Beach Trip 2010

So you know we hit the beach this year. Our usual haunt at the Beautiful and sadly tainted w/oil Gulf Coast is the Orange Beach/Gulf Shores area. Our trip wasn't scheduled until this week actually. But with the current conditions there we upped the trip to June and headed to Panama City Beach, FL. We headed down on Monday and Meme & Pawpaw followed on Tuesday. We had not been there in 12 years. A lot of it has changed for the better. Lots of new and nice condos and Pier Park is great. Some of it is still the same ole PCB of old. Anyway, here's my first installment of the Hicks Panama City Beach adventure.....

The trip down....still fresh into it here. I don't think we had even stopped in Clanton for Ice Cream yet so we're looking pretty calm yet excited.

Here we are somewhere in the middle of the trip getting a little van happy and antsy. If we heard, "how much longer?" one more time I think we'd have sold them for gas $$!!

And here we are hanging out the window b/c we were past our patient point and were stuck in some road work traffic about 30 minutes out of Panama City. (Particular child in picture:Maggie-who else?)

And once we arrived we stopped to eat some lunch before check in b/c check in is always so darn late in the afternoon. Anyway, here's my girls sitting outside Sharky's.

A quick shot of me and Al waiting on our food. While waiting one of those summer beach storms popped up and you would have thought Maggie had seen the coming of the end of the world. She lost it, I mean LOST it so bad I had to take her into the souvenir shop until Alex got our table moved inside. And once he did the bottom dropped out. However, the meal was good and we enjoyed watching the rain come down (b/c we were dry inside and not outside)!!!

Our condo was beautiful and so relaxing with great amenities but here you see the piece De resistance. Yes, folks, bunk beds was all my girls needed to set their hearts on fire. They were blown away and to top it off there were two sets of bunk beds so no one had to fight over where to sleep. They took turns and did so quite nicely I might add!!

The water was gorgeous the entire time we were there. There was a day or two that we had small amounts of seaweed but otherwise it was this pretty turquoise color the whole time! Prettier than I've seen it in a long time-ironic since there's oil out there somewhere lurking in them waters!

Also, the first day we arrived the condo (Sterling Breeze) happened to have a party for the kidos that day. They got glitter tattoos (being displayed above), several balloon animals and played games for candy!! It was a nice little extra for the girls and started the trip off on a good note - however that was not to be for long......more later!!