Too Much Vacation

Have you read the Berenstein Bears book, "Too Much Vacation?" Well, it has an all new meaning to us now. The best way to describe our beach trip this year is humor. Humor because you just had to have a sense of humor and a lot of grace to make it through. We went with our friends that we've vacationed with the last few years. Since last year we have added two more babies to the mix which made us four adults, two 3 year olds and two 10 month olds. This trip brought with it new challenges and new fun. This year, this trip, we battled a 24 hour stomach bug the first half of the trip that passed person to person. It was ugly but it was brief. We finally got everyone feeling better and then that same day Tropical Storm Lee came calling. It brought with it rain, rain and more rain. It also brought with it significant wind gusts, tornado activity and thunder storms. I have never seen double red flags at the beach before and hope to never again.

With all of that said, we had as much fun as two families can have considering the conditions. We did a day trip to Pensacola to the Naval Aviation Museum, played at the indoor pool, did walks in between rain clouds, had movie nights and the kids spent a considerable amount of time riding the elevators and playing in the arcade. Different than expected but memorable nonetheless. In fact, I bet this is the trip that we talk about a whole lot more than the rest. Too much vacation? Never.

I will let the pictures do the rest of the talking...

First days of sunshine and calm

Perfect evening. Check out the calm water.

Playing one sick evening. I can't remember who's sick day it was, might have been Will, but we had to go at least touch the sand once with our toes.

Then came the rain

Then came a single red flag

Then came a double red flag

What do you do when you are joined at the beach by a Tropical Storm and you have four kids 3 and under stuck in a condo? You get creative.

Day trip to Pensacola

We tried to take advantage of every moment it wasn't storming, we even swam in the pool in the rain. The next two pictures really define it best. There was a break in the bands of rain so we quickly ran down to the beach on our final night. It was windy but we were determined. Within 4 minutes of being down there the heavens opened and started to pour again.

In this picture it started to rain...

30 seconds later we all looked like this...

Another year, another memory. We sure had fun though.