Across Time: Oak Island, North Carolina

My family, led by my wife, has been visiting Oak Island, North Carolina, for the last decade, since my father-in-law moved there.

Over the years, we filmed a lot of video on those trips (mostly using our phones), and on our most recent trip in 2025, I shot even more video with the expectation of creating a fun and relaxing YouTube travel video about Oak Island. That's the first part of the video above! This was an experiment for me, as I work on growing my YouTube channel towards monetization, to try things in places that I don't normally get a chance to do with most of my videos.

What I didn't expect from the experience was to see how awesome it was that my wife had us do all these trips, often with me resisting her. In watching the video over a decade, it became clear to me how much my older kids (two of whom are now in high school) had grown up! My oldest daughter just got her driver's license! Seeing my kids in 2016, at the end of the video, certainly had me emotional, seeing them so small and innocent. And the end music accentuated that feeling for me.