Gulf Shores Vacation!

 

gulf shores beach

Did you notice the two sand castles on the beach?  The one on the left is the sand castle that our family built, while the one on the right was built by our neighbors who just so happened to be brick layers from North Carolina.  Why is it important to point out that they are brick layers?  They had a masonry trowel that they used to build a pretty impressive sand castle.  After a couple of rain storms though, their sand castle obviously does not look that much more impressive than ours.  Not to mention ours has a mote and a tunnel which of course makes it more impressive!

Howdy! it’s Josh here, I probably should give some more context to this image and post title.  Allie, Roland, Grace, and I went on a vacation to gulf shores along with my parents, Allie’s parents, my sister Stephanie, her husband Matt, and their 1 year old boy Elijah!  We left early June 19th close to 6 AM so we could try and get there in a reasonable amount of time!  We got stuck in some traffic and finally managed to pull in to our Beach house at Fort Morgan Alabama around 8 pm that night.  Fort Morgan is just 15 minutes west of the main strip that is referred to as “Gulf Shores.”    There are more beach houses here and the beach is considerably less crowded than the main public beach at Gulf Shores.  The picture above was taken on the back deck of the beach house where we were staying.   It was a beautiful house with our own private beach access!  The house had 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms allowing us to enjoy the vacation with a large group of people.

First day on the beach!

 

Roland was a bit nervous about the ocean at first and decided to wear his lifejacket, but after the first day he became much more adventurous and went without the lifejacket.  Roland really enjoyed walking on the sandbar in the “middle” of the ocean, running and jumping into waves as he yelled “cannon ball!,”  and he even ventured to try boogie-boarding!  It was super convenient that we had our own beach access allowing us to hop inside to grab a drink or a bite to eat and then head right back out to the beach.  We had a charcoal grill provided allowing us to grill and make food without having to leave the beach!

Just chillin on the beach most days

     Baby Grace of course enjoyed lounging in her chair while underneath the shade tent.  She still spends a good amount of her days sleeping away, so she had little to complain about.  The middle picture is just an example of a normal day on the beach just sitting back and relaxing.  There was a little kiddie pool at the beach house that the little ones got to play in which was nice.  The last picture shows Roland working on his sand castle that you saw in the first picture above.  You can get an idea in the background of this picture of what the houses looked like along the beach.  There weren’t any large condos or public beach access points, so we had just local traffic on this part of the beach and it was pretty enjoyable.

The kids had a blast!

The kids had a blast playing at the beach, digging holes (let’s be honest I enjoyed that too), collecting all of the treasures that a beach can offer, chasing sand crabs, and learning how to swim in the ocean.  Roland is still learning how to interact with kids that are younger than him and it is difficult to understand what it means to be gentle with a little one, but we are working on this!

We spent father’s day on the beach and got quite a bit of sun.  Many of us, including myself were pretty red after the first day.  What more could you ask for as a dad?  Sand to dig holes in, an ocean to swim in, yummy food to eat, and chairs to sit in and take a nap on the beach!

Just some more fun family photos on the beach

I have to admit that Allie took most of these photos.  I don’t always pay attention to good photo opportunities, thankfully she is all over it.

We took a day trip to Fort Morgan Alabama

This was a really neat experience.  This fort has been around since 1819.  Now it has gone through some major construction over the years, but I still can’t believe how impressive this structure is.  I wonder how many original bricks are still in this Fort.  They had displays all throughout the fort explaining different areas really well.  I recommend visiting this fort if you find yourself in Gulf Shores!  Roland got a kick out of us talking like pirates while we were there.  I would pronounce the name of Fort Morgan as “Fart Margan” with an emphasis on the R’s you know since I was acting like a pirate.  He thought it was pretty hilarious, which is really all that matters.

Family photo shoot evening!

I figured a good close out to this blog post would be a family photo of all of us together.  This was not the evening before we left, but it was the evening before our last full day on the beach, so we took advantage of a good sunset and took some family photos.  Did you notice the dog tail in the bottom right of the photo?  We had a nice family walk by and help us take some pictures with us all in it.
This evening we ordered like 6 pounds of crab legs and spent the evening eating ourselves sick of crab.  Roland absolutely loves crab, and was bugging everyone to give him some of their hard earned crab meat cause he wasn’t strong enough to break the legs.

Till next time folks!