Panama City Beach - Day 1

Around April/May, my sister started asking about a possible beach trip at the end of the summer for Ben's birthday.  His birthday is usually the first week of school (not fun), so they wanted to do something at the very end of the summer before school started back.  All of that to say, we had a beach trip planned for the 7 of us to Panama City for the very last weekend of summer (July 28-31).  The cool thing that I didn't even realize is that we spent our very first weekend of summer at Ormond Beach, and now we were spending the very last weekend of the summer at the beach.  It was a cool way to bookend summer break!

Our trip was planned for Thursday - Sunday.  Laura, Gino, and Ben actually went down on Wednesday night, so they were ready and waiting for us on Thursday.  We had quite a few errands to run Thursday morning, including dropping the dogs off at the vet.

Aspyn is learning to be a good car rider.  She put her head on the console and slept on the way there.

After we ran all of our errands in town, we were officially beach bound!

About half way there, LL said she was tired and fake slept for about 4 minutes of the trip.  ;)

The house that we were staying in was only a block from the beach.  We got there, made a quick grocery run, and then hit the beach for a little while before dinner.  Matt found some full sand dollars - my favorite!

Randomly, there were a ton of sea cucumbers in the shallow water (which I had never seen before), and LL loved them.  She found a bunch to play with (yuck!)

Cooper wasn't quite as in to them as LL was, but he did play with them some.

We were so happy to be at the beach!  It's our happy place for sure!

The kids were so happy to see Ben!  Another person to play with is always a plus!

After playing at the beach for a bit, we went back to clean up for dinner.  We decided to go to Pier Park to eat at Margaritaville (somewhere that none of us had ever eaten before).

We had to wait about 30 minutes for a table, so we tried to occupy the kids by taking selfies, walking around the gift shop, and playing Simon Says.

Silly face!!

Simon says, "put your hands in your pockets" - haha.

I'll be honest - our experience at Margaritaville wasn't that great.  We finally got a table, but they stuck us on an upstairs balcony right in the sun, and left us there for quite a while.  It wasn't our favorite for sure.  The plus was the view of the ocean from our table.  If you have to wait, at least have something pretty to look at, right?

My best girl!

To pass the time (again) we let Lorelai take pictures.  I think she pretty much got a picture of everyone except for her and Cooper.

LL took this one and actually did a pretty good job!

After dinner, we stopped by an ice cream stand only about a mile from the house.  We got smalls for the kids without realizing that they would still be huge!  All three kids could have shared one for sure.

After ice cream, it was time for bed to get rested for a day at the beach and Ben's birthday celebration!  The house we stayed in had 5 bedrooms, but our kids ended up sharing a room anyway (they'd prefer that away from home).  I went in to check on them and found them like this - so precious!!

Up next: a morning at the beach and celebrating Ben's birthday!