One Week of Luxury

I very rarely type right into the box for an entry, so please excuse the potential horribleness of what I write today. I will be keeping writing to a minimum though, as this is an picture-intensive entry. I might do these for the next few days, so if you're one of those people that don't like pictures, come back next week. I should be done by then. I have optimized the pictures as much as I thought I could, so hopefully it won't be too bad for those of you in the Stone Age who still use dialup. (Cable modems and DSL are worth every penny!) But enough chatter...

Can you believe I got to stay in that house? Sometimes I find it hard to believe. When you're looking at the picture, our room was on the top right. We had our very own private deck and a view of the ocean. The house was so fancy that we couldn't even figure out the computer system that ran everything. There was a manual for the house. It definitely added to the luxuriousness of the home, but it was a pain in the ass when you're trying to figure out how to switch on the lights. We managed somehow.

I know I posted pictures like this earlier from the realtor's web site, but I had to put up pictures of my own. This is the front of the house. It faced the sound, which is the strip of water between the Outer Banks and mainland North Carolina. It's rather swampy and produces copious mosquitoes as could be witnessed by the horribly swollen lumps all over me. It's nice not to have houses right across the way though, and we got to see some very nice sunsets that way too.

Welcome to our room! Isn't it just beautiful? It was quite nearly the best room in the house if I do say so myself. I don't know how we managed to end up with it, because I stayed as far away from the room deciding fray as possible. My mother- and father-in-law got the main master suite, which was the level below ours with a bigger bathroom if you can imagine such a thing once you see ours. I liked our room better though. We had a better view of the ocean, which, to me, beat their bigger bathroom.

It might seem funny to be all excited about drawers, but this is only the second time we've had more than two drawers in our room in all the years we've been taking these vacations. We had lots of drawers this time, and a closet that actually had lots and lots of hangers, unlike the five we had last year. I was a terrible person last year and went and stole all the hangers out of the closets of the people who weren't there yet. They all had better rooms than we did though, so I felt justified.

I still sigh every time I see this view. Right out our bedroom window it was. I woke up every morning to see a fantastic sunrise and then fell right back asleep for another two to three hours, because I don't get up at that God-forsaken time like some of the other people in the house. Loons. This view made it just a little bit easier to spend all of Thursday cooped up in that room because I had a monstrously bad cold and a case of pinkeye. I'll tell the pinkeye story later.

In case we entertained guests in our humongous room, we had a bench where people could sit. Since we would do no such thing, we used that bench to pile all our junk, just like at home. Nothing like feeling at home while you're away.

See what I mean about that bathroom? It's a room in itself. We might very well have been able to fit this whole bathroom into the shower stall of the master suite, but who needs that much space to shower? I was quite happy with my regular size shower stall and that beautiful jacuzzi tub. This bathroom even had the toilet in it's own little closet-like space with a door and a fan, so John and I could be in the bathroom at the same time without worrying about being seen on the toilet. Even after eight years of marriage, we still demand that privacy.

As in most fancy houses, there were two sinks as well, so John could leave all his hair, razor stubble (for all the two whole times he shaved), and toothpaste gook in his sink, and I wouldn't have to look at it. I wouldn't have to clean it either. That point is why I don't want two sinks at home. I would still have to clean his gunky sink. As it is, I clean one gunky sink that we all use. This bathroom had more drawers and storage space in it than our whole bedrooms on previous years.

This is where I spent many evenings. I had my book and a drink, and I'd soak in there until the timer for the jets turned off, and then I'd soak a little more. One night, I had bubbles up past my head just because I could.

I will miss not going to the beach next year, but I won't miss being bound to that vacation or having to deal with coming up with the money or with family politics. This vacation went very well, and there were no fights or obvious hurt feelings this time, which is good since we won't be doing this again for a while. I just need to find a way to make a ton 'o money, so I can live down there and wake up with the ocean out my window and go to bed after a nice soak in the jacuzzi tub. Until then, I'll look at my pictures and dream.