On July 16th, we headed down to Hatteras Island for our annual family beach vacation. Even though we have years of experience vacationing in and exploring the villages on Hatteras Island, we still managed on this trip to encounter new questions that had to be answered.

What’s a better beach choice: the beach we can walk to or the beach where we have to get in the car with wet children?

Normally, this is a no-brainer: putting kids who have been swimming in the ocean and then rolling in sand in a car while they are still wet is only a good idea if you hate yourself, your automobile, and any and all future passengers you might transport in that car. However, the normally swimmable beach right by the beach house had been terraformed with enough sand that new maps will have to be drawn of the island. Apparently, North Carolina’s government had decided that they had to do something about the encroaching ocean; last year, we noticed that some of the beach houses closer to the surf were on the verge of becoming ocean houses.

It would seem that losing a dozen or so beach homes to rising sea levels and eroding beaches was enough to get the government to take action. When we arrived this year, we found that a whole lot of sand had been displaced from the ocean floor to the shore. As the beach was built up and pipelines were being constructed, some people found that their home rental was a bit less oceanfront than they may have expected.

The beach was significantly wider than before so even people staying in ostensibly “ocean front” houses had a journey ahead of them.

Because of all of the relocated sand, our formerly level beach now had quite a drop off around where the waves break. By the end of the week, a two-tier drop had emerged.

The sand made swimming in this area a challenge. The drop-off just beyond where the waves broke meant that you could either swim in the area where the waves could potentially bodyslam you onto the bed of sharp shells that had been dredged from the ocean floor; or you could go beyond the waves and possibly drop off the continental shelf. Fortunately, the children found ways to use the sand-cliff to their advantage without swimming.

Even for children with little sense of self-preservation, jumping off a sand wall as high as they were tall as took guts and special mental preparation.

Soon, we realized that with the sand-wall to entertain the kids, no parenting was necessary.

In Alex’s defense, this wasn’t even the worst sand-associated jumping that we had encouraged the children to do that week.

Sandcliffs and waves that could grind swimmers against jagged shells might be good for death-defying feats of athleticism, but they weren’t great for relaxation, swimming, or, importantly, submersion in the ocean for beach peeing. However, there was another local beach option available to us. Reconnaissance performed during morning walks had revealed that the public beach by the Hatteras lighthouse was still flat.

But it wasn’t like relocating to this beach came without a cost. While the sand cliff beach was a relatively short walk from the beach house, the lighthouse beach was about a half-mile walk on the beach, through the sand, which was far enough that we would have to drive there to set up the beach camp. That meant transporting the kids in cars that we had purchased with real money.

Not to mention that driving wet children around meant that wet children would do wet children things in the car. Sometime soon, one of the adults will inevitably find that wet beach towel that had been lost in the car under the metric ton of sand that somehow sprang from a child’s bathing suit when they sat down, the towel mildewing in sea water. But on Sunday, we experienced an abbreviated beach day on the sandcliff beach with tweens who failed to understand that the new dropoff beyond the waves was something that might, you know, kill them, daring us to either kill them ourselves for failing to take the danger seriously or letting them die when they were sucked away to another continental tectonic plate. Because we are good parents, we instead lured them to safety with swimming pools and desserts that don’t pretend to be fudge. The next day, we rolled the dice and relocated to the lighthouse beach.

Everyone agreed that the beach, with its lack of cliffs, drop-offs, and cheese-grater waves, was a better beach experience.

This beach was great for kids even around high tide, which is usually when the beaches at Hatteras are rougher. Hours after low tide, there was a basin for kids to play in. And the absence of a rapidly growing sea wall at this beach meant that activities other than “hurl yourself from the sand cliff” were feasible.

Still, even aside from the transportation issue, there were drawbacks to the lighthouse beach. It was a bit more crowded than the beach by our house, and some people brought their own music.

In spite of these shortcomings, there was a clear people’s choice between the two beaches.

Which beach was better? Against the odds, the answer was the beach where we had to get into a car with wet children. Just be sure to account for all of your towels when you get out of the car.

What’s more frightening: our amateur fireworks or the family’s rendition of the Happy Birthday song?

Even on vacation, occasionally frightening things will occur, like that time one of the kids clogged the toilet so badly that several solvents and a fishing rod were needed to restore toilet functionality. Or after any child takes a shower.

On this beach trip, one of the frightening things we experienced was lighting off the fireworks that Mark had acquired, not from a store, but from a vaguely described “guy.” Consequently, some of the second-hand fireworks he had purchased had unclear functions and no directions. So who wants to set off the non-store-bought fireworks to see what happens?

We turned to the family expert at exploding things. In his younger days, my brother Scott was a textbook pyromaniac. He participated in the melting of a Cobra Water Moccasin into the front steps of a neighbor’s house, once set the woods near our house on fire in a blaze that the fire department had to put out, and he used gasoline to start a fire on the surface of a creek. So when Scott showed some reluctance in agreeing to detonate the mystery fireworks, we relocated the children even farther away, atop one of the nearby beach cliffs. Then Scott overcame his reluctance to work his fiery magic.

The fireworks were amazing. Mark’s unnamed source of explosives is to be commended.

And in spite of our early concerns, none of the fireworks came even close to blowing up a child or parent.

Clearly, the degree to which the fireworks could be considered frightening depended on how close you were to a firework that might explode in an unpredictable way. Our family rendition of the Happy Birthday song, on the other hand, with its lack of melody and dirge-like qualities, could frighten everyone involved.

Which was more frightening? It’s a wash.

What’s easier: Putting up a brand new sun shelter on a windy beach or starting a s’mores bonfire in the rain?

The Outer Banks beaches are windy. There’s a good reason the first airplane took flight in this region; on the right day, shovels and buckets can take flight. Consequently, beach umbrellas can either be blown inside-out by high winds or transformed into tumbling spears of death, driven by the wind to seek out unsuspecting victims. Fortunately, alternatives to beach umbrellas are emerging on the market, and Jodi purchased one of the new sunshades for this trip. That’s good news, right?

In spite of our efforts, the sunshade would not stay erect, remaining flaccid even after we experimented with a bunch of new positions we found on the internet. Many different configurations of the sunshade were attempted, both in line with the sunshade “directions” and as the product of failed inspiration. A critical problem seemed to be that unlike some of the other stable sunshelters we could see on this beach, which had four poles, this one only had two. Nevertheless, at one point Jodi apparently overcame the odds…

Ultimately, the experience once again proved:

And our experience wasn’t even the worst one with this product.

Another beach tradition involves building a bonfire on the beach to make s’mores. Particularly with the new extra-wide beach, this was a labor intensive process. We hauled firewood, Hershey’s bars, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (for superior s’mores), kindling, plates, graham crackers, waffles, and, of course, wet wipes, to the proper bonfire location. By the time we had completed that, a rogue cloud had broken away from a distant cloud pack, flying over to rain on us. To get the fire hot enough that the drizzle wouldn’t put it out, we threw all of the paper we had into our fire pit, including the paper bag that held our s’more supplies and the paper bag we intended for trash.

Scott, our expert in lighting things on fire, had gone fishing, so we had to rely on amateur bonfire-lighters. It was a close call keeping the fire going, but a shredded cardboard box turned the tide in our favor and defeated the rogue cloud.

Eventually, the fire did get pretty hot, but no one waited for that. Instead, we used the rain-cooled, cardboard-fueled early blaze to slow roast a variety of s’mores.

Of course, as soon as we finished the s’mores, the threat of rain totally disappeared. With the nice evening temperatures and the ample space provided by the reworked beach, it was time for the Feats of Strength phase of bonfire night.

As it turned out, building the bonfire on a sporadically rainy day was better than building it on…

Answer: starting a s’mores bonfire in the rain has to be the choice because we are still in the aspirational phase of erecting the two-pole sunshade.