Today: Explore your neighborhood

One of the many great things about living in North Carolina is you don’t need to go far to find adventure. Some of the best adventures I’ve had with the kids have been, literally, right out our front door, where at the end of our cul de sac a creek emerges from a storm drain and winds for perhaps a quarter mile before feeding into the headwaters of Walnut Creek. It’s all engulfed in a tangle of floodplain forest that hides I-40 just to the east, our neighborhood just to the west. It’s an oasis we retreat to when time doesn’t allow a longer adventure.

Odds are there’s a similar escape in your neighborhood. Start by donning some grubby clothes and shoes, then looking for a floodplain where developers are prohibited from building. There, my friends, is your adventure. Take a backpack with snacks and water, a camera, binoculars if you have them, a length of rope (who knows?) and maybe a drawing pad and pencils to capture the magic in abstract. And don’t forget a compass: Even in the seemingly smallest area it’s easy to get discombobulated.

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Previously in our Holiday Escapes series ...

Dec. 19: Go paddling
Dec. 20: Hit your neighborhood park
Dec. 21: Climbing the walls
Dec. 22: Take a guided hike
Dec. 23: An educated walk
Monday: Go play in a parking lot
Tuesday: I spy a bufflehead

Today: I spy a bufflehead

Great blue heron, spotted earlier this month at Jordan Lake.

Kids are easily distracted: Throwing a tantrum over a new toy not living up to expectations (specifically, expectations virtually assured by Saturday morning TV cartoon advertising)? Look! Shinny thing! Or, for our purposes today, Look! An American bald eagle, once on the verge of distinction now making a heroic comeback and, in 2007, removed from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants! Kids love discovering stuff, and this time of year there’s no better place to discover stuff with wings than at a local, sizable, lake. Today, for instance, at Jordan Lake on the southern fringes of the Triangle, join ranger Steve McMurray for an hour of waterfowl ID at Jordan Lake. Spotting scopes and expertise provided in this free program, which commences at 9 a.m. at the Ebenezer Church Recreation Area.

A fine activity, btw, with or without expert assistance. Pick up a guidebook at your local library, grab the binos, head to your local (sizable) lake and see what you can see.

* * *

Previously in our Holiday Escapes series ...

Dec. 19: Go paddling
Dec. 20: Hit your neighborhood park
Dec. 21: Climbing the walls
Dec. 22: Take a guided hike
Dec. 23: An educated walk
Monday: Go play in a parking lot

Today: Go play in a parking lot

Today, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Cliffs of the Neuse State Park near Goldsboro invites you to come and play — in its parking lots. Located on a bluff overlooking the Neuse River, Cliffs of the Neuse is a marvelous outdoor playground with 892 acres of both Sandhills and Piedmont forest to romp through. Yet today, it’s their paved parking lots that the park touts — and the strategy is genius. “Does your child have a new bicycle, remote control car or boat, or another new toy that they want to play with but you don't have the room?” asks the park, which notes that it will close its lots to traffic for the express purpose of letting your kids put their new toys through the paces. If you’re not in the area, you don’t need to drive to Cliffs of the Neuse to score an acre of empty macadam: Many large businesses close for the holidays and high school parking lots are barren as well, to site just two examples. Odds are there’s a vacant parking lot near you just waiting for a new skateboard to keep it company.

* * *

Previously in our Holiday Escapes series ...

Dec. 19: Go paddling
Dec. 20: Hit your neighborhood park
Dec. 21: Climbing the walls
Dec. 22: Take a guided hike
Dec. 23: An educated walk

This could be you and three people you may or may not know if you participate in Saturday's Charlotte Challenge.

Benefit the land this weekend with ride at the coast or a hike in the mountains, benefit yourself with a crazy 5K scavenger hunt in Charlotte.

Coast

You don’t get many chances to take a group ride at the coast, so when you do it’s wise to act. Saturday is one such chance, when the N.C. Coastal Federation holds its Cycle for the Coast fund raiser. Ride options of 20K, 40K and 80K are available, on a route that takes in Emerald Isle, Salter Path, Indian Beach, Pine Knoll Shores and Atlantic Beach along bike-friendly NC 58.

If you belong to the Federation — the N.C. Coastal Federation, not the other Federation — it’s $35 to ride, $50 for those of you outside the federation. Begins and ends at the Salter Path Public Beach Access (milepost 10.5 on NC 58), with the 80K riders heading off at 8 a.m., the smaller K riders thereafter.

More info, call the Federation at 252-393-8185.

Piedmont

The Charlotte area is overrun with 5K races this weekend, but only one of the races promises to “test your brains as much as your legs.” That would be the Charlotte Challenge, an urban adventure race that requires you to “solve tricky clues, strategize the best route, and explore undiscovered corners of the city.” Costumes are encouraged (to the extent there are two $50 prizes for best costume), and if you come in fourth or fifth you win a $50 bar tab. (First place, btw, gets $300 in cash.) Speed is important, but so is the quick thinking required to solve 12 clues to navigate the course.

Race begins and ends at StrikeCity at EpiCentre, 210 E Trade St. Packet pick-up is 11:30-12:45 , the races commences at 1 p.m. The Challenge is one of 37 being held nationwide this year.

More info here.

Mountains

Here’s another rare opportunity you shouldn’t pass up: a guided hike on mountain land that few people know about and that hasn’t changed much in 80 years. That opportunity comes Saturday when the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy hosts a 3-mile hike into the Swannanoa Mountain Range. According to the SAHC, “hikers will begin passing through a gorgeous stand of poplars before entering the oak-hickory forests with some very large, tall trees and even areas of virgin old growth forest. Numerous wet coves also provide for a very rich and diverse herbaceous layer home to various rare plant species.” Note, too, that there’s about 850 feet of elevation gain on this hike, scheduled to run from 10 a.m. -2 p.m.

For details on the hike, including where to meet, contact Rich Preyer at rich@appalachian.org or visit here.

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Those are GGNC’s thoughts for an active weekend. Find out other ways you can get out this weekend by browsing our super calendar, a collection of events calendars from throughout the state, below.

I can’t remember where we were — the middle of Nebraska? the middle of Missouri? — but it was time to visit another rest stop. We’d been driving for a day and a half, a day and a half and twelve hundred miles of sitting with virtually no exercise. My body was starting to petrify, my mood was increasingly surly. Marcy hopped out, opened the rear hatch of the M5, rooted around for a moment, then emerged with the antidote.

A hula hoop.

Exercising on a road trip is an oft-discussed, little-acted-upon phenomenon. LizzyGMobile makes underappreciated videos (6 views as of yesterday) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R61g57MfgYw on the subject, and truckers’ forums touch on the topic from time to time. http://www.truckersforum.net/forum/f18/get-out-exercise-rest-stops-5506/ Yet a GetGoingNC/Google investigation revealed that no states appear to incorporate exercise into their rest areas, despite offering everything from snack bars to wifi, according to the Interstate Rest Area Guide. http://www.roundaboutpublications.com/ebooks/index.php?recid=1&maincat_id=1&page=1

Thus, it’s up to you to make your own RAW — rest area workout.

The trick is to get some movement going, to get the blood flowing, the muscles engaged, the back realigned — without conjuring a sweat that will stick with you to Topeka. That’s one reason we like hooping. A recent study by the American Council on Exercise found: “Hooping is an excellent form of exercise that compares pretty favorably with most other group classes” — boot-camp, step aerobics, cardio kickboxing — “in terms of heart rate and calorie burn.” (Read the entire study here.) Plus, while your gyrations may warrant a curious glance or two, unlike with a bout of rest stop cardio-kickboxing, you likely won’t get a visit from the rest stop SWAT team.

An even greater plus: the rhythmic nature of hula hooping is a great way to ease the stress of driving and dissipate a potential case of road rage. And there’s surprisingly little collateral sweat.

Hula hoop: Add it to your packing list this Labor Day weekend.

Games are good, Exhibit A: ‘Exergames’ beat a treadmill
A study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that some interactive video games are a good way for kids to burn calories. The study took 39 kids, average age 11, and put them in front of interactive video games to see how much energy they burned. But first, to establish an exercise baseline, they had the kids walk on a treadmill at 3 miles per hour to establish their metabolic equivalent (MET), an approximation of how much oxygen the body uses during an activity. The kids measured an average MET of 4.9 on that activity.
Here’s how the games compared (the higher the number, the better; for the sake of you adults, “light” gardening has an MET of 2, running an 8 mile-per-minute pace — that would be a roughly 24-minute 5K — pulls a 13.5):

Sportwall — 7.1
Jackie Chan Alley Run by Xavix — 7
Lightspace Bug Invasion — 6.4
Cybex Trazer Goalie Wars — 5.9
Dance Dance Revolution — 5.4
Nintendo Wii Boxing — 4.2

The Sportwall game, incidentally, was the most popular with the kids; the Jackie Chan Alley Run the least popular. Overweight kids enjoyed the games over all more than kids with lower body mass indexes.

In a separate study, published recently in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, a study of 100 adults ages 18-35 found the amount of energy required for different types of interactive video games varied widely. “Shooter” games only increased energy expenditures by 23 percent over doing nothing. Games in which people pretend to play instruments saw energy output jump 73 percent, dance stimulation games saw a 298 percent hike and fitness games required 322 more energy than sitting on the couch.

More on the study here.

Games are good, Exhibit B: Shag a fly ball, dodge a Jeep

Research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign finds that college kids who play sports are less likely to get hit by a car while waking across the street while talking on a cell phone and listening to music. Researchers took 18 NCAA Division I athletes and pitted them against 18 non-athletes in a video street-crossing program. Both groups were given cell phones and MP3 plays and told to get across the a virtual two-way street as cars whizzed by at 40 to 55 miles per hour. Collision rate for the athletes was 25 percent; 37.5 percent of the non-athletes got splattered.

Playing right field: It could save your life.

More here.

Games are Good, Exhibit C: Sprints beat endurance when it comes to heart health

Remember when you were in 4th grade PE and the gym teacher said, “OK, line up! We’re going to do the 50-yard dash!” and you thought, “Cool, ‘cause I can run like a madman for 10 seconds.” But when "Coach" Payne yelled, “Time to run the mile, people!” your people looked for the nearest bleacher to hide under.

Sprinting is good for you.

If Coach Payne’s objective was to build your cardio, he should have stuck with the sprints. A study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Human Biology finds that sprints beat endurance when it comes to fighting cardiovascular disease.

In the study, 47 boys and 10 girls were divided into moderate and high-intensity exercise teams. Each group exercised three times a week for seven weeks. The MODs ran steady for 20 minutes each session, racking up 420 minutes of overall running. The high-intensity kids (or HITs, for study purposes) did a series of 20 meter sprints, exercising for 63 minutes overall. And yet, while both groups exhibited improved cardiovascular risk factors, the HITs were able to achieve similar results in 15 percent of the time.

More on the study here.

A lot of folks liked Chapman’s idea, and thus was born the Christmas Bird Count, an event that, 111 years later, spans the Western Hemisphere, includes tens of thousands of participants and helps identify potentially harmful developments in the bird world.

Here’s how it works: Each count is assigned an area 15 miles in diameter. Volunteers spend the day canvassing this area counting as many different birds as they can find. The results are then shipped to the National Audubon for analysis. You needn’t be an accomplished birder to participate; In fact, one of the great things about the count is that it often gives amateurs an opportunity to hang with and learn from accomplished birders. Not to mention the chance to lurk about the woods all day in search of nature.

The count occurs over a three-week period, this year between this past Tuesday and January 5. But the bulk of the counts, at least in North Carolina, are this weekend. Of the 47 counts planned in North Carolina this CBC season, 16 are this Friday, Saturday or Sunday, according to the Carolina Bird Club. A list of this weekend’s counts follows, broken down by geographic region. For the full list of counts in North Carolina (and South), visit the Carolina Bird Club Web site.

For more about the count, visit the National Audubon CBC site here.

Coast

Saturday

• Kitty Hawk: Jeff Lewis, 252-216-6336

Sunday

• Morehead City: John Fussell, 252-240-1046

Piedmont

Friday

• Rocky Mount: Brian Bockhahn, 919-676-1027

Saturday

• Gastonia: Steve Tracy, 704-853-0654
• Greensboro: Elizabeth Link, 336-273-4672
• Raleigh: John Connors, 919-733-7450 x602
• Raven Rock State Park: Erik Thomas, 919-880-7809

Sunday

• Durham: Jacob Socolar, 919.636.0326
• Southern Lake Norman: Taylor Piephoff, 704-432-1391
• Southern Pines: Susan Campbell, 910-949-3207

Mountains

Friday

• Highlands Plateau: Brock Hutchins, 770-486-3715

Saturday

• Buncombe County: Jamie Harrelson, 828-280-1659
• New River: Katherine Higgins, 276-768-8619
• Tryon: Jerry Johnson, icbirds@windstream.net

Sunday

• Mount Rogers-White Top Mountain: Allen Boynton, 276-677-4121

* * *

Those are GGNC’s thoughts for an active weekend. Find out other ways you can get out this weekend by browsing our super calendar, a collection of events calendars from throughout the state, below.

Coast

CapeFearCoast.com
Comprehensive calendar for the Cape Fear/Wilmington/southern N.C. coast searchable by date and event name.

Coastal Guide
Comprehensive calendar including nature programs from a variety of costal conservation and research agencies that offer nature programs. Covers the entire coast.

Crystal Cost Tourism Authority
Comprehensive calendar focusing on the Crystal Coast. Good source for programs offered by N.C. Coastal Federation, Cape Lookout National Park, N.C. National Estuarine Research Reserve and other costal conservation and research agencies that offer nature programs.

NCCoast.com
Comprehensive calendar including programs for the Outer Banks and Crystal Coast.

North Carolina Coast Host
Comprehensive calendar for the entire coast that lets you search for events by day, by region, by county, by city or by event (based on key word).

This Week Magazine
Primary focus is the Crystal Coast (North Carolina’s coastal midsection).

Mountains

Asheville Citizen-Times
From the main page, click on “Outdoors,” then WNC Outdoors calendar.

Blue Ridge Outdoors
Searchable calendar lets you extend your reach to events throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southeast (or you can just limit it to North Carolina). Also lets you search a boatload of categories, ranging from Hiking, Mountain Biking and Climbing to Trail Running, Triathlon and Road Walking.

The Mountain Times
From the main page, click on “Calendars,” then Main Events.

Piedmont

Charlotte

Charlotte Observer events calendar
Comprehensive calendar searchable by category, including Nature, Recreation, Recreation & Wellness, Running

Charlotte Parent
Comprehensive calendar concentrating on things the family can do together.

Triad

GoTriad.com
Comprehensive calendar includes a Sports & Recreation category.

Piedmont Parent
Comprehensive calendar concentrating on things the family can do together.

Triangle

Triangle.com
Comprehensive calendar searchable by category, including: Birding, Boating, Cycling, Nature, Rec & Wellness, Recreation, Running, Swimming, Tennis, Yoga.

Carolina Parent
Comprehensive calendar concentrating on things the family can do together.

Statewide

Office of Environmental Education
One calendar for the numerous Environmental Education Centers statewide.

North Carolina State Parks
Lets you search for programs at the state’s parks, recreation areas and natural areas by location, by month, by topic. To reach the calendar from the home page, click on “Education,” then “Fun & Free Programs at Parks.”

National Forests in North Carolina
From the home page, click on Carolina Connections for news updates on the state’s four national forests as well as hints on recreational opportunities and a detailed rundown of recreation areas and the amenities at each.

You know what that means — time is running short to explore the outdoors before the weather gets really cold. A few of your options this weekend:

Coast

Few things make you feel like a kid more than flying a kite. The thrill of getting your kite airborne after a dogged sprint, watching it climb higher and higher into the wild blue, chasing after it over fences and through the neighbors’ backyards after the string snaps. Good times — and a good workout, too.

Head to Wrightsville Beach this weekend and feel like a kid again at the annual Cape Fear Kite Festival. Lots of hands-on opportunities, including kite-making classes for kids and stunt kite lessons — from certified stunt kite professionals — for all. You can also watch the best in the business put stunt kites through their paces and checkout an airborne parade featuring a wide array of funky kites.

The festival runs Saturday and Sunday, from 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. both days. More info here.

Piedmont

If you’ve done much hiking with the kids this fall, you’ve no doubt been bombarded with lots of challenging questions: Why did that leaf turn red but that one turned yellow? Why do they change color in the first place? How close are we to a restroom? It’s almost enough to make you want to curtail hiking until the leaves have all fallen and the forest is a cold, gray landscape.

Or maybe not. Especially when there are so many hikes out there where a trained naturalist leads you around and answers these questions for you. Once such hike is this Sunday, from 10-11 a.m. at Historic Yates Mill County Park in Raleigh. Take a hike and relax while someone with actual knowledge answers your kids questions. It’s free, for ages 6 and up.

More info here.

Mountains

Little Green Mountain makes a great spot to take in the color of Panthertown Valley.

You’ve been an avid greenway walker for years. Secretly, though, you yearn to tackle more challenging trail in the mountains. But your noviceness intimidates you, as does the notion of being out in the wild. You need some major handholding — not to mention some basic equipment.

That’s what you’ll get on a guided hike Sunday into Panthertown Valley led by Gary Eblen of Diamond Brand Outdoors, the Asheville outfitter. Maps and compasses are provided, daypacks and hiking poles are available as well. There’s a $25 fee, but that should buy you some reassurance as you explore an area often referred to as the Yosemite of the East. (It’s actually more of a diorama of Yosemite: cool, with waterfalls, towering pines, and an enchanted valley setting, just on a smaller scale. A good venue for a first-time forest explorer.

For more info and to reserve a spot, call 828.891.6585

* * *

Those are GGNC’s thoughts for an active weekend. Find out other ways you can get out this weekend by browsing our super calendar, a collection of events calendars from throughout the state, below.

Coast

CapeFearCoast.com
Comprehensive calendar for the Cape Fear/Wilmington/southern N.C. coast searchable by date and event name.

Coastal Guide
Comprehensive calendar including nature programs from a variety of costal conservation and research agencies that offer nature programs. Covers the entire coast.

Crystal Cost Tourism Authority
Comprehensive calendar focusing on the Crystal Coast. Good source for programs offered by N.C. Coastal Federation, Cape Lookout National Park, N.C. National Estuarine Research Reserve and other costal conservation and research agencies that offer nature programs.

NCCoast.com
Comprehensive calendar including programs for the Outer Banks and Crystal Coast.

North Carolina Coast Host
Comprehensive calendar for the entire coast that lets you search for events by day, by region, by county, by city or by event (based on key word).

This Week Magazine
Primary focus is the Crystal Coast (North Carolina’s coastal midsection).

Mountains

Asheville Citizen-Times
From the main page, click on “Outdoors,” then WNC Outdoors calendar.

Blue Ridge Outdoors
Searchable calendar lets you extend your reach to events throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southeast (or you can just limit it to North Carolina). Also lets you search a boatload of categories, ranging from Hiking, Mountain Biking and Climbing to Trail Running, Triathlon and Road Walking.

The Mountain Times
From the main page, click on “Calendars,” then Main Events.

Piedmont

Charlotte

Charlotte Observer events calendar
Comprehensive calendar searchable by category, including Nature, Recreation, Recreation & Wellness, Running

Charlotte Parent
Comprehensive calendar concentrating on things the family can do together.

Triad

GoTriad.com
Comprehensive calendar includes a Sports & Recreation category.

Piedmont Parent
Comprehensive calendar concentrating on things the family can do together.

Triangle

Triangle.com
Comprehensive calendar searchable by category, including: Birding, Boating, Cycling, Nature, Rec & Wellness, Recreation, Running, Swimming, Tennis, Yoga.

Carolina Parent
Comprehensive calendar concentrating on things the family can do together.

Statewide

Office of Environmental Education
One calendar for the numerous Environmental Education Centers statewide.

North Carolina State Parks
Lets you search for programs at the state’s parks, recreation areas and natural areas by location, by month, by topic. To reach the calendar from the home page, click on “Education,” then “Fun & Free Programs at Parks.”

National Forests in North Carolina
From the home page, click on Carolina Connections for news updates on the state’s four national forests as well as hints on recreational opportunities and a detailed rundown of recreation areas and the amenities at each.

Perhaps because of the incredulity of the fact kids now had to be pushed outside to play, Baird, director of school programs for the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, initially had a tough time pitching Take A Child Outside Week. That has since changed. Helped in part to the awareness created by Louv, that has since changed.

“I recently compared it to a ball rolling down hill,” says Baird. “We just gave it a push and it continues to spin faster and faster. I now have people seeking me out to become a partner.”

To date, Baird says TACO has been embraced by more than 400 partners — various agencies with a stake in kids, the outdoors or both — in all 50 states and four foreign countries. In North Carolina alone, Baird says there are “hundreds of events” planned for Take A Child Outside Week, which begins today.

Baird is particularly pleased with the breadth of TACO programs. There are the bread-and-butter educational programs designed to get kids outside, your Hopper Herdings, your Carnivorous Plant Hikes. But there are also programs with a more interdisciplinary bent.

In Chatham County, for instance, high school art students will work with Museum of Sciences exhibit project coordinator Jane Eckenrode to “get out and draw the outside world.”

“It’s a way of helping students make better observations,” says Baird. “A way of better understanding the natural world.”

And there are programs that get at the gut of why kids really want to go outside. In Virginia, says Baird, they hold an “Earn Your Bath Day.”

“They go out and create a big mud pie,” says Baird.

“When we first launched this it was very unique, there were not many organizations pushing people to go outside,” says Baird. “In the past four years there’s been increased awareness of the benefits of being outside.”

The latest case in point comes from a National Wildlife Federation survey this past spring of 1,900 educators. Among other things, it found:

• 78 percent said kids who spend regular time in unstructured outdoor play are better able to concentrate and perform better in the classroom,
• 75 percent said students who spend regular time outdoors tend to be more creative and are better at solving problems in the classroom.

In the back-to-nature movement of the 1970s people were encouraged to get outdoors on the assumption that they would be more compelled to protect and preserve what they were intimately familiar with. Baird says that motivation remains, but with our kids becoming increasingly sedentary and obese, the impetus to take it outside is even greater.

“We don’t just get kids outside to appreciate nature so they’ll want to save it, we need to get them outside because it’s healthy.”

* * *
More on Take A Child Outside Week

Baird says hundreds of Take A Child Outside Week events are planned across the state. Here are three places to find them:

• TakeAChildOutside.org The official Website for Take A Child Outside Week includes a map of events registered through TACO that are scheduled nationwide. However, because not all events are officially registered, you should also check:
• North Carolina Office of Environmental Educators calendar for today through Thursday. TACO-specific events are marked.
• North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation has various events planned at its parks and recreation areas. Search their calendar for events.

Are you a parent who frets over letting your kids explore the great outdoors? Richard Louv offers advice in his recent article, “Hummingbird Parents: Seven Actions Parents Can Take To Reduce Risk and Still Get Their Kids Outside. Read it here.

What’s the No Child Left Inside Act? Read about it here.

We just got back from five days at Brigantine Beach, which sits just north of Atlantic City, N.J., though the gulf between the two couldn’t be greater. Atlantic City is all about glitz and gambling, Brigantine Beach is about kicking back — and kicking in.

Even before we got to the beach I could tell this place was different. One morning having a bagel and coffee ($1.89!) outside Aversa's Italian Bakery on the town’s main drag, I noticed that maybe one in five patrons arrived by car. The rest either walked or rode their bikes. Like many beach towns, the Brigantine Beach’s streets are wide, easily accommodating cyclists. The larger roads all have bike lanes. And they were all well-used, from people down for the week on beach cruisers to townies (the year-round population is 12,600) running errands on 30-year-old 10-speeds. I’d never seen so many people on bikes. Most surprising: A goodly number were men of retirement age who in other beach settings would be tooling around in a Lincoln Town Car.

Lacrosse is big in the Northeast, on grass or on sand.

The bakery prepared me for the beach. The beach here is wide, about twice the width of Wrightsville, Emerald Isle, or most other beaches along the North Carolina coast. Good thing, because these folks — who judging from their license plates come from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, in that order — make use of it. Sure, like us, they wheel in 40-gallon coolers filled with beverages and sandwiches. But their beach wagons, made of PVC pipe and bulbous, oversized wheels, also bore all forms of recreation. Horseshoes and bocce balls were big. Families decked out in Phillies T-shirts and hats brought mitts and balls and played catch. Frisbees and assorted other flying discs whizzed over unsuspecting sunbathers, who were more apt to get thumped by an errant paddle ball. Stunt kites kept several sun-and-air worshipers occupied. There wereinfo

Beach soccer is played on a (mercifully) smaller field.

rmal family volleyball games, there were more formal (though not

necessarily more competitive) contests on courts

established for the local beach volleyball club. There was the Atlantic City Beach Soccer Tournament, a five-on-five competition that pitted a melting pot of teams against one another.

And that was just on land. Once you hit the surf, there were boogie boards, surf kayaks, surf boards, windsurfers and kite boarders. And, of course, the frolicking you encounter trying not to notice the water is 73 degrees. (At Wrightsville Beach, the temperature was a bath-watery 85.)

A quick nap between contests.

In New Jersey, 23.3 percent of adults are obese; in North Carolina, the figure is 29.3 percent. Sure, the New Jerseyans like their hoagies and pork rolls. But as this beach scene suggested, they’re also more likely to get up afterward (30 minutes afterward, presumably, to accommodate proper digestion) and work off their indulgences with a spirited game of volleyball, an endless contest of horseshoes or catch with the kids.

We go to the beach to shed stress. Lying in the sun and having a picnic is certainly part of that process. But as our friends from the Garden State demonstrate, it’s only part of the process.