Today, we got an early start and headed to Wilmington to tour the battleship USS North Carolina. The battleship is fascinating but it was soooo hot on the lower decks. We were the first people there and pretty much had the ship to ourselves in the beginning. I can’t imagine being down there with a bunch of people in the middle of the ocean during a war or even with a bunch of people in the hot afternoon!

After exploring part of the upper deck, it was time to go down and explore the lower decks. The tour is self guided so you can move at you own pace. However, there are signs telling you which way to go so that certain stairs are only for people going up and and others for people going down. During the tour, we went up and down so many times, that I never really knew which level we were on, or whether we were in the front or back of the ship. Scott was very excited to see the inner workings, controls, and yes the radios on board. Talon’s excitement faded the longer we were below deck and the hotter it got. Here are some pictures from our tour below deck.

Eventually, we made it back to the deck of the ship. It started raining on us a little, but not enough to make us stop exploring.

They have built a nice walkway around the ship so that you can get a 360 degree look. We were hoping to see some alligators, but we only saw fish and crabs.

Overall, I think everyone had a good time. We drove through some storms on the way home, but when we got there, we decided to head to the beach hoping for a gap in the rain/storms. We made it to the beach and stayed (even in the rain) as long as we could before the bad part of the storm rolled in.

We headed home and decided to swim in the pool for a little bit. Mostly because there is an outdoor shower at the pool, and that along with swimming would help rid us of some of the sand! But it wasn’t very long before we were ran off by thunder and lightning.

We got back inside, cleaned up, and settled in to watch a movie (aka:nap time for me) while hoping the storms would pass and we would get a second go at the beach. Later in the evening we headed back out to the beach and we stayed almost until sunset. It was very cloudy and you could see rain out over the ocean but when we saw lightening we left. Talon was able to find all kinds of creatures in the sand. There were crabs, tiny tiny fish, clams, and dead jellyfish. As we were leaving there was a man surf fishing and he caught a baby shark. He let Talon look at it before throwing it back into the water. All in all it was a good day. We made the most of it despite the less than stellar weather.