Wednesday I took off for a little vacation. This was the week I had set aside two months ago and the basic plan was to find some place with a beach, warm water, and lots of sunshine. Checking the forecast, I discovered that rain was predicted for everywhere above South Carolina, so I drove to Myrtle Beach, SC. It took me thirteen hours.

The beach was wonderful though. The water was the perfect temperature, the sun shone brightly all day, and body surfing in the waves was totally relaxing.

I went on this vacation by myself. I asked my daughter if she wanted to go, but she refused. My girlfriend had already taken her vacation in Oregon a few weeks earlier. We met too late in the year to be able to coordinate things. Alone didn't mean lonely, but it did mean slightly more boring. It also meant that I didn't have to plan, and I could do whatever the hell I wanted.

The problem with going to the beach by myself though was the whole sunblock issue. I don't tan easily, so I got some SPF 50 stuff. It worked pretty well for the eight hours I spent on the beach. However, I forgot to get the backs of my arms and the top of my right foot, plus there is a four inch band under my shoulders that I did not reach and which I apparently can not reach without assistance. As a result these areas turned a very bright and painful red. I already had a tan on my face, forearms and legs from all the hiking I've been doing. Now I've got brown on my face and forearms and legs, red on the back of my arms and on my shoulders and the top of my right foot, and white everywhere else.

That's right, my skin is three colors. I'm a calico person.

Anyway, on the way back I drove up the Outer Banks of North Carolina and stopped at Kitty Hawk, where Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first powered airplane. It was on all the North Carolina license plates so I thought I should check it out. The drive up was beautiful. I went through Camp LeJeune in Jacksonville and some giant salt water marshes. The roads were empty, the driving was great, and the plant life was exotic looking. The Outer Banks themselves were pretty too with all the housing for the rich and the long, massive bridges.

Kitty Hawk had a powerful effect on me. It is amazing to realize that it was only a hundred years ago that we humans finally took to the air. My grandfather was already a teenager. All those centuries where all we could do was envy the birds. Then came Orville and Wilbur's historic flight. Slightly more than sixty years later, we had been to the moon.

As a kid, I went through a paper airplane phase one summer. I would make dozens of them and launch them as fleets, working on the right wing shape and getting them to do curves and loops. I would make little paper airplanes that would sit on top of the big paper airplanes and launch them together. I think I had help, maybe 7 of 12 or 8 of 12, I'm not sure which.

It was interesting to learn that Orville and Wilbur got inspired by wooden toys that you could wind up. I remember buying windup planes and plastic birds with wings that could fly. I never flew a kite until college. The winds in the valleys where I live never get fast enough and the tops of the hills are covered with trees, making them less than ideal. My daughter's uncle and his future wife and I would fly kites in college, and I think I tried going a few times with my daughter after college. She never got into it though.

I'm getting a little off topic I guess. So Friday I was there at Kitty Hawk, where these humble bicycle shop owners did what no one else had done before. Not well educated scientists, not government employees, not wealthy entrepeneurs (although bicycles were a bigger deal in the early 1900's, I'm sure), just two guys with a dream. It's a wonderful thing about American history that you can find such people playing such a large role.

They have it set up so that you see can see exactly where that first flight took off. It went about 120 feet and lasted twelve seconds. Just forty yards. Four first downs in football. I ran the path, counting off the seconds and trying to time it so I started and stopped at the right points. It's really only a slow jog. The plane must have seemed to have floated the distance. I could imagine that floating sensation, and the sounds of engine and the bicycle chains and propellers. Seriously powerful stuff.

So then it was back home. I hit rain on the highway at about 8:00 p.m. I just missed a big storm at home. The winds on top of the hill where I lived knocked down quite a few branches on the trees out back, and my sidewalk had turned into a stream that I had to slosh through to get to the apartment at about 12:30 a.m.

I had planned a long hike the next day, but the rain was still pouring all morning. Today, the weather is cooler and very dry. Good sleeping weather, but I have managed to squeeze in breakfast with my daughter and an afternoon cookout with time in the pool at my sister's. Tomorrow it is back to work. I still have another twenty days of vacation I have to figure out what to do with.

(I'll bet this entry is too long, and no one reads this far. It's really more for me though, so I shouldn't really care.)