10 Characters I Met While on Vacation
I always come home from vacation feeling re-inspired with new ideas and stories. We travel a lot, and often to places that are just off the beaten path. We camp in our little camper (the ‘beach house’ in the summer and the ‘ski house’ in the winter) and explore. Last week we were on Hatteras Island until the mandatory evacuation on Thursday due to Hurricane Arthur. We salvaged the rest of our vacation on the banks of the Rappahannock River where there is nothing but desolate beaches, small towns, and no internet OR cell phone service by the way.
We met a lot of people and each of them were bursting with story. Here are just ten of them:
1. Wyett the little boy that had mountain dew for breakfast and crab stew for dinner and traveled with his own golf cart and about fifty other people.
2. The little girl, when seeing my daughter and I together, said ‘I had a mom once, but she died.’
3. The guy that set up his camp chair with direct sight of the calm Pamlico Sound with his book and a full coffee pot seated in the sand next to him while the rest of his family still slept.
4. The girl in the coffee shop that was worried the pop-up camper she lived in wasn’t going to survive another hurricane and thought if she half-buried her mini fridge in the sand outside, she might be able to save it.
5. The kiteboarder that only had use of 33% of his heart and was limited to 15 minutes of fun on doctor’s orders. By the time he got everything set up and got his kite up in the air, he just about had to turn around and come back in.
6. The local woman that walked up to me on a remote beach just to introduce herself with her three little dogs, asking how we ever found this place, talking about the lonely winters, and insisting we call next time we’re in the area.
7. The girl at the café who made a panini for a customer and then asked if she could take a bite. (And she did. And nobody else seemed surprised but me! Not even her manager! Was it her mother? Aunt? Best friend? There are a thousand questions…)
8. The guy that skateboarded with his dog by the corn fields at night and skinned his nose trying doing a flip on the river trampoline. (oh wait, that was my husband…)
9. The pack of teenagers that yelled ‘Tourists!’ at us while we walked with our milkshakes and then smiled when my husband called back ‘Locals!’
10. The old man with happy lines walking around his café with a black coffee telling us how the tables were made out of stable doors from his childhood farm and the beams salvaged from a house built in the 1700s.
