Vacation III

(<—- parts I & II)

Day 5: I woke up early and went grocery shopping before everyone else woke up. The plan was to buy breakfast and lunch food for 3 days and dinner for one day, which is what I did. The checkout girl said "Oh, so you are buying all these groceries before the storm hits?" I said "uh huh" thinking "what is she talking about?"

I got back to the cabin and David said "I hope you didn’t buy too much, because we are packing up and leaving. There’s a tropical storm on the way." We sat and watched the weather a little bit, and I kept trying to convince him that a) a tropical storm is not a hurricane, and b) it would probably miss us anyway. I made breakfast while we talked about what we could do: go to Houston, go back to San Antonio, go back home, or stay. I was leaning toward staying, and David wanted to go to Houston, but we decided to at least go to the beach one last time.

I was wishing we had gotten some boogie boards. A lot of kids had them, and were having fun. Courtney and Rebecca played with a little girl that had one that she let them use a couple of times. We played in the water and in the sand making sand castles, then went back for lunch. I had bought stuff to cook for dinner (tacos) and sandwich stuff for lunch, but I decided to make the tacos for lunch in case we did pack up and leave, we could at least bring the sandwich stuff in the cooler with us. We ate lunch then I finally won David over to my idea of staying, except he decided that if we were going to potentially be rained in the next day, he had to have something to do. The kids and I had books, coloring books, etc which would have kept us busy, and I suggested going to buy a board game or something, but he wasn’t sure what would keep him busy. (He had left his laptop at home). There was a TV in the room but no VCR or DVD player.

We figured we could at least find a Target or Wal-Mart back in Corpus Christi if not in another town, so we drove out to the ferry and I got the brilliant idea to call 1-800-Wal-Mart. Sure enough, I put in the zip code where we were and it told me there was a Wal-Mart in Aransas Pass, the town on the other side of the ferry.

We went there and wandered around a while, getting some toys and more activity books for the kids and another book for me. Then David got the brilliant idea of buying the next season of 24 (we were up to Season 4) and a cheap DVD player. He found a $30 DVD player so we went with it.

While we were back on the mainland, there was a tree I wanted to see. I had read about the largest live oak in Texas, which was at Rockport. It’s over 1,000 years old with a diameter of 11 feet and the branches span 89 feet. David didn’t want to take the time to see it (tropical storm is coming!) but he finally relented and we drove out to see it. It was really huge. It was kind of an odd thing to do I guess but I like little oddities when you visit a new place.

After the big tree, we went back across the ferry and stopped at the grocery store again to get more sandwich stuff and pizzas for the next night (in case we were flooded in). Then we went home and David started messing with the DVD player. Right away he could see we needed something else, because the TV only had the cable-in connection & nothing else. The DVD instructions told us we needed an "RF modulator" so he went out to see if he could buy one of these Star Trek-sounding things. He found one at Ace Hardware, which was just about to close. Brought it home and realized he also needed a cable, d’oh! He ran back to Ace Hardware and pleaded with them to let him in to buy the cable, which they did. As he was driving back again, he went by the beach. It was starting to get windy, and he said the waves were looking big. After he got the DVD player hooked up, we went back to the beach just to look at the waves and take pictures (it was getting dark by this point).

We went back to the cabin and started watching 24. This season wasn’t as gripping for me as other seasons were (probably because I didn’t want to be watching TV on my vacation!) I watched the first disc then went to bed. I think I completely missed the second disc.

Day 6: During the night, I heard some rain and wind but nothing that really woke me up or concerned me. In the morning we couldn’t see any water standing and it wasn’t raining, although it looked cloudy. We had it in our minds that the storm was coming though, so we settled in to watch DVDs. About lunchtime, we decided that the sun was out and the storm must have done what it was going to do so we packed up a cooler of sandwiches and went back to the beach. This time the waves were really big (comparatively) and it was alot of fun to get out in them. Also, we could see that there was a lot less beach than there had been previously – the water was higher but it was so shallow for so far out, it wasn’t like the water we were swimming in was deep even then. We stayed out for several hours and I ended up getting one hell of a sunburn on my back. I was conscientious about putting sunscreen on the kids and on my face and shoulders but forgot about my back.

After a few hours, we were all kind of beached out. Tired of being sandy, tired of salt in our mouths, hot and sunburned. So we went back and finished up the season of 24. I made pizza for supper and we just relaxed. We had gotten Benjamin a dinosaur play set at Wal-Mart and he was happy with that and the girls were happy with their activity books and toys, so they played while we finished the DVDs.

Day 7: The plan was to leave around 9. I really hadn’t timed out how long the drive back was going to take us. At one point I thought we might go up to Houston to see my cousin’s son, but then we heard on TV that the storm that basically missed us, had hit Houston pretty hard, so we decided to just drive back the way we came. I got up early and took the car to vacuum some of the sand out (futile) then we packed up and loaded up and left, pretty much right at 9.

The drive back was uneventful, we stopped a couple of times for snacks and to eat in Austin (but nowhere cool, just at a Whataburger). We didn’t even stop to see the capitol.

I had told the kennel we would pick up Pepper at 5, just to give them a time (she was going to be groomed before we picked her up). At 5:00 on the dot, we pulled into their parking lot. Genius. She was all clean and good-smelling and really happy to see us. We went home and unloaded the car and then everyone got to just relax. Except me, because I had 15 loads of laundry to do and a car full of sand. Then David said, what day is today? And I said "Friday." And he said "You are a genius, you have the whole weekend before you have to go back to work!" LOL I said "Yes, I planned it that way (duh)".

I will post some pictures once I get them off the camera.