Tan, Tired and a Little Spoiled

Home again after a fabulous vacation to Myrtle Beach. Our trip started last Saturday and we pulled into our driveway today around 3 PM. We had such a good time and really enjoyed the South Carolina sunshine.

We have come to find that we do not do well on road trips longer than 5 hours and take this into account when we are planning such a trip. We stopped in Raleigh on Saturday for an overnight stay and a fun time at a little shopping center that reminded us of Fairfax Corner. We had a great dinner at a place called Firebird and ice cream at the Ben and Jerry's.

Sunday we headed off to the Myrtle Beach Marriott and arrived there in plenty of time to swim in their pools. We vacationed two years ago at this hotel and loved it. We had great accommodations and access to a private beach. Most of our days were spent swimming in one of their two pools or in the ocean.

Jakob and George dug lots of holes and made lots of moats

Boogie Boarding is in his blood. He is part Hawaiin.

Surfing is next.

The view from our room.

The pools.

On Tuesday we spent most of our day at the Nascar Speedpark. There were go-carts galore. We also played miniature golf and arcade games. Lots of fun. We had dinner at Joe's Crab Shack and Jakob loved the line dances they did. (Cotton-eyed-Joe and the Macarena) Salt water taffy was next on the list and Jakob found out he LOVES it. I don't.

Jakob driving the go-cart. He was excited it was the Home Depot car.

Riding the ferris wheel with Daddy.

Eating crab at Joe's.

This was the first time he cracked his own crab legs.

He thought he was the man.

Thursday morning found us at the ocean one last time before we headed to Raleigh. Not much traffic today and we were home in 5 hours. We are much tanner (if not a little burnt) and very tired and feeling a little spoiled with all the special memories we made. What a great vacation. Next week is VBS for Jakob and George has one more week of vacation to spend with us. We are truly blessed.

How many days does it take?

In May we decided Jakob needed a larger swing set. We had a beautiful plastic set with swings and slides, but Jakob was getting too tall and too heavy to have much fun on it anymore. We cleaned it up and put it on Ebay in hopes we would make a few dollars to offset the cost of a new wooden swing set. Two hundred and eighty dollars later we were amazed and excited to go get a new set. I scoured the internet and found a perfect size and price for us at Wal-Mart. To avoid the shipping cost ($180) we decided to drive to Stafford, VA (approx. 35 min.) to pick up the swing set. Once there we were told they sold the last one the day before, bummer. The next weekend we were headed to La Plata, MD (approx. 60 min.) and they had one!! We loaded it up and headed home.

In June we finally had a weekend to work on the set. We had to sort all the wood (there was no labeling) and begin the building. There are over 100 pieces of wood to be assembled and I can't even guess how many screws, bolts and nuts had to be used. The first day we assembled the slide. It took over 2 hours to do this. We really thought by the end of the first day we would have half of the set put together and would finish the next day. We knew this would be a one, maybe two, weekend project. WRONG.

Three weekends and countless hours later we are done!!! I do have to say we are not the type of people to get up in the am and get to working. We didn't start most days until 2 PM. This does not leave a lot of time before dinner to get things done. Especially when problems arose, which they did. Jakob loves the set and George and I didn't argue too much on whose way was the better way. Now what are we going to do this weekend?