We made it to the beach! We've been looking forward to this vacation for a long time and the excitement as been building. I think Mom and Dad booked our house over a year ago and we've been counting down the days since then...and we've 10000% been counting down the days since school ended. The kids were so excited to have a full week with their cousins and we didn't really get a chance to "beach" with everyone back in 2018 at the Outer Banks - we were only there 2 days before turning back toward home to try and be with Ellyn in her final days.
So, at long last, we made it and it didn't take me long to set myself up in the exact position I'd been waiting months for. The moment when I could sit with my book in a beach chair and everyone else would have someone to "activity" with. I'd arrived, we'd all arrived and now, we're not even half way through the trip and we have so many memories to share!
The house we're in is amazing! It's brand new, it's only been open as a rental for 3 months. It has 6 full bedrooms - four are king suites with beach porches and the other two are 4 queen bunk beds which the kids are LOVING. There's a dining room table that will fit 16, two fridges, two dishwashers and a pool. We have our own boardwalk right down the to ocean and we're the second to last house on this little spit of land, so we have the beach nearly to ourselves.
We're staying in the FL panhandle, in a little town called Port St. Joe and it's perfect for us. I've joked that all of the pennies Mom and Dad saved from not having air conditioning when we were little were spent on renting this house for us. We're very fortunate and I'm so thankful for them planning this whole trip for the family. Mom booked family pictures with a local photographer and I can't wait to see what we get back. He showed me a few shots on his camera screen and they looked amazing! I think they'll be photos we all cherish for a long long time - especially Mom. She even had him recreate a photo we took when we were in the Outer Banks of the whole family running away from the waves holding hands in a long line. I hope they turn out exactly as she'd hoped.
(Hazel has the cutest little splattering of freckles on her nose this summer and I can't get enough of them!)
My favorite memory of the trip so far has been teaching the whole group how to crab. Justin and I spent SO MANY HOURS crabbing when we were kids at Pawleys I couldn't believe not a single other person in my family knew how to do it. I'd been planning to teach Abby for weeks once I realized there was a little back water channel right behind our house. When we spied a bait shop in Panama City I didn't hesitate to ask the guys working behind the counter if my memory was right and I had all the things I needed. I knew we needed a net, some twine and some chicken necks (or really anything that would attract the crabs).
Us four McGraths set out the second night after dinner with our supplies just to see what we could figure out. Sure enough, within 20 mins or so we had our first crab and Abby was fully hooked. Watching her jump around with joy was all I needed. I know exactly how Mom and Dad ended up renting this house for us all...it was for memories like that....but for OUR reaction.
We caught about 8 crabs that night and I think everyone in the family was hooked by the end of the evening. Somehow Joey, Mom, Dad...nobody else remembered the hours we'd spend doing this or how Mr. Ware would cook them toward the end of our week in Pawleys. We're headed back out tonight to try and catch some more and Andy was even suckered into the whole venture at some point and has now invested in a box trap for crabs and its slow going - a full 24 hours and he's caught 4 - but his crabs are the largest we've caught. I can't wait to see which kids are willing to try the crab when we cook them up. I think we have one more day in them before we need to boil what we've got.
This morning Ryan and I got up early and kayaked over to a little National Wildlife Reserve called St. Vincent Island that's maybe just a mile up the road from our house. It has 10+ miles of beach and the only way to access it is via kayak or on a ferry. There are no houses on the island and the entire thing is a Wildlife Reserve. I'm pretty sure Ryan and I were the first people on the island today. We hiked about 3 miles and saw a lot of strange things - some sort of native rat, jelly fist, a set of turtle tracks and we're pretty sure we found it's nest. We saw a handful of other nests that has already been flagged and protected. We saw tons of shells and lots of native plants. Ryan commented that it was like hiking in Jurassic Park and it totally did feel that way. We left before 7am and were home again by 9:30 and I think we timed it perfectly. We hiked before it got too hot but we weren't too early to miss the mosquitos. They were BAD once we got to the inland part of the hike. But...we're pros at buggy hiking. The key is to not stop! Since we were solo without kiddos we could hike it pretty quick and we're both much more amicable to extremes (even though Ryan may disagree about my own ability to tolerate extremes).
This afternoon we took everyone for ice cream and tonight we're having street tacos (made by Joey and Andy)...oh, and maybe the best moment of the day was the quick nap I snuck in when we got back from ice cream. I decided I earned a nap because of the 6am alarm for the kayak trip and I'm here to say that there are few things better than an afternoon vacation nap after hours on the beach in the sun!
