A Long Weekend in Sunset Beach

I’m back from a quick but lovely visit to Sunset Beach!

As I’ve shared before, my close friend (and Core Desire Yoga business partner) Dorie rents a house for two weeks every summer with her family and this was the second summer that I’ve joined them for a few days. It’s a full house of adults and kids and it’s chaotic and extremely fun!

After two amazing visits to Sunset, it now holds a special place in my heart. I love this little beach town so much. It’s an easy drive from Charlotte…just a little over three hours. The majority of the vacation rentals are charming beach houses. You won’t find condo developments here and hardly any restaurants or bars.

Also, the beaches are wide and flat…and dog friendly! I have plans to return in the fall with the girls for a long weekend. I can’t wait for Zoey to have her first beach experience! 🙂

Here are some pictures from this summer’s trip!

Breakfast. I showed up with wine, homemade granola, homemade chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter! Sounds about right, huh? My daily breakfast was yogurt, fruit, granola and peanut butter.

I brought I’ll Give You the Sun for my beach reading. (My bracelets are Erin McDermott’s Beach House Bracelets.)

I am about half way through the book. It took a little while to get into it but I’m hooked now. It’s young adult fiction but the book is so creatively written.

Jude and her twin brother, Noah, are incredibly close. At thirteen, isolated Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude cliff-dives and wears red-red lipstick and does the talking for both of them. But three years later, Jude and Noah are barely speaking. Something has happened to wreck the twins in different and dramatic ways . . . until Jude meets a cocky, broken, beautiful boy, as well as someone else—an even more unpredictable new force in her life. The early years are Noah’s story to tell. The later years are Jude’s. What the twins don’t realize is that they each have only half the story, and if they could just find their way back to one another, they’d have a chance to remake their world.

We had big bowls of homemade popcorn floating around every night after dinner. So impossible to keep your hand out of warm, buttery popcorn!

On my first day there I ventured over to Holden Beach to visit with my dad’s side of the family. Four of his cousins were there with their families for a week long vacation and I was so excited that my trip overlapped by a day and that they were so close. I hadn’t seen some of them in 10 years. It was so nice to reconnect. We went to lunch at Captain Pete’s where I ordered a grilled fish sandwich. It was really delicious!

Acro yoga with Dorie on the beach.

This is what it really looked like most of the time! 😉

There’s nothing like a sandwich at the beach for lunch. I alternated between peanut butter and jelly and homemade tuna salad.

We had a pretty epic Uno match one afternoon when it was overcast. I hadn’t played this game since I was a child and forgot how fun it was.

Dorie’s daughter and I did a big taco dinner for everyone one night. We made fish tacos last year too so we’ve decided that our taco night is now an annual tradition.

I was totally spoiled because Dorie’s daughter loves to cook too so she did all of the recipe research. We made this amazing Thai Coconut Rice Salad and Sweet Thai Chicken Tacos.

Everything was so flavorful and fresh. We received so many compliments on our dinner and there were zero leftovers so we knew it was a win!

It was such a wonderful long weekend and I feel so grateful to Dorie for welcoming me into her family! I can’t wait to return to Sunset.

What is your favorite beach to visit? Have you made any summer beach trips this year?