Those who follow my Twitter account probably noticed two things over the course of the last week: 1) I was surprisingly quiet; 2) what tweets I did have were about the NC beaches. The reason is because I spent the last week in Kure Beach, NC, with my wife and parents. Thought I’d give a feedback report for Google to index: hopefully it’ll improve someone else’s vacation in the future.
The beaches of North Carolina are the most pleasant surprise I’ve discovered since moving to Durham. I’ve been to Sunset Beach and now Kure Beach, and both of them are sandy, comfortable beaches which are built up with vacation homes, not gigantic hotels, resorts, and condos. This means that the beaches are pretty sparsely populated compared to the beaches in Florida or Mexico that I’ve been at. And the water in North Carolina in June was comfortably warm — by September, it’s bathwater warm!
I stayed at 701 Fort Fisher Blvd. That complex had 7 units, and we stayed in #7. Although the unit was clean and relatively spacious, unit #7 was a bit of a ways from the beach, and you had to walk by the glass patio door of unit #6 to head out there. Units #1 through #5, on the other hand, have a boardwalk directly from their back patio to the beach. They also look out over the ocean in the back, which would have been nice. And despite advertising to the contrary, there was basically no internet: it was spotty at best, and you had to leave the patio door open to get it with any consistency.
The reason you go to Kure Beach is for the beach, and there’s not a lot else to do. The food wasn’t particularly good (avoid Big Daddy’s and El Zarape, but check out Grandma’s for breakfast and order oysters at Olde Salty), but Fort Fisher was worth checking out: watch the little LED and voice-over description of the battle, and then go hike through the fort and you can imagine what it must have been like. The aquarium near Fort Fisher is also worth checking out if you’re in the area: it was much nicer than I expected.
One Comment
I went to Kure Beach several years back. The quiet was so nice there…I grew up in a touristy area in Florida, so most touristy-type getaways just leave me cold. I found Kure Beach to be a very nice break from the typical gaudy-gift-shop-and-rundown-hotel cluttered beach fare. Nice write-up!