B&N.

Almost every year out of the past 5 or 6, my family has taken a trip to Emerald Isle in North Carolina for a week during summer vacation. We spend our week in a beach house with some relatives. The week is filled with nothing but relaxation, good food, and beaching.  The only activity that is really planned in my week (aside from being a full-time beach bum) is the round of putt-putt golf at "The Golphin Dolphin." The whole family hits the links for some mini-golf, which is a pretty fierce competition. My uncle is Australian in every sense of the word, and golf is one of his passions. His 7 year old son (my cousin) proves to be the stiffest entry into the tournament, telling his younger brother to "mark the hole" for him and the like. Many years I have watched this miniature Rory Mcilroy dismantle holes 1-18 of the course like a skilled surgeon while my golf ball finds itself on the nearby freeway more often than it finds the hole. All in good fun though. I can take the kid when we start playing rugby and cricket though. Barely.

Before my family even gets in the car to leave for the beach, we take a trip in the week preceding vacation to the local Barnes and Noble Bookstore to aquire a "beach book" for each one of us to read....well at the beach. Past purchases have included (this is the whole family, not just me) The Hunger Games, Twilight, Mark Twain's Autobiography, Dune, Etc. Light reading. I do enjoy reading very much, and the week at the beach gives me a chance to sit in a hammock and peruse through a good novel. Tonight was the B&N trip. I got Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. It's kind of a personal goal of mine to become more well-read over the next whoever-knows-how-long. I remember liking A Farewell To Arms, mostly because of the short, clipped style that Hemingway so beautifully employs, so I figured I couldn't go wrong with another novel by a classic author. I'm a fast shopper, (when not in the guitar store) so I had the book in my possession within 15 minutes of entering the store. While the rest of my family was looking through the store for books, I just sort of wandered around browsing, trying not to look any of the employees directly in the eye for fear that they'll steal my soul. (The stereotypical B&N worker is either a cranky senior citizen or a heavily tattooed artsy person in their mid-twenties with myriad piercings, each one in a more unlikely place than the next.)

When the time comes to leave, I remember the least pleasant part of this pre-vacation ritual. It's the meltdown my 8 year old brother treats the whole store to when he finds out my father is not buying him a $60 book about how the Death Star was constructed (foreword by George Lucas). I used to be embarrassed by this, but I've grown out of that. Tonight I watched #4 (in the birth order) crash and burn in the children's section and was mildly entertained by that, much in the way that I am entertained by watching cheerleaders get dropped by their fellow squad-mates (cause it's not really a team) then caught by the school mascot. Or watching NASCAR crashes. Same thing really.

The pre-vacation getup is almost as fun as being on vacation itself. Everyone in the family is so excited to be going away for a week that life becomes easier for everyone except my dad. He gets in "pre-vacation mode," which means he starts saying the phrase "_(insert number here)__ days  until I'm at the beach." This can happen anywhere from 5 to 10 days before actual departure for NC. I used to wonder why he did this, but since I've started working part-time in his law office this summer, I've stopped. I'm not saying it's super-boring or anything, just that the man does a lot and has a lot of pressure on him. It's his week to blow work and responsibility off, or at least feel like he's doing so.

Anyway, I'm stoked for a week away from VA Beach.