The Tigers are playing the Cubs tonight, and I noticed their centerfielder's last name is Fukudome.

I'm sure it's not pronounced the way I'm pronouncing it... but.. hah.

I was very excited today about our planned trip to Cape Lookout.  We'd made reservations on the 8:45 ferry with Island Ferry Adventures and a guided tour with Port City Tour Company to visit Shackleford Banks, part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore.  Shackleford Banks is a 9 mile island at the southern end of North Carolina's Outer Banks, and is home to over a hundred wild horses, left by the sunken ships of Spanish explorers over 400 years ago.

the ferry dropped us off on the southern end of the island, and there happened to be a small herd of the horses right at the ferry dropoff, so we didn't actually have to go hunting for them.  However, we'd paid an extra $10 for the walking tour, so we followed our excellent guide Larry off into the wild, where we learned about the horses, fiddler and ghost crabs and other wildlife on the island.  We also spent some time on the ocean side of the island where the surf was quite rough, looking for shells.  The water felt great.

After the walking tour (about 2 miles I'd guess) and the shell hunting, we headed back over to the sound side for some swimming.  I was the only one with the sense to put my suit on when we left in the morning, so me and Emily were the only ones who went swimming.

I guess I should mention that this trip was just Adrienne and I, Emily, and Erin.  Bill and Lin and Marnie and Derrick stayed at the resort (and Bob had actually gone home Wednesday morning).

The water on the sound side was surprisingly deep.  It actually dropped off to 10' or more only about 20 feet offshore.

We got on the 12:20pm ferry back to Beaufort, and hit up Clawson's 1905 for lunch on the recommendation of our ferry boat captain.  Lunch was excellent.  Emily and I went into the General Store afterwards to look around, and on our way out, Emily tripped down the stairs (about 3 steps) and went face first into the sidewalk.  Very unpleasant.  Amazingly she survived the incident without any blood or broken facial parts.  And I really was amazed because after seeing her face hit the sidewalk, I thought for sure I was going to pick her up and have her nose be bloodied at the very least.   She managed to calm down after about 5 minutes but during most of the ride home she was telling us how certain she was that something was wrong with her.  My little drama queen, I love her!

I have no recollection of what we did for dinner that night.  I think Emily and I had leftovers while Adrienne and Marnie and Erin had dinner at the Hurricane Restaurant.

Tomorrow - back to the islands!

Emily had a swim meet last night, her first of the summer swim season.  It was at Eagle Ridge in Raleigh, and thankfully I was not volunteering.  Of course, the benefit of volunteering is you're not bored.

Summer swim meets consist of "main events" which are scored, and "heats" which are not.  The top swimmers typically get to swim in the main events.

Emily got to participate in her first ever relay events.  She swam the backstroke leg of the medley relay for one of the Otters 7-8 girls relay teams, and her team took third place.  She also swam the anchor (4th) leg of the freestyle relay at the end of the meet, and took third place in that race as well.

In the individual events, she was in main events for both freestyle and backstroke, and in heat 1 for breaststroke and butterfly.  She finished 3rd (of 6) in freestyle, and 2nd (of 6) in backstroke, won her heat for Breaststroke, and finished 4th or 5th in Butterfly.

Overall, an excellent outing.  She had a good time, and won some place ribbons.  I'm anxiously awaiting her times to see if she set any personal bests.

Today was our day to stick around New Bern.  We intended to go down to historic New Bern and have lunch at The Cow Cafe, a cool little place we discovered on Middle Street last time we were in New Bern, then visit Tryon Palace.  Tryon Palace was build in 1767 as the home of the Royal Governor, but it burned down in 1798 and wasn't re-built until the 1950s. 

Anyway, lunch was good, but as we finished it started to rain.  So instead of heading over to Tryon Palace, we shopped.  There are a lot of cool little shops on Middle Street, including The Pepsi Store which was supposedly the place where Pepsi was invented, then called "Brad's Drink".  The pepsi Store consisted of a soda fountain where you could sit at the bar an order a Pepsi for 50 cents, and a bunch of pepsi-branded merchandise.  It was kinda lame, actually.  Plus, I'm a coke drinker.  Coke Zero, actually.

We ended up spending a couple hours wandering up maybe 3 blocks of Middle Street before getting ice cream at the end of our shopping trip.  By that time it had stopped raining but it was very wet, so we just headed back to the resort.  We ordered take-out from The Hurricane Restaurant, which was onsite at the marina.  I wrote a review of this experience on Google:

We recently stayed at the Fairfield Harbour Resort, home of the Hurricane Restaurant. We had a large party and ordered carry-out from the Hurricane twice. Everyone in our party enjoyed their food. For my part, I had a full rack of ribs the first night, which were good... fries and slaw on the side. The second time I went with the Seafood Fra Diablo, which was shrimp and scallops over pasta with a spicy marinara sauce - also good. This isn'ta "top of the line" or fancy upscale restaurant, but as far as "resort/hotel restaurants" go it was good enough for us to eat twice at in a week. Of course, it has the convenience of being the only nice restaurant within 10 miles of the resort.

Off to bed early as we had a big day planned for tomorrow - our trip to Beaufort and Shackleford Banks.

Our original plans for Tuesday had been to hang around New Bern.  This would've allowed Emily and I to drive back to Garner for a 6pm swim meet - the first "real" swim meet of the summer swim season.  Unfortunately, because the trip to Topsail hadn't occurred on Monday, and Wednesday wasn't going to work either, we ended up going to Topsail Beach on Tuesday.  We left around 9am in a bit of rain, and it poured pretty hard at times... we managed to drive out of the rain but then back into it on and off.  As we drove down the main drag on Topsail Island (Hwy  210 / Anderson Street), there was some really high standing water on the road.  Thankfully we were in the pickup truck so it was no problem.  I think I did power wash someone's house going through one puddle.

We were visiting our friends, Bob and Debbie Grady.  Adrienne's dad and Bob have been friends for a long time, and Adrienne has been visiting the Grady's at Topsail Beach since the mid 80s I think. 

Marnie rode down with Bill and Lin for this trip, and left Derrick back at the resort with Bob.  It was raining hard when we arrived at their second row beach house on the south end of the island, so we went inside to relax for a while.  Eventually it did stop raining, so Emily and I went out to the beach for about a half hour to play.

Debbie made us one of her typical awesome beach lunches - a good ol' southern steampot.  Smoked sausage, corn on the cob, new potatoes, and shrimp, all boiled together.  And the shrimp was good and fresh too!  I love fresh peel-n-eat shrimp.  As usual, lunch was great.

Nothing much else to tell about Tuesday.  We headed back to New Bern around 5 o'clock.  We picked up Chinese takeout on the way home for dinner, and went back to our condo to play Blockus and Uno before retiring for the night.