ERT16 Day 28

Beach Day!

By 10am we were on the beach. It was a beautiful white sand beach with a huge pavilion and (drumroll...) clean bathrooms with hot showers. Jerome put up our big canopy and that was just what we needed to escape the heat and make our time there super enjoyable. The heat index was 106... yikes! Even still, the kids had a ball! They played in the sand and made all sorts of things (whales, castles, cakes, pizzas, wells, etc.). And, of course, they buried themselves a time or two. Justin spent most of his time playing in the water... and unfortunately paid for it. He got stung by a jellyfish... twice! He was brave though. Jerome scrapped the bards out with a credit card, treated it with muddy sand, and sent him on his way. We didn't leave the beach until 5pm.

After the beach, we stayed on the fishing pier for another 2 or 3 hours... partly because it was so interesting to watch the big time fishermen, partly because (at a massive 1500+ ft long) it simply took forever to get from one end to the other, and also because we didn't want to go back to the tent until the sun went down because of the heat. We watched people fish... and fish... and fish some more.  One guy let the kids use his pole to catch some really small fish that the other fisherman used for bait. It didn't have a hook, but had a net with some kind of sticky red stripe on it. It was pretty cool. All 3 kids caught at least one fish. Jasmine and I also watched a whole wedding ceremony on the beach from the pier. We ate icies, played a super simple but addictive game involving a nail, rope, and a hoop, and called it a day. A very full day.

ERT16 Day 27

Yesterday was day 27. After a comfortable hotel stay and a hot breakfast, we continued on to Gulf Shores, Alabama. For this leg, we stopped at the Infinity Science Center in Pearlington, Mississippi.  This is was a NASA funded museum with lots of weather and space / rocket focused exhibits. It was smaller than we anticipated, but still made for a good opportunity to break up the drive. We had lunch in Slidell, LA, and must have either lost track of time somewhere along the way or simply miscalculated this leg of the trip because we ended up doing something that we usually make a point to avoid like the plague: we arrived at our campgrounds in AL at night... which meant pitching the tent and setting up camp in the dark. To add insult to injury, we apparently arrived on the tail end of a heat wave because the heat outside was incredible, which made it doubly uncomfortable in the tent. All of us were stripped down, soaked with sweat, and trying not to move, touch or breath on each other. We also tried to get to sleep as quickly as possible since that was pretty much the only way to beat the heat. It was rough, but we survived.

ERT16 Day 26

Yesterday was a rest and laundry day at Uncle Daryl and Aunt Marilynn's house. Today we packed up the caravan and headed to Louisiana. We broke up the trip by spending time at the Houston Zoo. The zoo was huge and nice; but the heat was intense (index of 100+). Jerome had the idea of buying each kid a disposable camera in order to help them take their minds of off how miserably hot we all were. It helped, and it also made the excursion a bit more novel than our usual zoo trip. As for the zoo itself, the gorilla exhibit was awesome! They were super playful, chasing each other around and putting on a show. It was funny. The dinosaur exhibit was nice too. My surprise favorite, though, was the bull exhibit. The kids also did the carousel 2 or 3 times and got to feed the giraffes. In all, we stayed for about an hour or two; and then it was off to the Drury Inn in Lafayette.