Friday we set up camp at the KOA and ate dinner at Brooklyn Pizza just down the road. The campsite is rather dusty, but Lucy looks nice and shiny.
Saturday was cloudy and damp, so we decided to make it our museum day. Our first stop was the Children's Museum. The kids remembered some of the exhibits and activities from our visit there last year. We discovered some fun new things to do as well, including a large hopscotch grid and a "broadcasting" TV stage.
After a quick lunch of corn dogs and french fries, we walked down to the river and took the free trolley to the Railroad Museum. The kids weren't interested in the rail history exhibits, but they LOVED watching the model trains. There was a large-scale layout in the children's area, as well as a detailed HO scale layout with multiple trains and a trolley.
Simon made a fire and roasted hot dogs for dinner, then Norman and Lea-Frances helped toast marshmallows for s'mores. Mmmm, sticky marshmallow goodness.
Sunday was still a bit cool and breezy, but we headed for the ocean anyway. In the past we've always gone to Wrightsville Beach, but we decided to try something different this year and went to Carolina Beach instead. It's just a narrow strip of sand, but the beach seems to go on forever in both directions. The kids had fun in the surf, and also being made into sand race cars.
We ate our requisite sandy sandwiches at the beach, then changed out of our swimsuits at the public bathrooms. Our beach choice meant we were now only a short drive from the NC Aquarium at Fort Fisher. Alligators and tree frogs and turtles and horseshoe crabs and star fish and sharks and eels, oh my! And lots of fish too, though the other critters definitely stole the show. This was something new for us, and a HUGE hit!
Monday we packed up camp, but instead of hitting the highway we stopped at the battleship USS North Carolina. Norman had vague recollections from our trip two years ago, while I don't think Lea-Frances remembered anything from that visit. Most of the time the kids were more interested in finding the tour arrows to follow than in learning anything about ship life, but occasionally they stood still long enough to hear about what they were seeing. Simon found the machine shop especially fascinating. We missed that area in 2006, as we cut our tour short when Lea-Frances started falling apart, and we almost missed it again.
I left out all the misery of late bedtimes and early mornings getting into the groove of sleeping in Lucy, as well as the details of Boo's boo-boos: knee and ankle scraped on the playground, finger pinched in the camper door, and a fall down several stairs of the battleship in her whining exhaustion when she'd had enough. This was not an idyllic trip (is there such a thing when you're traveling with a four-year old?), but there were lots of good moments and good memories.
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