- Continued -

The Wedding

The primary purpose of our March 19 - 23, 2010 trip to Myrtle Beach was to attend the wedding of Butch Barnes and Susan Stacy.  We've not personally known either of them for a long period of time, but consider them special people and, indeed, special friends and felt very privileged to be among those invited to share in this significant occasion in their lives.  Our regular readers will remember seeing comments about and pictures of Butch and Susan in our write-ups for the past few years, with the first "group picture" of us all being a formal one made backstage at the 2008 Carolina Beach Music Awards.  And, of course, those of you familiar with Carolina Beach Music recognize Butch's name and know of his many accomplishments including now being a member of one of our favorite groups:  Sea-Cruz.

We were more than a little anxious for them when the morning of the wedding day arrived on March 21.  Because we were concerned one or both of them might get cold feet?  Nope - certainly not that.  It was the weather that seemed to be threatening rain at any moment, which was not a very good prospect for a wedding that was to be held beachside on the lawn at the Breakers Resort.  But the rain didn't fall till afterwards that day and the ceremony was a splendid, joyous event.  It was elegantly simple and perfectly wonderful in every respect.  The ceremony was beautiful with gorgeous flowers, attendants attractively attired and appropriately organized and presented,  the bride and groom a handsome, loving couple, and the words spoken by all indeed most heartfelt and touching.  The wedding music was performed live by Dino Fair, the keyboard master with Sea-Cruz.  Frankly, we had no idea his repertoire included classical music.

The reception was held afterwards at the Blue Marlin in Garden City which we had not visited before, though we knew Sea-Cruz regularly performs there.  We were surprised at how large the club is and at the fact it has a good size, proper stage and dance floor.  It was wonderfully decorated for this occasion - most impressive.  There were far, far too many people we knew and visited at the reception to even think about trying to acknowledge here and we'll trust they understand.  We will say Rick Strickland and his band provided the entertainment and did an outstanding job - very well done and most enjoyable.

Throughout this emotion filled, busy day Butch was Butch, meaning he was serious when appropriate, sincere in his comments and, of course, mischievous and playful when the opportunities presented themselves (and sometimes when he created them).  We can think of a few words which succinctly describe Susan that day - radiant, happy and by the end of it all - quite exhausted - understandably so.

Yes, it was a most special occasion we enjoyed sharing with special friends and, as they well know, we wish them all the happiness possible in their lives.

Interlude

OK, those of you romantics needing to grab a tissue to dab at your moist eyes should do so now.  We promise there will be no more cause for tears during the remainder of what we have to share except for those which might be shed when we tell you that the fried shrimp at Duffy Street Seafood Shack was better in every respect than that which we had at the Sea Captain's.

Now we'll move along with the topics you're accustomed to finding addressed in our travelogues.

Weather and Travel

Let's quickly get the subject of weather out of the way, since we've already broached it with regard to the wedding.  For the most part it also was less than auspicious on the other days with one significant exception which was a day full of bright sunshine and delightfully warm temperatures.  Too bad the others weren't that way!  We did have some more sunshine but it was very windy and much cooler than we liked.  Then there were the days that were heavily overcast and windy.

However, knowing the weather forecast for the trip wasn't what we would have preferred, we still decided to drive the new BMW Z4 s35i.  At least it wasn't pouring with rain or snowing!

The maximum trunk space is available in the Z4 when the hardtop convertible roof is raised and it took essentially every cubic inch of it to squeeze in our stuff.  We've never made any pretense of traveling lightly and this trip was no exception.

Ed thoroughly enjoyed "exercising" the car on its first significant trip and found it, shall we say, exceedingly responsive in terms of acceleration and bursts of high speeds achieved even with the notable weight in the trunk.  The twin turbo chargers did not disappoint, though Ed is still planning to have a Stage II "tune" done which will make its performance capabilities even better than those of his much enjoyed previous roadster, the supercharged Cadillac XLR-V.  Along the route we take on the less traveled roads in the Carolinas there are several very straight stretches, with no driveways, no interchanges and no other access, and nothing other than perhaps a kamikaze deer or some such to interfere with doing a little speed testing.  At such times it's Sandra's job to watch the GPS computed speed displayed on the Passport 9500ix.  On the first run which was a bit of a warm-up practice without pushing it, she announced we had hit a pretty respectable number.  Later, another opportunity presented itself and this time Ed let it go and it "felt" significantly faster than the first time (think very fast).  After that brief spurt he quickly reined it in, resumed a normal speed, looked over at Sandra and said "OK, how fast was that?"   Her response was "I don't know - I closed my eyes."

For those of you who have your britches in a wad in a disapproving way over the preceding, we'll just say we were being facetious for purposes of entertainment and it didn't really happen.  There, feel better now?!

Did we mention we made the trip to Myrtle Beach in really good time?  Indeed we did.

But the most fun we had with the car was on the one day we had great weather.  It definitely was a top down day and we took advantage of it by doing something we haven't done in a very long time.  We cruised Ocean Boulevard from a point well south of the old Pavilion site all the way up beyond Grande Dunes Boulevard, then out onto North Kings Highway, and on along to Main Street in Ocean Drive.  And, of course, there were appropriate tunes playing all the while.  That definitely was fun and definitely brought back many memories of having done such many years ago.  Here's a little slideshow from that day.  Give it a minute or two to download, and then after another minute or so it will automatically start Windows Media Player.  Be patient.

Crusin' Ocean Boulevard

Needless to say, we're looking forward to visits this summer when we can have top down time every day and especially enjoy the fun of doing that in the evenings with the bright lights and a nice ocean breeze.