In July, Chris and I decided to use his last week of vacation of the year and plan a beach trip for our family! We can't yet afford to go by ourselves, so we got some great friends of ours, the Bledsoes, to go with us! Turns out they were already planning a trip and were looking for another family to go with. Our families mesh really well because Emma and Parker were born only a few weeks apart and are great friends and their son, Will, is only 9 months older than Caroline. Well, we booked our trip for the last weekend of August. Then - the hurricane came! Our condo owners were nice enough to let us change our weeks to their next available week which was the second week of October. So - a little change in plans - but come October we were READY and EXCITED for our beach trip! Here we are in our cramped truck headed down to PCB!
Ahhhh- 7 hours later and we were there! Our condo was amazing - great view - great area - great beach - great pool! The pier you see in the distance is Pineapple Willy's.
Only one part of the pool that you could see from our balcony... it was a huge lagoon pool that wrapped around the entire courtyard. Turns out we never even got into the pool! The beach was so amazing and the weather so great, we stayed on the beach with our tent the entire time. (Thanks Whit and Doug for letting us borrow your tent - again!)
We weren't sure how Caroline would do in the sand. When we went to the beach in May, she wasn't sitting up yet so she really didn't get to experience the beach. Well, now she's a sitting up, crawling crazy baby! Turns out - she LOOOOOVED IT! The sandier she was, the happier she was! She would crawl straight into the ocean if we let her - she even loved it when the waves hit her face! Crazy kid!
Park had a blast, too! Chris and I gave birth to two part-fishies! We did have a small scare one day when I looked up after a few minutes and realized Parker was GONE! Within a few minutes, I had every family around us looking for him and Bryan ended up finding him about 100 yards away playing in the water with another little boy. I nearly had a heart attack. When we came up to me, I explained to him how scared I was and how we were all looking everywhere for him! He looked up at me with his big blue eyes and said, "Well, where were you looking, you weren't looking in the right place!" Goober! Needless to say, I was on extra guard the rest of the week!
Caroline would get so excited when we put her swim suit on each day!
Pineapple Willy's was walking distance to our condo so we headed their for dinner one night! (After going to 4 other places just to find out there was an hour+ wait at all of them!) Willy's is huge and we were able to sit on the pier and only had a 10 minute wait!
Willy's is known for their frozen drinks!
Park and Emma were two peas in pod! They slept in the bunk room together and we would catch them up after bed time talking and whispering and giggling together!
Kaci and I hanging out after the kids went to bed one night!
The kids were great entertainment for us! They would make "boats" on the carpet and make up entire stories to go along with it.
Seriously Park has no sense of personal space!
This is my heaven!
Caroline would CRY every time we tried to take her out of the ocean water! The great thing about the gulf was that there was about a 50-70 yard distance where the water was just ankle-knee deep! This was like our own private kiddie pool!
Another night, we headed to Pier Park for ice cream!
And we let Parker ride on one right at Miracle Strip!
One of Caroline's fave games was taking EVERYTHING out of mommy's huge ginormous beach bag!
When we stay on the east coast, which we normally do, we have amazing sun rises. But on the gulf coast, we have amazing sun sets!
THUNDER BEACH - bike week - started mid-week through our stay. We were a bit worried about it but it ended up being great! We met a ton of really great people on the beach - who knew bikers were so nice! The night before the bike week began, on the top floor of our parking deck to our condo they had a band, Hooters waitresses serving Dominos Pizza (huh?) and we caught a couple sneak peeks at the crowd. Very interesting for sure!
We spent most of our evenings playing cards and other games with Kaci and Bryan! We played spoons one night and no one was able to beat Kaci!
A few more random shots from the week...
We put Caroline's pack n play in our walk-in closet in our room and it worked out great! She would sleep in there for days if we let her! It was completely pitch black dark and with her sound machine, she was loving it! She definitley slept well that week! Here she was one morning - dreaming of being super woman!
We ended up leaving the beach on Friday night even though our reservations went through Saturday. My Granny from Florida was coming to visit our family in Kennesaw so we wanted to be home on Saturday to spend time with them! This was our last family picture at the beach! Can't wait to go back next year!
Our last full night at the beach, we headed down to get some family pictures of everyone with the sunset!
You can imagine what was happening in this pic...
The sweet Bledsoe family!
Bye bye Panama City Beach!
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