We had originally intended to spend Monday at Topsail Beach with our friends the Grady's.  A few days before the vacation though, we changed the plans because Marnie didn't feel it would be a good idea to take Derrick back on another car ride the day after driving to New Bern.  The trip to New Bern for them on Sunday was about 3 hours.  The trip to Topsail Beach was about 90 minutes.  So we rescheduled the Topsail trip for Tuesday.

Somehow, Monday we ended up driving about an hour and 15 minutes to go to Pine Knoll Shores (on Emerald Isle) to go to one of the North Carolina Aquarium's.  This would end up being the only time Derrick (20 months old) left the resort.  Everyone actually had a great time, and Derrick really loved the aquarium.  Marnie and Bob took Derrick back to the resort after a couple of hours and the rest of us went to Fort Macon State Park on the northern end of the island.  We had about an hour to kill before dinner, so while Adrienne and Bill went to check out the civil war era fort, Emily and Erin and Lin and I hung out on the beach.  Emily and I flew our kites and walked along the shore.  Because it's on the end of the island, swimming is not only dangerous here because of the currents, but actually prohibited.  They even say "no wading" though we did get our feet wet!

Finally 5:30 rolled around and we packed up the truck and headed to The Channel Marker, a wonderful seafood restaurant on the sound side of Atlantic beach.  This was our third trip to this restaurant and the first that it wasn't "awesome".  The appetizers were still great, my she-crab soup was awesome.  I thought the crabcakes were great but Adrienne said they weren't as good as last time.  I actually ordered a pound of peel-n-eat shrimp and it was overcooked.  Oh well.  I think we'll probably still go back.

After dinner, we headed back to New Bern for a good night's sleep.

We had a limited schedule today for a couple of reasons.  We weren't sure when the rest of the crew was arriving, and of course it was Sunday.

After getting some breakfast, we headed out to the Aurora Fossil Museum in Aurora, NC - a very very sleepy little town about a half hour from the resort.  Sunday hours had the museum opening at 1pm and we got there around 10:30, but we were still able to dig in the fossil pit in the park across the street.  The fossil pit is a pile of rejected "stuff" from the PCS Phosphates mine.  We looked for fossils for about an hour and found numerous sharks teeth.

Then we headed up to Washington, NC, where we were going to go to lunch and maybe hit up the North Carolina Estuarium.  We had a bad lunch experience at The Meeting Place, then ended up heading back to New Bern as the rest of the family was going to arrive.  No time for the Estuarium.

Washington, NC is a pretty cool little waterfront town at the mouth of the Pamlico River.  They've undergone quite a waterfront restoration I guess, and the downtown area itself is quite cool.

One note, beware of one way streets.  Luckily for us it was pretty quiet, but we ended up driving about 5 blocks the wrong way down the one way "Main Street" in downtown Washington before we noticed.

Didn't really do anything worth mentioning the rest of the afternoon/evening.