Beach Week 2019

2019 is the year of the Dunnevant family Beach Week vacation. It’s a biennial event. Nineteen people, renting an 8 bedroom, 8 full bath house somewhere on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is not for sissies. Finding a house which is large enough, close enough to the beach, suitably endowed with a proper kitchen, a pool and hot tub, a massive enough living area to accommodate 19 people for a sit down dinner, one that doesn’t cost a small fortune, and one which is available during the one week that 19 people can all agree on is no small task. So, to that end, the search begins the first week of January and is greatly assisted by my wife and her dazzling array of Google docs, spreadsheets and organizational life hacks.

The first family email went out a few days ago with the aforementioned Google doc attached. It has prompted a flurry of responses. Already, huge obstacles have appeared, not the least of which is something called the...Great Beach Refurbishing Project of ‘19...whereby, the storm ravaged beach between milepost 11 and 21 will endure a re-sanding project over a 5 month period which happens to include the entire summer. The department, bureau, or agency in charge of this project has declined to provide any information on when exactly it will begin or specifically where it will begin. So, if you rent a house anywhere between milepost 11 and 21, you run an incalculable risk that during your chosen week the beach in front of your house might be closed, or worse...inhabited by scores of illegal immigrants doing the dirty, hard jobs that Americans just won’t do, right at your doorstep! The burning question now is...do we roll the dice and take a chance on renting a house in this trouble zone?? What are the odds that our vacation will be ruined? 

To establish those odds...if I understand how Vegas works...you first have to calculate the amount of beach mileage affected, and then divide that by the number of days in the five month window. Then, since the work is being done by an agency of government, you have to factor in delays, impact studies, public hearings, work stoppages because somebody saw an endangered species crawl into the dunes somewhere, grandstanding press conferences by local politicians trying to either claim credit for the work or blame somebody else for the debacle that it has become, and finally... the potential of a government shutdown. What is a vacation planning family of 19 to do?

Despite all of these obstacles...we will figure it out. That’s just what we do. We air all of our concerns, we balance competing preferences, we all make the required concessions and compromises necessary to accommodate what is best for the majority of us, consistent with our objective of a happy and fun family vacation.

If the Dunnevant family, a tribe known far and wide for our raging opinions and contentiousness, can figure this out...how come the people in Washington DC cant?