Working Vacation

Despite the horrors of my job currently (which you read about in my last post), I was finally able to pull myself away and take my vacation to visit my sister, Samantha in Wilmington, NC this week (sans work laptop, I might add!!).

Wilmington is right on the Carolina Coast and is currently 14 degrees warmer than Rochester, so I can't complain. I met my parents here, not for a relaxing beach vacation, however, but to help my sister finish off some planning for her wedding in October.

First order of business: meet her fiance, Adam. Check. Adam is great! We spent most of the day yesterday hanging out in an Old Chicago restaurant watching the Badgers lose against Xavier. I'm happy to say he has my official and enthusiastic seal of approval. He and Sam are great together.


Second order of business: cake, dresses, flowers, see venues, and maybe a few things I forgot about. I started the day today calling a half-dozen wedding cake places to see if we could set-up a cake-tasting. This is easily one of the best parts about wedding planning and although Sam had her heart set on one place, I convinced her to try several before choosing because, let's face it, what do you have to lose? (Except trying several fabulous cakes for free if you just go with the first place you see.)

Adam took a half-day to spend the afternoon with us, so we got to do some fun wedding and non-wedding things too. First stop? The beach! Even though it is just March and our temperatures were in the 60's, the ocean was dotted with surfers and the beach with mostly naked people. I guess some of the North Carolina students get together in large groups to rent out the beach houses to live in during the year, so they were out doing what college students do best - avoiding their homework.



After that, we drove downtown to take a look at the conference center where the reception will be and the park where the ceremony will be. The conference center room was open, so we broke in and took some pictures.


The place where the ceremony will be, however, was not open. When we drove up there were huge semis parked along the road supplying power to what I thought was maybe U2 on tour or something. Everywhere people were sitting with large cameras waiting to take pictures and the cops were keeping people from getting to Sam and Adam's actual wedding site. A guy came up and told us to clear off the path because they would need to bring equipment through. It turns out that they were filming a scene for the show One Tree Hill, which is filmed in Wilmington (Dawson's Creek, apparently was filmed here too)! I took a picture just in case there were any famous people out there, but I don't watch the show (and neither do most locals), so I may never know!