OBX 2021!

 VAY-CAY! Is that how it's spelled? Looks odd. That's short for "Vacation" Look at me, trying to use a short and exciting intro and then ruining it with a lengthy explanation. Let's start over. Woo Hoo! A whole WEEK in the Outer Banks!

In case you didn't know, the "Outer Banks" is the thin stretch of islands off of the North Carolina coast. Often abbreviated as "OBX" One of the first things to do is to grab a local coupon-filled guide and plan what you want to do all week. This year 2021 was extra-required to plan, because plenty of places and things were closed periodically due to the heard-about worker shortages.

A funny moment occurred when checking out the movie nights offered, and while someone was reading them, they mis-quoted title as "The Greatest Snowman". Which sounded like a movie we all wanted to see.

Full Moon! I'll take this opportunity to mention that we probably could have planned better. We spent a lot of time debating things like where to eat, calling them, finding out the pizza place doesn't open until Wednesday... that kind of thing. We still wound up doing plenty of stuff, it's just that we spent a lot of time doing the vacation version of the Browsing-Netflix thing; you know, where to take just as much time trying to find something to watch as you would actually watching it. I guess my advise is to plan a bunch before you get here, if you can.

I don't recall this in the recent past, so I was a little shocked to have gotten a plastic bag at the Walmart. For years, the OBX had been a paper-bag-only place.

They brought a couple of those Escape Room-in-a-Box um,... boxes. We had planned on going to a real Escape Room so we thought we might need some practice. This wound up being super fun all on it's own, and I highly recommend you pick one up and give it a try. Pay attention to the difficulty levels though, three-circles was a lot harder than the two-circles one.

Orientation at the Time Share place. Basically free breakfast for listening to a couple of ads. I won this bracelet in the raffle! A little too big for my tiny hooves.

Plenty to do right in the Rec Room. It's interesting how long we stayed there that morning, and to note that we could have easily just "did that" every day and still would have had a fun week. None of us were particularly good at any of these things, but it's fun to play anyway.

We laughed when someone went over to the shelf and grabbed a puzzle, but soon after we were all so competitive and stubborn that we totally got caught up in it. Can that be a general warning about puzzles in any situation?

Just in case you were wondering we did indeed finish it, and it did indeed have all of the pieces. While it was cool that we finished, the real happiness came from the luck of having only grabbed a 100-piece puzzle, so it honestly didn't take up too much time. A good balance of fun without having it seem like a chore we HAD to complete before we moved on.

Table Tennis! More commonly known as Ping-Pong. Just bouncing the ball off of the floor and hearing the little "click" noise is great! Who cares if the game is any good, that constant click noise is what it's all about!

I forgot to take a picture of the epic almost-full Connect 4 board. So I just settled for a picture of the box. Which is a lot less impressive from a picture standpoint, but... the game was fun.

One night we downloaded the Uno game for our Nintendo Switch, because we forgot to bring cards and the store was [whiny voice] "all-the-way-over-there!" The unique thing about this was the relentless 6-second time limit on everybody's turn, which altered the relaxing way we'd normally play and turned it into a much different "FOCUS! JUST PLAY A CARD!" Which was funny at times in different ways.

The Time Share property has silly little events planned, like this Giant Kerplunk we did one day. It really gives it the backyard vibe, without having to construct a silly thing yourself.

Free freezy-pops with the activities? Yes please! Blue for me, because we all know blue is the best freezy-pop flavor.

Can you tell I took this picture through a window? This was a test shot using a waterproof case we bought.

Here's the case. Our phone is quite waterproof on it's own, we simply wanted a strap to use, so we didn't have to worry about dropping it. Sure it will still work on the bottom of the ocean, but how exactly would we get it back?

We had "won" a ticket for free ice cream during the Giant Kerplunk. Not a lot of people showed up for Kerplunk, so they just kind of handed out tickets. Since we are in Vacation Mode, of course we have to get ice cream at every opportunity.

Ice cream yay! It's a little silly to take a picture of a bowl of ice cream these days, right? We all already know how awesome it is. Do I need a picture to remind me of this one particular bowl? Eh, it's a vacation, take a picture of the ice cream. It's just what you do.

Those sunset streaks are very cool looking. I wonder what is blocking the sun? That's a very sharp edge. I heard you can get a good view of the sunset from that side of the island, but we never found a good place to check it out.

Not too long ago, in a galaxy close to us, my friend had never before seen a Star Wars movie. So we have been catching him up on them. Having watched Episodes 4, 5, 1, and 2, it was on to Episode 3 Revenge of The Sith. Check out that giant screen! You think they'd have bigger TVs in this place?

I brought this Jump Start set of Magic: The Gathering cards to play. The idea is to grab any two Jump Start boosters, which contain a random connected theme of cards and lands, and shuffle and play! No other setup needed.

The matchup was Lands and Walls vs Unicorns and Vampires. So right away you can tell that sounds like fun. Lands/Walls seemed to have an advantage because they were both Green sets, and yeah the first match was dominated by the Green tendency to grab extra lands and quickly cast a bunch of simple but solid creatures.

The re-match though, unveiled a wicked combo. The Unicorns and Vampires worked surprisingly well together and turns out these three cards let you tap a creature every turn and gain life equal to it's power, and at the same time deal that much damage to the opponent. When I cast a 12/12 Towering Titan, it was +12 life for them and -12 for me! Ouch!

Table Top Shuffleboard! Not sure if that's the official name for this. It was super fun carefully sliding the heavy metal discs on the sand-filled board. It's very large so you probably have to go somewhere to play it, unless you have a big garage or something. I kinda wanted to play this more.

We did an arts & crafts project one afternoon. This was a glass etching thing. There were several types of glasses to choose from, we went with this shallow glass we planned on using for ice cream. I think this is technically called a "rocks" glass? Used for small beverages with rocks, or... ice.

There were stencils to be put around the glass, so find something cool. They said we could use up to four of them, but there were also letters, and each "word" counted as only one thing.

After you tape around the stencils, you glop on the etching goo. You can see they didn't have a Minty "swirl" thing so I went with a snowflake instead. Since I planned on using this for ice cream, I guess.

Etching stuff all over it, it has to sit for seven minutes. If you can't read through  the goo, that other side says "OBX" and "2021".

It's hard to take pictures of etched glass! The etching is not deep at all, it hardly feels like it's even etched when you rub your hoof over it. Self-made souvenir! Woo hoo!

The second Exit: The Game box we tried was a LOT harder. We had to stop in the middle because we knew we had to wake up early the next morning to go fishing. Even though it's not a video game, there's a kind of "Pause Button" effect going on with a table nobody touches.

I mentioned fishing, those pictures will be posted later. My friend cannot look at a hot tub without thinking about the Saturday Night Live skit where Eddie Murphy did a James Brown song about getting in the hot tub, when he puts his toe in and does the James Brown scream is so funny.

Good call to hit the pool during typical dinner time. All to ourselves! Strange how the actual beach is "right over there!" but we choose to go in the pool instead. Nothing to do with sharks. Nothing at all.

We decided to try to go to one of the outdoor pools. Those are typically busier but we lucked out to find an empty one. Thanks to the recent stretch of hot weather and clear skies, this entire pool was very warm, almost like the hot tub, just without the bubbles.

Maybe you can zoom in and see, but there was at least a dozen dragonflies swarming over us. It's cool because those things eat the other more annoying bugs, so we cheered them on.

We took a risk with out "waterproof" camera to get a picture clearly taken while swimming in the pool. We didn't have to test the waterproof-ness of the camera, it stayed dry the whole time. 

Cards Against Humanity is not easy to take a picture of something to share, that's going to be okay to post. This match-up got a good laugh and is not too bad. I couldn't show the other cards but this was the clear winner it was so funny.

As much as the place blew-up with stuff everywhere when we arrived, it was amazing how quickly it all was packed up again. Check-out is at 10 am! While this picture might suggest the end of the vacation, there's tons of pictures to be seen of the various specific activities we did.

I... wanna swing... from the chande-lier... from the chand-da-le-iiirrrr! It was suggested that I pose from this with those song lyrics. And now do you have that song stuck in your head, too? Yeah, thank them for that, not me.