Kiawah Island, South Carolina
Last week we arrived home from a marvelous family trip to a heavenly island in SC.
Actually, we went there because of a conference that Cody was attending, but we are so thankful to this conference for turning us on to such a lovely beach destination.
Before we left Reese wanted to get in several practice sessions in the tub with her new goggles.
Oddly enough she never used them ONCE at the beach.
After an oh so enjoyable nearly 12 hour car drive,
we pulled into our condo in the middle of the night.
The next morning we were off!
Beach time for kids is so beautifully therapeutic and peaceful.
The girls spent hours upon hours boogie boarding,
digging, finding creatures and jumping over waves.
The water was SO WARM that even I spent a great deal of time boogie boarding
and splashing in the waves.
We spent one full day in Charleston.
As you can see, Reese enjoyed several of the famous landmarks.
When we were on the Charleston Waterfront Park Peir
we were able to watch a woman fishing for crabs.
It was neat for the children to learn all about the process.
As you can see, she was quite successful.
We went to get Gelato at a "must try" shop, or so says Trip Advisor.
What I discovered there was that I don't much care for Gelato,
however, the children will never protest to anything with sugar in it!
Cody tried the Belgian Waffles,
not nearly up to par with the ones we ate IN Belgium.
Our main Charleston highlight, actually located across the river in Mount Pleasant,
was a trip to
There was SO MUCH to see and do there, but unfortunately we were restricted on time,
so we mostly focused on exploring the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier.
With a desire for our children to learn just as much about this historic ship
as they possibly could,
we outfitted the family with individual audio tour headsets.
Note to self-
When it's 23452345 degrees outside with 99% humidity and you are on a metal
ship without air-conditioning, kids do not stay attentive and happy for too long.
Above left, Reese and Aspen fight over who gets to do Irish dance by themselves on the
American Flag stage.
Above right, Reese, in an exhausted state, puts herself in timeout
and spends a goodly amount of time screaming in the corner
because a sibling sat in her stroller for 15 seconds.
As we quickly navigated the ship (PS Navy ships are NOT stroller friendly)
it was truly inspiring to learn more about it's incredible past and the men and
women who lived aboard and bravely defended our freedom.
All in all we made through about
10% of the audio tour and saw about 30% of the ship.
When it was time to move onto our next tour, a horse drawn carriage ride through the heart of Charleston, a MASSIVE storm began pouring down rain,
which left us stranded on the ship with a cancelled carriage ride.
We waited until it was tolerable to race though the storm and toured another submarine at Patriots Point and then onto our car. By the time we got there we were all pretty wet...
which did NOT stop us from driving back across the river on the
Aurthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge
into Charleston to attend a little local theater production called Groovy Kind of Love,
at the
34 West Theater Company.
It was charming venue and the FOUR actors did a fabulous job at putting on
a cute and clean show.
Above : On the way to Charleston from Kiawah we stopped at the
which is a very old, very massive and very cool tree.
A fellow tourist snapped this family picture of us and then also happened to snap a picture of me walking back from the tree with Reese.
I was thankful for this mishap,
a sweet reminder of my "off-camera" interactions with my kiddos.
Kiawah boasts it's fair share of boats.
The night I took this picture we has just finished enjoying a
sunset boat ride where we were able to watch dolphins jumping up all around us.
During one beach day we all worked together to create this!
We felt a dolphin was fitting since we had seen SO many during our trip.
I had arranged for our entire family, minus Reese, to have surfing lessons.
It was AWESOME!
We were all able to get up, Avery nearly every time!
All the hours of wake boarding certainly proved to be a helpful prerequisite.
And yes, both Avery and Brinley
surfed on that size of yellow board you see in the picture.
Aspen's was just a tad smaller.
I have a feeling this was the first of many more surfing experiences in our future!
We rented bikes for the week and spent a bit of time biking around the island.
Due to the heat and humidity, the girls were not thrilled with this activity.
(all the streets in Kiawah look like this)
One evening we took them on an "alligator hunt" bike ride.
Kiawah has a LOT of alligators, or so we have been told.
We said that if they spotted an alligator then we would ride to the ice cream shop.
One baby alligator and several deer later we wound up at the ice cream shop,
and after that we rode on to participate in
THE most darling festival with face painting, bounce houses, slides,
games, bands, train rides and crafts.
AND finally last, but certainly not least, we took a
MOST awesome sunset Kayak tour.
Brinley, Avery and I had our own Kayak and Daddy shared with Apsen and Reese.
Everyone loved it, except for Reese,
who was quite vocal about how much she DID NOT like it.
The absolutely most awesome part about the tour was observing dolphins
jumping and splashing all around us.
At one point a dolphin came up right beside Brinley's Kayak.
Brinley, Avery and I stayed out later than the others to
watch the dolphins splashing about,
what we did not realize was that the sky was preparing to dump buckets of rain onto us,
which was somewhat frightening
being in the middle of a largish body of water...umm the ocean.
As soon as the rain started we paddled our little hearts out and
made it back to shore safe and sound.
We all agreed that this trip was pretty much fantastic in every way!
Thanks Babe for having a conference is such an awesome place.
