Road Trip!: Destin, FL

We had one week between the end of Rob's internship in Louisville and the start of his second (and final!!!!) year of MBA school, so we decided to do a little camping at the beach. Sounds beautiful right? Well, it was in Florida, so wrong! Ha! Despite warnings (thanks, Erin!) we decided to head to beautiful Destin for a few days. It was a pretty long trip down, around 9 hours, but the girls were awesome in the car. Grace watched Tangled over and over and over again. The whole way. It was really cute, because sometimes she'd sing along to the songs (she had headphones on so we got to listen to our own thing). We stopped at Cracker Barrel for lunch. We're becoming more Southern by the minute. Aunt Leslie, if you're reading - I think of you every time we go to Cracker Barrel :)

We got down to Destin. Beautiful white sandy beaches and blue water. Heaven! Until, that is, you step out of your air conditioned car. So it was hot, but nothing we didn't think we could handle, but that could have been because there was a storm blowing in, which apparently happens every day there. That, and it was after 6, so the sun was setting - that helped too. After the storm blew through, it got hot again and we didn't really sleep. The next morning I ran to Wal Mart to get us an extension cord and a fan so we could survive the next night in the tent (gotta love hookups!). We headed down to the beach, but it was windy (more storms) and the red warning flag was up for dangerous surf. By the time we headed back to camp for lunch, they had closed the beach due to all the storms running all the nasties out to sea. Bummer! This is apparently only the 3rd time in 6 years this has happened. What terrible timing! We were dying on land though, so we headed out in the air conditioned car to find some cooler entertainment. That led us to Gator Beach (which is really a pond under a tourist trap restaurant that has over 100 gators).



We fed the gators:

Just kidding! We love you Ruby!


But we really did feed the gators:




And rode the gators:

And Rob even acted nutty enough that he was chosen to get to hold a gator!


We were planning on staying three nights, but with the beach being closed, we cancelled the third night and headed back the next day (after a much better sleep, thankyouverymuch fan!). That night we had a crazy storm that lightning and thundered in our tent (almost!) and rained so hard and blew. It was pretty crazy to be that close to nature during a storm like that!

The ride home was looooooong again, but the girls were amazing for have done it two days before! Not the best camping trip, but one that we'll look back on and laugh about. What an adventure!