The wondrous pool at the beach house in Buxton

We have a Saturday-to-Saturday rental at the Outer Banks, which means that leaving at 7am on Saturday is ideal for beating the traffic coming from Maryland and Pennsylvania. We came close, leaving the house at 7:30. There is really only one road to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for travelers coming from the north, so all of our efforts to get out early were undermined by a wreck on that road.

This is actually an overly positive estimate of the traffic by Google. The yellow on the map gave me false hope.

As traffic stalled to a stop, one enterprising group of travelers in another car got out to walk their dog. That lasted until they spotted this snake roadkill on the side of the road.

The delay, though, caused us to reach the beach house just after it was opened. We unloaded, had an early dinner, and then most people went to the pool at the beach house. The pool was great and even worked miracles like:

Scott actually being nice to another human being. No one thought it was possible, but the pool made it happen.

Mostly, though, the pool helped us to clean and entertain the kids. When McKenna first got to the beach, she was not a fan.

Then, she rediscovered her love of sand.

“The sand is exfoliating my scalp! That’s amazing!”

Hmmm… There’s a lot of sand in her hair. How will we ever get it out?

With all of that sand, it was time to go to the pool! Of course, we did rinse the kids off before we threw them in, but that didn’t get the sand that had become one with every hair follicle on their bodies and entered every orifice. The use of the pool to clean kids started a trend.