Our "Summer Vacation"

I wanted to document this experience because we had a lot of fun and I thought it was kind of funny.  As you all know, we couldn't do much while Ryan was going through chemotherapy.  We certainly couldn't go on a vacation (nor could we afford it....this is where I would normally go into my Obama rant, but I digress...).  We did, however, decide we wanted to take baby to the beach and that we would go and come back the same day.  My cousin Samantha was visiting at my parent's house so we thought we'd invite her to come with us.  Who doesn't want to go to the beach, right?  And...she's the coolest 12-year-old I know.

Soooo we start off. I think it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday, so we weren't expecting any crowds or anything.  We leave from college park moderately early...I think it was around 9:30 or 10:00am.  We decided to go to Rehoboth, Delaware, which is only about 2 hours from College Park.  That means we would get there just in time for lunch.  So far so good.

We plug an address in Rehoboth into our handy dandy GPS and off we went.  To make a really long story short, we didn't get to Rehoboth until 4pm!  The GPS took us on the scenic route, I guess, but it was brutal.  Baby just barely survived being in the carseat that long.

Oh boy.

Sooo we finally get there and it starts raining.  By raining I do not mean a little drizzle.  I mean thunder, lightning, the whole works.  We didn't want to just leave after being in the car for so long, so we waited the rain out and found a parking spot.  It was worth it to see baby meet the ocean.  He really liked it, and we got a really cute video too.

I love how he waits for the waves to come and kicks his little feet in the video.  I haven't figured out how to connected youtube to blogger, so you can see the video here.

We were on the beach for a total of about 10 minutes before it started raining again.  The clouds were dark and ominous:

Not exactly beach weather, haha!

We were trying to decide whether to just go back home or try to wait it out again.  It was pretty late already...about 6pm so if we left we could get home at a decent time.  Ryan wasn't happy about getting no beach time.  He had invisioned a day of sand castles, reading and general relaxation.  In an attempt to give the beach another try, we started looking for a hotel so we could at least enjoy the beach the next day.  Ryan's dad (who is wonderful!) got us a room big enough for all of us in Ocean City, which we discovered was only half an hour away.  It was a great room too, with a great view:

We were really grateful for that great view because that is the way we enjoyed the beach the next day....from the window.  It rained alllllll day.  But we had a great time.  We played cards and ate pizza and Sam and Elias had lots of fun together.  Elias loves Sam.

On the way back home, we decided to stop and have some crabs, to give Sam the full Maryland experience.  It was a bit messy, but she liked it.  And, as you can probably guess, I ate chicken : )

On our way back home I realized that we had just had our first family summer vacation.  On accident.  It hadn't turned out at all like we had planned, but we still had a whole lotta fun.