Spring is here and every small town in the area is having their annual spring festival. Do you want crabcakes at the Soft Shell Crab festival, lunch at the Shrimp and Grits festival, or a few hours on the tarmac as the Marine Core Air Base puts on a show?

“We’re going to stay right here and watch the air show from our pool,” one of the dads at the marina informs me while trying to fill an inflatable pool with water. Skye is inclined to agree this is a good idea. I’m loaded down with produce and meat from our morning foray to the farmer’s market and tell him we’ll be back up after lunch and nap. The Blue Angels show is at 3 and we should be up by then.

Skye goes down for a nap and I work for a while until the rumble of a jet gets too loud to ignore and Skye wants to know what’s going on. She climbs out into the cockpit just in time to see a jet pass by, low and slow, making a pass right over our heads for the air base. A few minutes later, two jets swing by.

The festivals downtown are just as fun. Every restaurant and catering outfit in the area set up tents and try to entice with their best local flavors. A separate section is devoted to the artists that have come in to show their wares. This is the park Skye and I frequently visit for running and playing and she doesn’t understand why she has to stay right next to me during festivals. She wants to run to the playground, not stay and eat more food, listen to a band, and watch the Forest Gump impersonator walk around.

Closer to home, the marina throws a potluck for everyone sitting on the deck watching the airshow. BBQ chicken, hamburgers and hotdogs, salad, coleslaw, two pasta dishes, green beans, and more line up in the lounge and everyone brings their plates outside to enjoy. Skye runs off with Geoff only to come back soaking wet from taking her turn in the inflatable pool (which, apparently, doesn’t inflate as well as it did last summer. The marina parents are going to buy a nicer pool to leave up on the lawn). Soaking wet and happy, she runs around with a hamburger and bubble gun, stopping anytime the planes fly over to express her enthusiasm.

Recently in town were replicas of the Nina and the Pinta, two of the three boats Christopher Columbus came over from Spain in. Big boats, but hardly spacious and even with modern epoxies, incredibly leaky according to the crew. Touring them was fun and gives a real sense of how far boat design has progressed.

We also took a morning off during the week to visit the kazoo factory – the only plastic kazoo maker in the US. Well worth the trip, you learn the history of the kazoo, the surprising number of variations on the instrument, how they’re made, and then you get to assemble and make your own. It’s a mini introduction to manufacturing safety and processes as well as a fun excuse to make noise for the rest of the day. Kazoo duets at lunch, anyone?