One Last Vacation

About a month ago, we received an invitation to an Eagle Court of Honor for one of Craig's favorite former scouts.  And since his family was so nice to actually send us an invitation, and since I SUPER miss everything about Allen, I orchestrated and begged and cajoled Craig into working out a McAllen business trip into his August plans.  

McAllen is no where near Dallas.  In fact, it's about as far from Birmingham to Allen as it is from McAllen to Allen.  So logistically, this trip makes absolutely no sense at all.  But I REALLY wanted to go, and I never want to go on trips, so Craig thought we should probably capitalize on that little anomaly.  

We had originally planned to leave Saturday, drive halfway, stay somewhere so we could go to church on Sunday morning, and then make the second reasonable length drive after church.  But, there was that dance.  And the girls had already invited the whole ward to our house for that pre-dance party.  And since I'm in the YW Presidency, I now get to carpool to and chaperone at those youth dances.  So we changed our plans, and made the whole 15 hour drive in ONE DAY...except because it's us, and because I have to stop every 20 minutes to go to the bathroom, somehow that 15 hours turned into more like 18, I think.  We left Birmingham at 4:00am and drove into our condo on South Padre Island at 10:30pm.  That's definitely the LONGEST drive we've ever done in one 24 hour period.  And probably the longest we'll ever do because there aren't many more driving hours you could fit into one day.  


The weather was not ideal.  It's raining everywhere in the southern half of the United States apparently.  We were diverted because of flooding in Louisiana, hit torrential rain in New Orleans and Houston, and didn't see even a tiny bit of blue sky the entire day.  

And there's a very good possibility the rest of the week might look the same... 

But even if we just sit in the condo and watch the Olympics all week with the beach in the background, it will still be a good week because there are NO responsibilities at the beach.  I'm not even planning on wearing make up for the entire four days we're here!  And since Craig will have the car with him working in McAllen all week, which is an hour away, we'll be happily stuck here.  

While we were on that long drive, Craig took us on a surprise diversion through Houston (which isn't my idea of a great surprise because Houston isn't my favorite place, but this one was kind of worth it.)

This place also keeps with the whole scouting theme of the trip, too, don't you think?  

Craig wanted to show the kids the giant wall of immortalized Eagle scouts from the Houston area.  He lived in Houston in high school and earned his Eagle in 1986.

We were all pretty impressed with that little sighting, especially McKay, who now wants his name engraved somewhere.  :)

Although it was a super LONG, rainy, tiring day, we listened to some amazing BYU devotionals, we sang our heads off (ok, maybe that was just me...) we caught a couple of Pokemons, we tried out McKay's new trumpet silencer (it works!) and we made it safely to our vacation home for the next four days.    

Now we're all just hoping the rain stops long enough for us to play on the beach a little before school starts next week...and I might be secretly counting the days till we get to Allen.  I might cry when we pull into that place and when I see all those people I love.