Earlier this month, my wife rented a house at the beach in North Carolina and drove the kids down for a week to bake in the sun. I waited a few days and caught up with them by airplane.

My wife lives 51 weeks a year yearning for that one week when she can breathe the salt air, listen to the waves and feel the sand between her toes. If she could, she'd be on the beach from sunup to sundown.

I, on the other hand, am generally not a fan of beach vacations, as they involve sitting in a chair, reading a book and drinking beer. Those are some of my favorite hobbies -- I just don't like the idea of driving 13 hours to do what I could do in my own backyard. As a result, I can take one, maybe two hours a day before I start to get antsy. Half the time, I just sit in the house and watch TV.

As we couldn't agree on a vacation, it ended up being a last-minute trip, and my wife had to decide quickly on a house she found on the Internet. The house was cheaper than any of the others on the site, but it was on the beach, and the pictures looked nice. She booked it.

When my wife's sister heard we were coming down, she drove by our vacation cottage to do some surveillance. She called my wife immediately.

"Get out of it," she barked into the phone. "It's a dump!"

My wife, who always tries to look on the bright side of things, and worse, had already paid via credit card, insisted that it couldn't be all that bad. Her sister, who had seen it first-hand, assured her it could.

My wife decided, in the end, that she'd just go for it. She was determined to overlook the obvious faults and just try to make the best of a bad situation. I waved as she drove off in our loaded-down station wagon, wondering if I could fake missing a flight.

When I got off the plane later that week, my wife met me with the kind of nervous, apologetic smile people use when they would rather not have this discussion.

"OK," she said, holding up her hands. "You're going to have one of two reactions: One, you're going to be positive, and think the place is charming."

I just stared at her.

"Or, two," she continued, "you're going to be you and get very, very upset."

I almost missed the house when we pulled up in the dark. I assumed it was a garage for one of the neighbor's places. A beach house takes yearly maintenance and repair or it it'll fall into the ground. This one was just needed someone to step back and yell "timber!" Trying to be positive, I reached out to touch the old-fashioned cedar shingles on the wall.

"Don't!" my wife said. "If you touch them, they fall off!"

As I pulled my hand back, one fell off all by itself, clunking to the ground.

I thought it looked vaguely familiar. Then it hit me: This was the very house the Clampetts moved out of when Jed struck oil.

Inside, it wasn't much better. The central air conditioning had broken down, so the owners had installed window air conditioners. The moldy window units, however, were unable to keep the place cool because the windows wouldn't close all the way. My wife had stuck plastic bags in the cracks to cut down on the warm drafts. When I went to open a kitchen drawer, the bottom fell out. That night, when I sat down on the toilet, it rocked back on the decayed floor, making a loud thump as the tank hit the wall.

I didn't sleep that first night, listening to the windows rattle in their frames and the air conditioners' slow drip, drip, drip into the carpet.

The next morning, I looked around our oceanfront Unabomber shack, nodded my head and hugged my wife. Then I grabbed a book, a beer and a beach chair.

"Thanks, honey," I said. "It took a little doing, but you finally arranged a vacation that makes me want to go out and sit on the beach all day!"