Great to be home again...

Hey all! Our family had a WONDERFUL time at the beach. My brother Austin and his friends Eric and Trey enjoyed fishing and skim-boarding and wake-boarding and playing video games. My mother and I cooked huge meals for them, but they stayed hungry! (You'd never imagine how much three teenage boys can eat until you live with them for a week.) I absolutely LOVED crabbing, and overall I think I caught three crabs. :) Not exactly a success, but it was really fun anyways. (Hey, we only spent a total of maybe 3 or 4 hours crabbing all week.) I also caught a pretty big catfish.
My mother and I spent most of our time together beachcombing. We looked all week for sandollars, and FINALLY both found two on the day before we left! My favorite shells are definitely scallops. They come in SO many colors and varieties, and most look so antique! We also went two hours to Panama City to watch Night at the Museum 2 on a rainy day. We all enjoyed it, and had a wonderful time playing road trip games coming and going.
We had a bonfire on the beach, and Ausin and Trey buried Eric in the sand! It was pretty hilarious. Also, since my dad has been vacationing at this beach his whole life, we got to spend some time with his mother's dear old friend. My father's mother (my grandmother) died when he was in colledge, so I never met her, but I had a wonderful time listening to her best friend Mrs. Dorthy talk with my parents. She also is an avid gardener, and when she heard that I was planning on getting some muscadine vines, she gave me a little muscadine plant in a pot!! I was sooo excited! I still need to decide where to plant it. Anyways, here are some pictures of all this!

Here are some pictures of the guys being silly while crabbing at the beach. (The one in blue is my brother Austin.)


Here's my favorite picture of me. (I think I had just caught a crab!)



And here's the lucky crabs we caught. (Lucky because we never caught enough to keep!)



And here is Eric buried in the sand right next to the bonfire. (No, they wern't trying to catch his hair on fire, he laid there himself to look at the stars, and they just started covering him with sand!)



My beautiful MUSCADINE!



The Old Soda Fountain and ice cream place!


Beautiful, yet random shot of the town.


Lovely tree in front of a yellow house.



The estuary! (A marsh where saltwater and fresh water come together.)



The GRILL! (We eat here every summer.) (Except for this one! :( I was sad that we didn't get to go this year.)



The RAW BAR!! (We ALWAYS ALWAYS eat here. It is a MUST. I even have two of their T-shirts. They sell mostly beer and raw fishy things like oysters. BLEH. How gross. But their regular food is good, and it's a tradition. It is also so close to our beach house we could walk!) (But of course, we are at the beach, and it is hot, and we are on vacation from exercising... so we drive.) :P

(Sorry, it's a terrible picture. I took it from inside a moving car...) :~)