Sabbatilog 2.0 | Part 8 | Holden Beach SEA-bbatical

For roughly 40 years, my family has vacationed at Holden Beach, North Carolina.  This year I believe there were 23 descendants (and spouses of descendants) of the Reverend Luther and Mildred Knauff, and everyone had already arrived by the time we got to "Turtle Twins" on Saturday evening.  This is our third year staying at Turtle Twins.  You can read about other places we've stayed here.      

We don't always attend worship when we are at the beach, but this year we did.  The kids and I invited Mom and we invited some Calvary folks who were in the area to join us at the Lutheran church in Ocean Isle Beach.  In spite of (or because of) the holiday weekend, the church was packed.  Part of the gospel reading included the words of Jesus: "Come to me, all of you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest."  An appropriate verse for the first Sunday of my "sea-battical." 

Most days we eat two meals at the house and one meal at a restaurant.  Mermaids is falling out of favor; the BBQ restaurant is still a favorite.  I have a new respect for the Provision Company.  We also had ice cream at two different places after dinner.  The triplets enjoyed being in the ocean and on the beach.  Abbie has become an expert at finding shark teeth and she made some into charms for bracelets.  We played a new-to-us game called Monikers, which Jon says is like a game they play at school called Fruit Salad.  All of my kids enjoyed spending time with their cousins.  

On Wednesday, families began to head home, including Mom and Dad and the California cousins.  On Thursday morning, the Georgia Knauffs all left, leaving just Aunt Lois, Uncle Mike, and us.  We went to North Myrtle Beach to do an escape room, which was a lot of fun, and then we went to an Italian restaurant which had really good food.  The kids and I left Friday morning and spent Friday night at the Summit Bechtel Reserve, our go-to glamping spot on the way back to Ohio.  This was our third time staying there.  No bears this year, but we saw about 40 deer on the way to the camp site.  

Oh, one more thing.  There is a beach house named SEA-bbatical, which is where the name of this blog entry came from.  I took a selfie from across Ocean Blvd West, but the name on the sign is very small.  Maybe we will stay there in the future!