Outer Banksious

We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it.

We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us.

I found a place in a nice neighborhood with five bedrooms. There would be a bedroom for each couple, one for the three boys and one for all eight girls. The kids were fairly small at the time. Although it would be a tight squeeze for the girls, there were bunks beds to share and floor space that made it workable.  

The neighborhood had a big pool and the beach was just a short walk beyond. It was a three-story house and like most of the Outer Banks beach houses, the top floor held the kitchen with an open floor plan that worked well for everyone to hang out. Per usual, it also had plenty of balcony deck space with a hot tub and hammock.

When we arrived, the kids went crazy, running all over the house to explore. The ladies had all worked out a menu and schedule for the week and bought all the food. So we had all the supplies to carry up to the third floor. Although it was dark by the time we settled in, we all took a walk down to the beach.

The next day after breakfast, the ladies made lunch and we all went back down to the beach to hang for the day. When I go to the beach, I am not content to just sit. For the most part, the other five adults were. I like to skim board, boogie board, dig holes. When my kids were young and couldn’t go in the ocean by themselves, I would dig a hole near the water with a wall to use as a pool.

There’s a science to pool-building at the ocean. You have to know what the tide is doing. If it’s coming in, it’s going to wipe your pool out. If it’s going out, you’re going to lose your water. You have to dig it in just the right spot for the maximum possible useful life. If you’re there for any extended period of time, one of those things is definitely going to happen. So, depending how long you are there, you will have to build several pools further from, or closer to the water.

When we first went to the Outer Banks, some of the kids were still pretty young. A couple of them couldn’t even swim yet so I kept busy building the pools. I would also carry several of them out to jump waves. After a while, we went back to the pool to play.

Back at the house, all the dads and kids would pile into the hot tub to raucously sing silly songs before we cleaned up for dinner, played some games and put the kids to bed. Then the adults would play some more sophisticated games before we retired for the night so we could do it all again the next day.

One day we met the people staying in the house next door. They told us how surprised they were at how well we all seemed to be getting along. They told us the story about how they tried to do the same kind of thing. A few years before, they had rented one of the houses with some friends but their relationship had deteriorated so much that they didn’t even talk to them anymore. From then on, when they went to the Outer Banks, if anyone wanted to go with them, they each had to rent their own house.  

We just seemed to have the right mix between all of us. While we had some differing opinions and ways to do things, for the most part, we had the same theology and philosophy of life. One of the main things is that we believed in the same way to raise our children so we could correct each other’s and even appreciated it when the others corrected ours.

The Kids