Our Annual Memorial Day Weekend Beach Get Away

For many many years we have a tradition of heading to the beach for a long weekend each Memorial Day weekend. Sometimes it's the east coast of Florida and sometimes the west coast. It all depends on the availability and prices of condo's. This year we headed back to the east coast. About 80 to 90 people from our missions base will be joining us this year. They are all coming in on Friday night. It's always a great time of hanging out and fellowshipping with everyone. In fact it's the same place we stayed last year. Our friends Scott and Tammi own a condo here and it's always very clean and in a great area.

Carlos, Sierra and I headed over to the beach on Thursday along with Ken, Lisa and the kids. Yesterday we got everything unpacked and settled. Then it was off to Wal-mart and the grocery to load up on food and snacks for the long weekend.This morning we all wokeup leisurly and then Ken and Carlos headed down to the beach to get everything set up. This year we added a cabana type thing to our three umbrella's. We pulled Sierra out of school a couple days early but Alexia, Taylor and Landon really needed to go Thursday and Friday so Jordan is bringing them up sometime tonight. Also, coming is Jessica, Austin and Steven. The had a great time today hanging out at the beach.Christian was in heaven with his sandtoys and the great soft sand of the east coast.Sierra, Kaitlyn and Christian went in search of shells.Kaitlyn's favorite find. Sierra was in search of a sanddollar but all she could come up with was a partial one . . she was still happy with her find!
Christian was just happy to be at the beach.
And Ava . . .. well . .. she is just happy period!

Carlos and I really enjoyed having a couple days to hangout with Sierra. There are not many times when we can just hang with one of the kids.
Halfway through the day Lisa and I went up to our rooms to make lunch for the gang. We brought it all down to the beach so we could have a picnic lunch.Ava loves to share!After lunch the kids went back down to the water to look for more shells. While they were searching Lisa saw something in the water . . . .She started running towards the kids . . what did she see . . . was it a shark??????It finally showed itself again but thankfully it was just a friendly dolphin :-)
Carlos' favorite place to be is on the beach with a good book!

My precious God-daughter Kaitlyn and me!
We saw many sand crabs today.
The kids then decided it was time for the pool.
The water was not too bad .. . even Lisa and I jumped in to cool off.
Christian is taking swimming lessons so we worked with him a little bit. He is doing great!
Around 4:00 it started to drizzle so we packed it up and came up to our rooms. I took a shower and then fell asleep. Ahhhhhh . . .how nice to sleep with the sound of the ocean right outside your door. We are so looking forward to this weekend . . . it's going to be awesome.