First Landing State Park 2023

Trip: 36
Nights: 114-116

I didn’t really mean to schedule a 3-day weekend at the beach the weekend following a 3-day weekend in the mountains. It does highlight the advantage of our locale though, mountains 2 hours west, ocean two hours east.

It was a chill beach weekend. We got in around 8 PM on Thursday evening. It was very hot and humid, so we opted to play cards in the air-conditioned camper versus sit by a fire outside. On Friday, we made our way to the beach around 10:30 AM and stayed until about 3:30 PM, when we headed back to the camper to clean up for dinner with friends. I was sitting under the sun shade the entire time, with maybe 10 minutes total of sun exposure when I jump in the ocean to cool off. And I had sunscreen on. Somehow, both my shoulders still burned.

Saturday was a repeat of Sunday, including dinner with other friends. Saturday evening, I was sitting by the campfire in the dark when I heard a bird call directly above in a live oak tree that I did not recognize. Merlin identified it as a Chuck Will’s Widow, a nocturnal bird that most people see and not hear. I double-checked the library recordings of the call in Merlin, and it was definitely a Chuck Will’s Widow. So I fired up E-bird and added it to my life list. It was too dark to see the bird, though.

On Sunday, we intended to spend most of the day on the beach before heading home in the late afternoon. However, the forecast was for heavy storms starting early afternoon, and I didn’t want to get caught towing the camper is a severe storm, so we headed back early and were home by 2 PM.

It was brutally hot both days, with the Accuweather ‘Real Feel” temp at 109F on an actual air temp of around 85F. We are headed to the Outer Banks for Labor Day weekend, hopefully it’ll be cooler there.