When my daughter, Rachel needs a rest break from work, she sometimes schedules a few days at the Surfside Hotel, Nags Head, N.C., just a short walk from the truly iconic Jeanette’s Pier!(you don’t have to be an angler to enjoy the view).

Rachel called me from there recently, telling me about the amenities, such as a tasty breakfast and the “wine and cookies hour!” She added that the hotel provides over the internet a live surf-side view from a camera mounted atop the hotel’s roof. This view is also displayed on a big screen in the hotel lobby.

I figured that by checking out the hotel’s webcam, and while actually being here in Danville, I could “sort of be there” with Rachel, at least from a bird’s perspective (a very far-off bird).

In my first view from Danville via the Surfside Hotel’s rooftop camera, I saw tiny bird silhouettes walking along the surf. They looked “tiny” from the top of the roof (and you might paradoxically and comically say their “tininess” was magnified even further by my looking at them all the way from Virginia). The seagulls made their little characteristic “bird march” up and down the surf, perusing the wet sand for sand fleas. Just now, outside my glass door, a “landlubber” mourning dove is also performing a variation of that “Food Search Forever March!”(not by Sousa).

Because the webcam field of view was not 180 degrees, I was, from time to time, “shocked” by a random seagull darting seemingly from nowhere into the vicinity (figuratively) of my face (I didn’t see it coming).

From time to time, Rachel would hold her phone up to the sea, and I was delighted to hear the waves breaking on the beach! (It would be nice if the hotel’s beach cam was accompanied by a microphone. )

One time, checking the webcam around dusk, I saw a flashlight “bobbing around.” No, it wasn’t bobbing in the water. The back-and-forth motion was because of the walking bearer of the light being invisible in the evening’s darkness (and I’m not putting this forth as a solution for North Carolina’s famous Brown Mountain Lights).

I later learned that some beachcombers walk along the water’s edge at dusk to look for creatures such as sand fleas, crabs, and sand dollars, which hide during the bright sunshine. I remember years ago seeing sand fleas when our family went to Holden Beach and Emerald Isle. When the surf rushed in and out, that place in the sand seemed to “leap.”

On another one of Rachel’s Nags Head visits, I checked the webcam and saw something of a “geological” nature on the beach, upon which Rachel had also commented. The tide had gone out, leaving a little, sharp “cliff” of sand along the beach. The next day, the ocean left behind some of its water on the other side of that cliff to make a nice-size pool. It’s not just people who creatively make something on the beach; sometimes, nature, in a “playful mood,” decides to construct something, too.

One time, the wind off of the ocean was so blustery that a couple of shingles just within the outer part of the webcam’s sphere of visibility were flapping up and down!(perhaps something the hotel manager might look into).

On Rachel’s most recent mini-vacation there, I saw someone “webcam beach walking” around noontime on the day after she had checked in. Even in the distance, I could tell it was the “Williams walk”(the “Williams walk” is not a “silly walk,” but a determined one.)

I called Rachel later; and she verified that she was the walker!

Rachel said she would take one of the hotel’s beach-lounging chairs out the next day and call me.

Sure enough, Rachel called me the next day, and I opened my laptop and Googled the Surf Side Hotel webcam site. There she was, wearing a big floppy pink beach hat and seated in a beach chair.

In this type of “picture phone,” Rachel told me to be on the lookout for a group of pelicans which had just flown past her, advising me there would be a delay in my seeing them fly past. I waited a few seconds, and there they were! This reminded me of the weathermen watching the satellite pictures of the weather fronts making their way from west to east. Thinking along those lines, you might say Rachel “predicted” the pelican flock to me.

Just now, I remembered the time the Romani camped out in their “Romani wagons” in the clearing of woods near Mayberry and used a shortwave radio to predict the rain. On that episode of the Andy Griffith show, the Romani also sang, danced, and some of them played the violin (from this detailed description, the historic, now “out of vogue” name of this group of people will appear in the minds of some of the older readers).

I figured it might not hurt to hold my flip-phone up to my laptop and try to take a picture of Rachel sitting in her beach chair in the Surfside Hotel beach cam, thus using this “picture phone”). This would be kind of a Rube Goldberg “invention,” creating a machine by linking things together (though not nearly as “linked” as the things linked in that “Rube Goldberg Breakfast-Making Machine by Dick van Dyke’s character, Caractacus Pots in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).

I’ve included the flip-phone picture with this article. Its lack of clarity makes it sort of seem like some of earliest photographs, you know, those internet articles titled: “The First Picture Ever Taken!”

Even though the picture is not very clear, I know it’s Rachel.

Hmm, I wonder if Rachel might take some future vacations in other places that feature webcams?