Brunswick County With Kids, Rain or Shine

Day one: do not go anywhere

Arrival day is not a sightseeing day. Level the rig or find the cabin, let everyone out, and send them in the direction of the noise. The gaga pit will take an hour and will teach your nine-year-old to beat you at something. The jump pad takes care of the rest. There is a hand-built playground, cornhole, and twenty acres of mown trail through the pines for whoever needs to walk off a car journey.

Every child gets a free craft at check-in, which is also how your children find the other children, the single most useful thing that can happen on day one. After that it is the jump pad, the playground, the gaga ball pit and a treasure hunt through the pines.

Day two: Oak Island

Twenty-five minutes to the bridge. Sixty-five public accesses, which sounds like a lot until a July Saturday, so go early. A good number of the accesses have parking, restrooms, a water fountain and an outdoor shower, and the shower is what turns a sandy carload into a civilized drive home.

Parking is paid from 1 April to 30 September, enforced 9 AM to 5 PM: five dollars an hour, twenty for the day. The pier lot at 705 Ocean Drive is free but capped at two hours. Out of season it is all free. The Oak Island Lighthouse is worth the stop even if you are not climbing it. It is one of the newest in the country and it does not look like any lighthouse a child has drawn.

Day three: Southport and a ferry

Twenty minutes the other way. Southport is a working waterfront town with a short main street, a maritime museum in the old Fort Johnston buildings, and a free walking map of the places three films and a television series were shot. Children do not care about that last part until you point at a porch and say the name of a film, at which point they care enormously.

The ferries are the real event. The Southport–Fort Fisher ferry is a state vehicle ferry. You drive on, stand at the rail for the crossing, and come off near the aquarium. The Bald Head Island ferry from Deep Point Marina is passengers only, about twenty minutes, and lands on an island with no cars on it: trams, golf carts and bicycles only, which children find both hilarious and completely reasonable.

Day four: the sluice and the pool

Gem and fossil mining runs on the property every day from nine to five, in the open air. The bags are enriched (we say so plainly), but the amethyst, garnet, quartz and shark teeth in them are real, and your child will be the first person to touch any of it. Shake the screen side to side and keep it level; the moment it tilts, the small heavy things go downstream.

Then the pool, which is shallow at both ends. Parents of small swimmers notice that within about four seconds of arriving.

Day five: Wilmington, or Fort Fisher

Thirty minutes to downtown Wilmington. The Battleship North Carolina is the one most children remember. You go below decks, into the turrets, through the mess. Jungle Rapids has go-karts, putt-putt and a waterpark. Airlie Gardens is a better idea than it sounds at six years old if there is a scavenger sheet involved.

Or go south instead: the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher, then the historic site next door, then the Carolina Beach boardwalk in the evening, which is an old-fashioned seaside amusement park and none the worse for it.

Brunswick County with kids on a wet day

You will need one. Coastal Carolina weather arrives quickly and leaves quickly, but a whole wet day happens.

• The aquarium at Fort Fisher, about forty minutes by road, or by ferry from Southport.
• The Battleship North Carolina, absorbing, though a good deal of it is open deck and ladders, so check the forecast.
• Defy Gravity and Flip N Fly in Wilmington, trampolines, for burning off a wet morning.
• Fort Johnston Museum in Southport, small, free and better than it needs to be.
• The camp store, which has absorbed more wet afternoons than it gets credit for.

Things worth knowing

The campground is a quiet dead-end property with a five-mile-an-hour limit and no through traffic, which is why parents let children ride bicycles here who would not at home. Dogs are welcome, two per reservation, on a six-foot leash except inside the dog park fence.

And the thing nobody plans for: build in two empty days. Every family we watch have a genuinely good week has two days where the plan was the pool, the trail and a fire, and those are the days that come up in the review afterwards.