Summer Goodbye

We said goodbye to summer with a trip to the Beach.

Siesta Beach is our favorite beach.  The sand is so soft and pure white it's like flour.  No joke, it feels like all purpose baking flour.  

We drove down and spent the night in South Georgia.  After a late start and a few detours, we arrived at Siesta Beach just before dinner.  We grabbed a picnic lunch at Publix and headed down to the beach with our blanket.

 Nothing like a picnic on the beach at sunset!

Beach time isn't our only activity at the beach.  We also love to head over to the mini golf place and feed the alligators

 (yes, that's right. They keep baby alligators at the putt putt places in Florida!  None of those fake plaster alligators here.  Not when you've got the real thing!  Ha!)

Beach time is still our favorite though.  This trip, JR and ML were REALLY into catching sea creatures and observing them.  This was one of the first trips where we've seen a lot of seaweed at the shoreline.  JR & ML figured out that not everything that was seaweed shaped was actually seaweed.  There were also these little 'creatures' that looked like seaweed, but were actually separate living creatures.  We were all fascinated by them.

 We also somehow caught a tiny creel.  Having just seen Ice Age 3, we all cracked up about that!

Big Daddy LOVES, LOVES, LOVES The Hub Baja Grill in Seista Key Village.  It's his happy place.  We went there twice on this trip.

 So fun and so good!

 After dinner, most nights we returned to the beach:

 This cracks me up - JR looks so grown up and Big Daddy doing his Big Daddy thing - talking on his phone.

One night JR wrote out "London 2012" without any prompting.  We stayed up late almost every night watching swimming and gymnastics and every afternoon we watched water polo or rowing or volleyball.  I thought it was a fun remembrance of our trip to the beach during the Olympics!

 We saw some other sand sculptures that were *almost* as cool as our "London 2012."  :-)

 And we were finally back in town on a Tuesday night in the summer.  Which is important because JR loves to participate in the kid's Fun Run that happens on the beach every summer Tuesday.

It really is a neat event.  After the kids finish, they get a popsicle and a ribbon.  And after all of the kids are done, they have a 'mini tri' for anyone who wants to participate.  They run down the beach and then swim around the buoys and finally emerge from the water to cross the finish line.  The lifeguards are out in the water on paddle boards.  It's fun to watch.

Big Daddy was scheduled to fly home late Wednesday.  The kids and I could have come home as late  as Saturday, but when it was all said and done, I was so, so ready to be home.  So after a short, but sweet!, trip, we packed up on Wednesday morning and hit the road.

We made some cool stops on the way home though!