Island Chick Travels

Ever since I retired from my offline job, I’ve rekindled my love for Saturdays.  The weekends are also when I don’t sponsor tour stops for my online job, so it’s like I can get up and do anything I want.  Remember how that was as a kid?  You wake up and you lie there a second and then your head shoots off the pillow and you scream, “It’s Saturday!”  My head won’t shoot anywhere like it used to but I had the very same feeling when I woke up this morning.  I can do anything I want today.  There is nowhere I’m supposed to be, no one I’m supposed to do something for and I can be…well…me for a day. ;o)

Since I have the time, I’m going to reflect back on 2012 and why I have this blog and what’s happened since I started it.

1. I actually started this blog back in February 2010.  I wanted a place I could keep up with the many travels I was partaking in at the time.  Since then, the travels have been few and not even blogged about.  For this I could kick myself because I had really high hopes for this blog.  So one of my new years resolutions is to blog here at least once a week to let everyone know what’s going on in my life not that it’s all that interesting to everyone but a few might enjoy reading about my adventures living on an island and getting off of it once in awhile to do some trail blazing or whatever.  Unless I have something really interesting going on, my blogs will take place on Saturdays.  You can sign up in the left hand corner to get updates if you want to make sure you don’t miss anything.

2. Since we’re mainly focusing on 2012, my trips have been few as I mentioned but we did get to the Outer Banks of North Carolina which is an escape and a half.  I know I know, why would anyone living on the water want to go to a vacation spot on the water?  I love the water.  Well, at least until Hurricane Sandy hit here last Fall.  Now I’m not so sure I like it as much as I once did.  I’m always ready for a change but I daresay I will make that change.  But I will say this.  Hurricanes are great for bringing in driftwood.  I have never seen so much driftwood in the time I have  lived on this island.  And that’s what I want to talk about in #3.

3. Driftwood.  I am a driftwood nut.  A fanatic.  I can’t take a walk without having my eyes peeled on the ground in the search for that piece of driftwood I may have missed the last time I walked that very spot. I wish I had taken pictures of what the road looked like after Hurricane Sandy blew through.  There was no road.  Just boards washed up, sea grass, maybe a boot or two, buckets and my precious driftwood.  It was on a trip to the Outer Banks last summer when I found my first driftwood piece that I feel deeply in love with.  It had rained and there was nothing else to do but visit shops we’d not been in before.  Granted we had been in almost all of them but the ones that we thought weren’t very interesting but this time we decided to check them out for lack of something to do on a rainy day on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  It was in a shop called Nags Head Hammocks but was actually in Kill Devil Hills.  It was there I found this:

I saw it in the shop and walked out without it because of the $80 price tag and ended up going back and getting it the next day.  I thought it would look perfect on my coffee table and there she sits!  This is a driftwood bowl, btw and inside are glass balls, very nautical looking!

So that began my love for driftwood only I really didn’t realize how much it would take over my life until Hurricane Sandy hit and I was deluged with all these pieces of driftwood on the road and beside the woods, only what should I do with it all?

I did some research and there are really cool things you can do with driftwood.  Take this for example:

This was made by The Driftwood Guy and the only place I could find to give him credit for this picture was this link.  Isn’t this remarkable?

While these projects require a lot of time and patience and lots of driftwood, I’m starting small with driftwood candles which I made for people for Christmas.  Here’s one:

That was my first.  My second I made for my daughter turned out really good as well:

The lighting isn’t all great in the living room right now but that gives you an idea.

So these are my latest projects with more on the way.

4. Pelicans.  Okay, I’m also into pelicans.  I am on a search for pelicans.  I bought one last summer at Ocean City (Maryland) in one of the little shops on the Boardwalk and placed it on a piece of wood that Hurricane Sandy washed up:

So this is the first of many pelicans I intend to fill up this house with.  If you are selling handcrafted wooden pelicans, send me an email because I’ll buy it!

5. So back to 2012, here are the highlights.  The baby’s daddy ended up in the hospital dying from a hole in his stomach that was leaking waste from his bowels.  He recovered but ended up with a stroke.  He’s doing great now though, gotta hand it to him.  He went back to work and is almost back to normal.  My kids have been through the wringer as I have but my daughter was with him almost 24/7.  Because of this she had to test out of the first semester of RN school to make sure the hospital didn’t kill him (another story for another day) but she’s returning to school on Monday.  She’s a trooper.

6. My son and I have taken up a new pastime since all this happened – walking the beach.  Because so much was going on, and then Hurricane Sandy hit, then cold weather, but we managed to get a few trips there before the really cold weather hit.  The last trip we took was to look at the new inlet that Hurricane Sandy made and it was like being on Mars believe me.  The sand was just like pictures of Mars if you ever see one up close.  The inlet was kinda cool though.  After I got over the shock of what nature can do, I thought it would make a great place for vacationers to see and it made the beach even wider on the north end because the hurricane cleared out most of the shrubs that were there.  A bad thing but a good thing for people who love to walk the beach – more of it.  The southern end got ripped up bad but they’re working on restoring it before summer starts.  My pictures didn’t turn out so I can’t send one to you but I will the next time we make the walk.  However, I do have an aerial picture of what it looked like at the time below.  At the bottom of the picture you see a the new inlet.  Some of the sand has returned and you can actually walk across it at the part nearer to the ocean:

Well work is calling me but I wanted to give a wrap up of what’s going on in my life and keep this blog going.  Winter can be a cold thing but it doesn’t mean you have to stop living!

Until next time,

Island Chick