The Crystal Coast Life Home Page

Updated May 29, 2021- It has finally happened. After close to sixteen years, we are no longer living along the Crystal Coast. On February 2, 2021, we moved from our spot along the White Oak River to a rural area near Mocksville, North Carolina. It is only a four hour drive back to the coast so we will be visiting once we have our roots established. We moved because we wanted to be involved in our grandchildren's lives not because of any lack of love of the Crystal Coast. It is back to home turf for me so I grew up less than thirty minutes from here. One of the roads in the area is even named for my great grandfather. Living some place besides Carteret County makes this the first summer that we have missed Memorial Day at the beach in sixteen years.

Carteret County's Crystal Coast is one of the most beautiful coastal spots on earth. We lived there for nearly sixteen years. Many days I averaged one hundred or more photographs a day. For three straight years I walked every mile of Emerald Isle's ocean beaches from the northernmost area of the Point to the beach sign that marks the boundary with Salter Path. We have many friends in the area, so continuing to write about the Crystal Coast will be a pleasure.

Writing about the same area for over a decade provides some perspective on the area that you will not get from a tourist bureau.

Beyond being exceeding scenic, the Crystal Coast is a wonderful place to live. Its friendly, small town atmosphere was one of many things that attracted us to the area. However, the Crystal Coast has changed a lot since 2006, and even as I write this just before Memorial Day 2021, I believe the rate of change is speeding up. We just read about the approval for 156 acre travel park development on the west side of Highway 58 just south of T&W's Oyster House. It is large enough that it has the potential to change the character of the area. When we first moved to the area, a Maxway, something of an unusual store, was one of the only places to shop in the Carteret Crossing shopping center. There was not much else beside the Lowe's Grocery. Since those early days, Walgreen's, Lowe's Home Improvement, a new vet and recently a Jersey Mike's opened. A Starbucks will be opening by fall. Change is accelerating so now is a good time to enjoy the Crystal Coast before it really changes.

If you choose to read on, you will links to Crystal Coast content that I have available on this site and others. You will also find links to other sites and our books.

Once a year I try do a post on my Southern Outer Banks site. It used to be my only Crystal Coast site. I try to summarize what has happened in the last year. You can usually get a very good sense of the weather and how it is trending from these posts. Sometimes I will refer back to it since it is a good record of past summers.

Two or three times a year, I write a post on my Crystal Coast Life blog. While the topics can be wide ranging, they generally have something to do with the water, beaches, fishing, kayaking, or boating. The blog fits its name perfectly. It is about my life on the Crystal Coast and there are years of posts available by month. Those might slow down a little since I won't have as many the detailed personal observations now that we have moved.

Occasionally, I write a coastal post on my blog, The Crystal Coast, Saltwater on my feet. These posts are targeted more towards people who might be interested in living in this area, from Swansboro to Beaufort. The posts have a special emphasis on the White Oak River area where we lived just up river from Swansboro for sixteen years. A lot of the posts deal with gardening, weather or fishing. We lived just three miles up the White Oak from Swansboro. This link provides a listing of all the 150+ posts that are there.

My wife, Glenda, and I published three books about the Crystal Coast area and North Carolina. Our A Week at the Beach, The Emerald Isle Travel Guide is the sixth version of our well-respected travel guide for the area. We released the updated 2018-19 versions in June 2018. We may yet do another version once things return to normal. The most recent guides have an aerial photo of the roundabout on Emerald Isle which has worked much better than the naysayers thought it would. The Kindle version has the modest price of $3.99. It is readable on almost any digital device with the Kindle reader software. There is nothing like our travel guide available for this area. The current Kindle version has over 100 color images, lots of maps and several family recipes. To make the latest paperbacks more affordable, the paperbacks have no recipes and not as many maps and pictures. The paperbacks do have 152 pages and over sixty pictures, and nine maps. If you buy one of the paperbacks from Amazon, the Amazon match book program will let you buy the Kindle version for $1.99.

All our books really help people to understand and appreciate the area. If you are visiting Emerald Isle, you can pick up one of the black and white paperbacks for $8.95 from Emerald Isle Books and Toys. If you find them unavailable there, let me know so I can ship them additional copies. The two paperback versions are identical except for one being in color and the other being black and white. You can find the color version on Amazon at this link and the black and white one here. To find out more about me and my other books visit my Amazon author page or to access a wider selection of articles visit my Muckrack Profile.

I also publish a Crystal Coast Newsletter a few times a year. This is the signup link for the newsletter. This is the latest edition of the newsletter from this past fall.

You will find additional but somewhat irregular area observations at my Ocracoke Waves blog but they do go back many years. I post fairly regular commentary that often relates to the Crystal Coast on my my View from the Mountain blog. That site has over 1,400 posts but many posts are about anything but the coast. However, there are several about the Crystal Coast like this one, Living the Dream. Our reviews of area restaurants will slow down but I will pass on anything that I hear. I am still looking forward to visiting my all time Crystal Coast favorite, Riverside Steak and Seafood as soon as time permits. I would love to visit Southern Salt in Morehead City during the oyster season.

If you need basic orientation to the area, here is a map with a few locations. The best source of information including my hand-drawn maps is the Kindle version of our travel guide which actually has some printable maps. The print version have plenty of information but the Kindle version has dozens of live links to additional information.

If you are looking for a simple, free guide to the area, try this, The Quick Emerald Isle Travel Guide (Rewritten Summer of 2014).

Normally this WordPress site has at least the post picture and a sentence from almost all my posts. You will also find pictures of the area at my Flickr stream and on Pinterest.

I even have videos of the area on my YouTube account. There are directions for becoming a Facebook friend in our Emerald Isle Travel Guide.

You can read some history about my family and me at this link and this one leads to some of my favorite old posts which are mostly not about the Crystal Coast. If you have done business with me over the years and want to connect, you can find me on LinkedIn.

There is plenty more information that I have written about the area on the Internet so do not be surprised if you run into an old article about the Crystal Coast that I wrote years ago. I try to rewrite and update some of the most useful posts. If you scroll down on this page, you will find a list of them. Whatever you see, I have not been a practicing real estate agent for over nine years. Hopefully I have cleaned up most of those references.

You may contact me at the following email address: david "at" crystalcoastlife dot com or use this contact form.