureen asked everyone what they had enjoyed most, the answers were all over the place—fishing, playing group video games together, and riding Boardwalk rides were on the list. Then someone said, “Aunt Rita’s breakfasts,” and I was so touched.

Then someone else said, “Fractured Prune donuts,” which was an even better answer. You can’t compete with those.

~4~

One of the days I went to the grocery store happened to be the hottest day of our vacation. As I was checking out to pay, I realized that I was mainly buying drinks.

I laughed to myself thinking of how people say not to shop hungry because you’ll buy too much to eat. I wasn’t hungry, but apparently, I was thirsty. Still, so was the crew back at home, and they plowed through those drinks.

Walking on the Boardwalk and riding rides and winning plush creatures from claw machines is hot, thirsty work.

~5~

When John and I honeymooned in Fenwick Island almost 18 years ago, we ate several times at Nantucket’s, a lovely upscale restaurant there. We have been there many times since then, but we haven’t been able to go for a few years—even before the pandemic.

This summer, we were determined to go—and to take Maureen with us. My niece and her boyfriend agreed to monitor the younger children and feed them pizza, wings, and a Pail of Pasta from Nicola Pizza.

Meanwhile, we skipped the Pail of Pasta (which I hear was excellent) and headed to Nantucket’s for chowder and a roasted red pepper soup with lump crab, a shared portion of Mahi Mahi, a Cajun shrimp and sausage dish, and a baked Brie appetizer that I have been trying to duplicate at home for 18 years. Then there was coffee and dessert—some chocolate macadamia nut concoction with coconut mousse on top.

Everything vanished. And we enjoyed adult conversation, which is always one of the great joys of a beach trip, as the cousins do what cousins do best—puzzles and Super Smash Bros and watching ridiculous movies about chihuahuas—and the grown-ups get to discuss the small and large problems of the world.

Vacations don’t come often enough.

~6~

It was an exceptional vacation, but it was also an adventurous one. We made several trips to pharmacies for different reasons—including treatment for the first beach sunburns I can recall since I was a child. The most dramatic excitement happened when my niece’s boyfriend lost his glasses in the ocean.

You are probably thinking that if we didn’t find them in the first few minutes, it was obvious that they were gone forever. But we are one optimistic group, and so the search was extensive, with cousins combing through the waves for a while, and my sister visiting the lifeguard stand to learn about the Rehoboth lost and found, and my mentioning the missing glasses to a lady on the beach whose child’s Crocs I had been guarding while he played in the waves.

“Oh, I just lost my sunglasses, too,” she said with a smile.

The ocean must be full of fish who are trying on glasses and sunglasses to see which look best.

I’m just disappointed that our fishermen didn’t pull the missing glasses out of the sea that evening. That’s how the story is supposed to end.

~7~

We had plenty of happy endings to the week, though. Or maybe this one is happy and unhappy all at the same time, in an Eeyore kind of way. My niece Elise had her eye on a stuffed Grumpy Bear in a claw machine on the Boardwalk. She tried and tried and tried, to no avail. Eventually, her sister’s boyfriend came to the rescue and managed to win it for her. He was definitely the hero of that chapter of our beach story.

I snapped a photo of the Grumpy Bear she won glancing in at the Grumpy Bears still left in the claw machine.

Family beach vacations are always full of inside jokes and funny memories and photos that are packed with extra meaning for those who remember the ins and outs of the situation. To me, that Grumpy Bear photo is somehow hilarious because of all the implied drama and emotion.

Don’t even get me started on the fact that Grumpy Bear is dressed as a dog. We would need another beach vacation just to unpack what’s happening there.

It’s probably time to start planning for next year’s trip.

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