Young Party of Four

1,850.7 miles 36 hours and 28 minutes spent in the car 5 hotels 4 states 2 happy kids 1 exhausted family Countless memories ... And our road trip from Florida to Louisiana and back again is over. We had such a great time! When we asked everyone what their favorite thing we did was we got these answers: Kenzie - Staying in all the hotels and seeing the Blue Angels Will - Eating beignets Kristen - Seeing the Blue Angels Steven - Visiting New Orleans because it is somewhere he has never been before This morning we were up early (as usual) and we packed up and loaded the car before breakfast. It's probably good this was our last night or the kids may have started revolting when we tried to make them eat out. Especially breakfast. They definitely slowed on how much they ate as the week went on. We were on the road by about 8:00 Central time. We knew we would switch back to the Eastern time zone and the drive was 5 hours so we wanted to get on the road. They kids rode ...

Today was the day. The day that we have been waiting for. Well, we were waiting for all of them but today was the event that basically set this particular trip in motion. Last summer we read through Dr. Beach's list of top beaches in the U.S . and found that Siesta Key was #1. So we visited it. Then when looking through the list we noticed Grayton Beach State Park in the panhandle and thought we should totally visit in one day. When we were talking about a trip this year, that came up and we basically built a trip around it. Yep. You read that right. We pretty much planned an entire road trip around one main stop. Well, it ended up being about a lot more but it all started with a beach. That's really our family's motto at this point. It all starts with the beach. Maybe I will get us all matching shirts with our family motto at some point. Haha! (Quick side note: Grayton Beach State Park is #3 this year.) We have been looking forward to this for quite some time. We moved...

Things we learned today: - Always have a back up plan. - Duval St. > Bourbon St. - Will has a beignet problem. - Gators in LA are significantly smaller than gators in FL. This morning started as early as all the others. Okay, maybe it was a few minutes later as we have worn these kids out so much that they are sleeping in a few minutes more each day. If we stayed away from home long enough maybe we could make them sleep in until 7am. Honestly though, Steven and I had been up off and on since about 5am anyway. Our adjoining neighbor was either hard of hearing or just inconsiderate. He turned his TV on at max volume. We didn't call about it because neither kid noticed and we were both able to tune it out some and sleep off an on even with it on. It was more work to call. Oh well. As long as the kids weren't bothered. We think the only reason we could even hear it really was because we had an actual adjoining room with a door and that's where the sound seemed to be...