Wilmington & Southport 2025

One Week in Wilmington & One Week in Southport | Day Trip to SC | August 2025

When we arrived back in Wilmington, it was just as hot and humid as we’d expect for August in the South. We picked up a rental car and made our way to our hotel. We knew going into this that we needed to find a new hotel, that it would be too hard to return to the hotel where we had just stayed less than 2 months ago with Charlotte, and had stayed several times with her. Fortunately, there happened to be a brand new hotel that had just opened up in the area — literally just days before our arrival. We checked in to the Element, where we had a nice spacious room for our time here.

This was what we considered to be the start of Curtis’ fall season, where he would be working on site every week for the next 2+ months. Luckily, it started off pretty light with him teaching a class and having a normal 8 hour workday. We frequented our new favorite restaurant, Pipeline Poke, and spent one evening downtown Wilmington where we ate at the Copper Penny and went for a long walk.

On Saturday, we checked out of Wilmington and made the 50 minute drive South to Southport for Curtis’ second week of work. Once we had a new rental car and hotel room, we still basically had the entire weekend to do whatever we wanted. For today, we decided to take advantage of having a rental car and just drive South on US-17 to South Carolina, just to say we did. Another state for the year! After crossing the border, we stopped at the welcome center to figure out what we could do, and ended up going to Vereen Memorial Gardens which was right across the highway. It wasn’t too hot today, so we went for a long walk along the water and through the woods, playing PokemonGo and finding a few letterboxes. On our way back to Southport, we grabbed burgers at Highway 55 and did a little thrifting. After some down time at the hotel, we rounded out the night with a sunset walk on the beach — which we ended up doing almost every night here.

On Sunday, we considered taking the ferry to Bald Head Island, but the cost felt too high and we just weren’t that interested in what it had to offer, so instead we spent most of the morning and some of the afternoon just walking around downtown Southport, which we hadn’t done before. It had a nice mix of Southern historical charm and beach town vibes. All things considered, this is really one of the better towns that this job brings us to — we just wish we didn’t have to visit so much in the summer!

This week of work had Curtis working slightly longer days, but we still were able to have a good amount of time together and got to end most nights at the beach. We had dinner with his coworkers and their wives a few of the nights, dining at local spots like Tengu Sushi, Southport Smokehouse, Alpaca Chicken, and Salt 64. Work wrapped up on Thursday, and so on Friday we packed up and prepared for the next leg of our adventure.