Yesterday started off innocently enough. Our only real plan was to hit the beach at Sea Pines with CampCashion and Company for a couple of hours, then home for rest and a return to the Harbor Town area for a little walking around looking at the enormous yachts and a casual dinner.

After our usual breakfast of bagels in some form or another, we hit the Harris Teeter for various perishable and non-perishable goods including some impulse buys like a huge can of whipped cream, ice cream and some Dora vitamins. I figured doing that at 7:45am would leave us plenty of time to get to the beach when we wanted.

Boy was I wrong.

Apparently, if the family gets dressed and heads to the grocery store at 7:45am, the earliest they can actually get to the beach is about 11:30am. I know we're on vacation and have no schedule to speak of, but that infuriated me for some reason.

By the way, I got over my crankiness by starting drinking at 11:31am.

The CampCashion contingent were well organized and fully engulfed in fun when we hit the beach. Lauren (who I am renaming 1Doh now) had a plethora of kids to play with that were armed with every imaginable beach toy. What was supposed to be a 60 to 90 minute visit turned into a nearly five hour day at Sea Pines.

But the best part of the day (for everyone else anyway) occurred after noon as the tide started to come in.

We had multiple viewings of many dolphins (and possibly an entire pod) including at least one very young dolphin. And I'm not talking about "Hey, I think I see a speck on the horizon that could be a dolphin or maybe it's a container ship." I'm talking about "Hey, is that a dolphin right there 25 yards from shore?"

Truly amazing. After the 55 dollar per person dolphin viewing tour boat left, it seemed that the dolphins were taunting the recently departed tourists by giving us an extended free dolphin viewing. It was awesome.


Then we spent almost an hour watching schools of stingrays swim by as close as ten feet from shore.

The kids also got to play with several hermit crabs that they found just wandering around in six inches of water, and then they got a jolt when they saw a blue crab that was about eight inches across scurrying out from his little hidey hole in a foot of water right in the middle of where we were all walking.

But back to my over-consumption. We came back and got showered up and headed back to Sea Pines to check out Harbor Town and the surrounding fun. They have a HUGE playground, some cool shops and outdoor restaurants, the big light house and many enormous yachts. After playground time, the wife, kids and grandparents hit the boardwalk, I parked my wobbly ass in front of the accoustic guitar guy and very close to the outdoor bar that apparently had no policy about selling two beers at a time to an obviously hammered customer. (In case you are confused, I'm talking about me).

We returned home at a reasonable hour, although in retrospect a "reasonable" time to return home would have been about 11:20am.

We took another in-room hot pool and upon exiting, I kicked 1Doh in the neck. She forgave me, and when I went into her room at around 8:15pm to apologize to her again, we both apparently fell asleep simultaneously in the grandparent's room.

The wife rousted me about 15 minutes later and hustled me off to bed.

No wonder I feel great today. I slept for about 11 hours straight.

Vacation rules.