Family Vacation

Every year we say it, "no more family vacations- ever!" and then every year we find ourselves lured into another one. However, this family vacation, unlike so many others, was a great one filled with just fun, no drama nor arguments. The visit was pretty low-key. Lots of eating, taking showers, hanging out with family and just doing nothing. Besides relaxing on the beach we also managed a day trip to Savannah, toured summer cottages of the rich and famous, and also toured what was once a rice plantation.

Here we are trying to stay entertained on the plane. I was running out of ideas seeing as I hadn't slept for a day! Overall, the flying wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. We did have some small meltdowns (from all of us) but on the plus side we had the entire center aisle to ourselves which meant all our stuff could spread out.  There were some slight delays due to some high winds in Rome and then again in Philly for some unknown reasons. But we made all our flights and only arrived two hours later than expected.






This was from the first day at the beach. We're warming up to the water. Can never be too sure...

You might see these...
It's not what you think. It's really supposed to be those friendly mammals but I didn't go back into the water for the entire trip. I did hear that hammerheads and bull sharks are commonly found here and occasionally great white sharks. So I'm never going back into those waters.

In case your imagination didn't sufficiently strike fear in your heart when you read the word hammerhead, here is a picture. Would you go swimming there??? 

On to happier and less dangerous things. This was one of the summer cottages we got to tour. I forget who it belonged to, all I will say is that these were not summer cottages, I could easily live there all year round. Oh, the tour was on Jekyll Island where 1/6 of the world's wealthy would come and play for the summer back in the day. I won't post pictures of all the houses, I don't want to bore but they were all beautiful.

 I will post just this one- it belonged to the
Rockefeller's.














This was the driveway.















Back to the beach...
You can see the dike I slaved over while M was napping. What do you do during nap time? I build dikes.
















The drink of choice for this vacation was Blue Moon but one night we switched things up. My grandpa made some great margaritas. By five o'clock we were all passed out (we may have started happy hour a little early that day).

After the first two sips I was gone leaving someone to entertain herself with whatever she came across. Good thing Sierra Mist bottles are such good babysitters.

I slacked off in Savannah with the picture-taking thing. Savannah has a beautiful historic center in case you visit. It's pretty tiny and can easily be done in a day. I would recommend parking the car and just walking around, you see so much more. We planned the trip so that we could go to a latin mass in the cathedral. M believed her version of the kyrie was better and decided to debut it. We spent most of our time in the narthex. Flannery O'Connor's family home was just across the square where the cathedral was located. Was it her sister who trained a chicken to walk backwards? Whoever it was they did it in the backyard.




Here we are trying the water thing again. Those waves looked dangerous.















She preferred lounging and taking long walks, anything that involved keeping our feet dry.














C made himself a baseball bat, I was quite proud of him. I caught up on some reading. I reread Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. Such a great novel. M got to bounce around on Grandma's knee.

It was a great way to start off our summer.