Home Sweet Home

Is there any sight greater than the Welcome to Texas?

Our return trip to home was also spent over two days, albeit with a much longer drive the second day than the first so that we could spend time in New Orleans.

Its about 4.5 hours between Destin and New Orleans, and we stopped in Mobile to tour the USS Alabama.

Of all the potential sights along I-10, I thought this was one of the ones the boys would enjoy the most.

Its an old battleship which saw a lot of action in World War II.

The battleship was fun for the boys. They had fun pretending they were sailors on board the ship. Sleeping...

Interrogating a prisoner in the brig...

Working in the engine room...

Inspecting the missiles...

(Or are those pencils?)

And of course, "trying" a uniform on for size.

And what's a battleship without large guns to fire?

The upper decks of the ship were equally fascinating for Team Danger.

Alas, because its an "old" battleship, it doesn't exactly have air conditioning, not counting the lovely Alabama "breeze" on top of the ship.

And it was a hot and muggy day, and the further below deck you go, the more certain younger folks start complaining. (Ryan is *so* my child in this regard. I didn't complain out loud, mind you, but when he was asking me to skip certain numbers on our self-guided map to make it go faster without Carl and Alex knowing, well, I was half-impressed/half-disturbed at his ingenuity. Because that is definitely something I would have done on my own anyway.) (Just kidding, Carl. I'd never skip rooms 17-19 of the B tour. When there were roughly 30 rooms on each of the A,B and C tours. Oh no.)

There was also a submarine at this site.

Ryan was tired of boats at this time, so just Carl and Alex went into the submarine.

Ryan and I hung out on top of the sub and played on the grass. Although not too much, because this sign had  me more than a little freaked.

 
From Mobile, it was another 2.5 hours to New Orleans. It rained for most of this drive, and it rained for most of our time in New Orleans.

Sigh.

This visit did not go at all the way I hoped it would. The boys HATED New Orleans with a passion. They didn't even want to sleep in our hotel after we had been out for a bit, they just wanted to get in the car and head towards home.

I had planned for us to stay down at the Riverfront area. I remember this being a very fun, carnival-like, family-friendly area that was great for kids.

It was a ghost town.

Except for the large numbers of homeless people. Sadly, this was not a good place for us to be with the kids, so we decided to take a trolley towards the French Quarter. Some brief smiles came out for this.

The boys were intrigued by the street musicians.

And some of the souvenir shops.

But then Ryan lost all interest in New Orleans.

And rapidly shut down, wanting to go back to the hotel, eat and sleep.

I couldn't even get him to be in this picture with Alex.

Or this one, at Jackson Square.

He was DONE, and pronounced (or screamed, yelled, pouted, cried, take your pick, he did them all) that he was not moving one more step unless it was to a restaurant or the hotel.

So much for my sightseeing of the French Quarter.

He perked up a bit with dinner, where he ordered pancakes with vanilla ice cream on top. And at the trolley ride back to the hotel.

I ended up retiring early with the boys, while Carl went back to Bourbon Street. He did, at least, get me a cocktail to go. There are some pluses to the open container laws in New Orleans. ;)

 The next morning, I was determined we would at least make it to Cafe du Monde for breakfast. Cue much screaming and crying that we weren't just leaving this horrible city right away. But one of the perks of being a parent is that I win, so off to Cafe du Monde we went.

Happily, there was no wait for our table, and we sat right next to some friends of ours from back home. Such a small world.

We made a brief visit to the Old New Orleans Mint, which I thought would make my coin-collecting children happy.

It did not.

 

 Getting in the car and leaving New Orleans did make them happy, though.

And eight hours later, we were home. :)

Sand and Surf

We had so much fun on the beach this vacation.

The boys love nothing more than digging in the sand, and they dug several very impressive, large holes.

They would often compete with other kids for Biggest Hole, although I think Alex and Ryan were the only ones competing.

Every large hole needs to have lots of water in it.

Lots of water.

After they would dig their holes, they would have us bury them.

This never gets old.

They quickly developed shovel envy (since we had only brought small shovels with us).

A quick trip to Publix solved that problem.

At Publix, we also picked up some nets for "fishing."

Sometimes they would even get creative with their big piles of sand, and make some sand castles.

And used some of the sandcastle building skills we learned from "Sand Dad" last year at Horseshoe Bay.

Sometimes they would write in the sand.

But usually, they just dug holes.

(Proper hole size not captured very well here, but this sucker was HUGE)

The first few days of our trip, the water was very calm, with gentle, lapping waves.

We would head out to my shoulder height in the water, and we discovered that if you dug in the sand about an inch, you might find sand dollars. Alex was the king of sand dollars. He collected seven, I found three, leaving Carl and Ryan in the dust. (To be fair, we were in five feet deep water, and Ryan can only hold his breath so long.)

Before we had left for Destin, Mom had told the boys all about the story of the sand dollar, and asked the boys to find a very special one for her to bring back.



The fact that we were able to not only find whole, complete sand dollars, but so many of them, made the boys very happy.

And we spent plenty of time in the water this beach trip. Usually the kids spend most of their time on the sand, with 5-10 minutes of water time for each sand hour. But this time, they lived in the water.

Whether it was wading in ankle deep water trying to catch the "sea creatures," as Ryan called them - they looked a bit like swimming lizards, so calling them fish didn't seem quite right to him. I'm still trying to search the internet for their name, because they were bizarre.

Or whether it was diving for sand dollars.

Or just riding the waves with the boogie boards.

Our boogie boards have never seen so much action!

The first few days the surf was very mild, but after the rain storms started to arrive, thanks to a bit of a push from Ernesto which was hitting the Carribbean around this time, the flags on the beach changed from yellow to red, and the waves became intense.

I was happy there still wasn't a huge undertow like we had experienced last summer, just huge powerful waves that could throw Ryan and Alex on their boards a huge distance back to the beach.

They LOVED the red flag days. :)
 

I loved watching the different colors of the beach, depending on the the time of the day.

And what the weather was like.

Our other big water event of the vacation was renting a pontoon boat.

The boys had a blast helping Carl "drive.

"

Our destination with the pontoon boat? Crab Island, which is not really an island but a sandbar party spot. They had a huge water slide, a water trampoline, volleyball games, a climbing water ball, and a restaurant and bar.

Oh, and did I mention an ice cream boat?

Could there be anything cooler than ice cream being delivered to your boat, complete with the ice cream truck jingles?

Alas, those dark skies you see in the pictures quickly turned into what Ryan screamed was a "hurricane" so our time at Crab Island ended prematurely.

The rain was a frequent annoyance on our trip, but we still managed lots and lots of beach time.