Ah….Home From Vacation!!

(A very long post)


So this past week Terry, my parents, my sister and her boyfriend all went to Hilton Head for a MUCH needed vacation! It had been a very long time since T & I went on vacation and some relaxing time away was very much needed.

Overall the trip was FANTASTIC! We had 7 nights at this beautiful condo and pretty much relaxed and ate for the entire trip. Yeah, my kind of vacation!!

We left at 1:00 am Saturday morning…yes ONE am!!! In retrospect, maybe not the best choice. The trip down was looooooong and even though Terry slept for about 6 hours before we left, just driving on the boring road in the dark made him naturally tired. Of course I stayed up as Terry can fall asleep anywhere so I figured we both needed to be up. Luckily, my doctor wanted me to stop every couple hours, so that gave us both time to walk around and wake up. We ended up making 10, yes TEN, stops along the way. CRAZY!! You know the trip is only about 12-13 hours, right?!

Reststop and visitor's center in TN. Our favorite!

Terry liked it :)

It was actually a nice trip down as we just took our time, enjoyed many of the rest areas from here to Hilton Head, and listened to music. Only drama came when we were in the hills of Kentucky and as we are driving up in the mountains with few to no exits we see the gas light come on. Now as I recall I suggested at our previous stop when we were at a ½ a tank we should just fill up, but someone else doesn’t like to fill up until we are at least at a ¼ of a tank. So in a mild state of panic knowing we hadn’t seen exits for awhile, we took our trusty TomTom* that our friend let us borrow for the trip and found the nearest gas station was 5 miles away. Terry usually doesn’t worry about that stuff, but it was a little tense as the last thing Terry wanted to do at 8am was to have our car run out of gas on the mountains! Longest 5 miles of the trip I must say. However we made it to the gas station and my 14 gallon tank drank up 14 and ½ gallons of gas!! Nice. Let’s just say we didn’t make that same mistake on the trip back.

The mountains after the gas situation.

We arrived in Hilton Head at 5pm. We unloaded our car, looked around at the awesome condo and ordered pizza for dinner since we were ALL exhausted. By the time I went to bed at around 9:30 that night, I had been up for 36 hours with only an hour nap during that time. Basically, everyone in that house was ready for an early night!

But the condo itself was really nice. (Great pick Mom & Dad!!!) Two full bathrooms, three bedrooms, full kitchen, dining room, living room, a deck with a grill, a balcony, about a mile from this cool plaza, and about .2 miles from the beach. It also had two pools and was really quiet.

Outside

Our Room

Turtles in the lagoon. See those three little heads? 

There were like 15 turtles in this little lagoon.

Getting Sun

Hello Turtle!

I probably took at least another 20 pics of just turtles :)

The rest of the week was great. The weather was actually fantastic, sometimes even a little chilly in the evenings – PERFECT! Sunday it was in the 80’s but it wasn’t again until Friday and the Saturday we left that it got back up in the upper 80’s and was humid. The entire week it was in the 70’s/low 80’s. YAY!!

We also walked a LOT! (Which made me feel a little better about all the food I ate.) There was a shopping plaza about a mile away from where we were so we walked there a few times. Mom, Kristen and I even spent a morning at an outlet mall and had a lovely time together and got some great deals on clothes! Ok, Henry made out really well at those outlet malls…..but who can pass up a $5 pair of OshKosh jeans or $7 footie pajamas from Carters?! Not us.

And the food….oh the food!! We ate some really great food while down there. I think my favorite was Skull Creek Boathouse. It was the first place we went too and the food was AMAZING! T & I got hushpuppies & hot peel and eat shrimp as an appetizer (YUM!!), and then Terry got clam chowder and a mix of fresh seafood for dinner and I got Dungeness crab legs. This place had everything and I think everyone had an amazing meal!

We also tried the Old Oyster Factory one night and we had some amazing oysters Rockefeller, Terry had raw oysters and a seafood pasta for dinner, we had more hushpuppies and I had this spinach and crab stuffed flounder. Again, it was all wonderful!! Oh and for dessert we got 2 desserts to split between four of us. An amazing key lime cheesecake and a dark mouse with berries. *drool*

We found a New Orleans place called Kenny B’s and had some delicious Po’Boy sandwiches and beignets. Totally my kind of food and SO good.

There was also this cupcake place called Sweet Caroline’s Cupcakes…..it had awesome cupcakes. Only complaint there was the cupcakes are $3.50-$4 EACH! How can I get my cupcake on for that price?! Maybe it is good they were not cheaper or I would have eaten more than I should have!! I had the red velvet from there and this one which was a chocolate cupcake with vanilla frosting INSIDE the cupcake and then chocolate fudge ganache on top with vanilla frosting on top of that. Think a ho ho cake times 100!! Honestly, I would have paid more for that cupcake.

We also ate many many many other places while down there and most of them were really good. There were a few duds, but really no complaints at all!

One day we headed over to Savannah. My husband LOVES this town. I mean he wants to retire there or even move there tomorrow. I had never been, nor had pretty much everyone else, so we took a 90 minute trolley tour of the town which was great. It is a very interesting town full of lots of history. Very fascinating. We also ate at a great place called the Cotton Exchange Tavern….BEST clam chowder and BEST clam soups we had. DELICUOUS! We also got some pralines, which I had never had because there is nothing about pecans I enjoy. HOWEVER, the pralines there were amazing. Sorry pecans, when put inside a freshly made praline you are delicious! We walked into the candy store and you instantly got a cavity as the smell of cooked butter and sugar just surrounded you. It smelled amazing. We brought back plenty of pralines for us as well as some Honey from the Savannah Bee Company. Terry also had to get a drink and walk around the town so he got a frozen drink called “Call a Cab”. It basically was 151 Rum with a bit of fruit juice. Awesome. He was a bit tipsy after that. I really want to go back to Savannah. We didn’t realize that many of the tourist things close at 5pm, so you can’t get into the church and many buildings after that which was a bit of a bummer. But we did get an overall good look at the city which is great for first-timers. And there is no doubt in my mind we will be back to check out many of the places we didn’t get around to seeing.

So pretty there.

Besides eating ALL. THE. TIME. We also played putt-putt, went to the beach, and explored Hilton Head. It is a quiet place. Things close early and there is not a lot to do, but it is relaxing which is really nice. A week was a perfect amount of time to not get too bored there and to not get to too annoyed being in such close spaces!!

At the beach. Lovely.

Kristen and I

He will NEVER take a serious picture :)

And one last thing, during this trip I felt very much pregnant. I guess you don’t feel as pregnant when you just come home and flop on the couch, but it really hit me that I was pregnant. Between trying to get comfortable at different places, all the walking, sweating from EVERY PORE on my body (no human should sweat as much as I did….and it wasn’t even that hot), finding clothes that fit but were comfortable, being tired, always being hungry or really full, stopping what felt like every 5 minutes to pee, having to tuck my swimsuit top into my bottoms because my belly kept flopping out of the swimsuit (attractive), always breathing like I just ran a marathon, not enjoying having to bend down to get my golf ball during putt-putt and instead having T. get it for me…..yep I felt pregnant!!

Here is me on vacation at 24 weeks. Look at the stretching on that shirt….It is giving it all it can, no?!

Honestly, at times it was a little annoying (like how much I was sweating – seriously, it was gross – I WAS GROSS). BUT I also embraced it too. I have really tried to embrace EVERY step along the way, and even the one where I had a break down in the car because I was tired, hungry and felt stupid because I had to stop every 90 minutes….it may have taken me longer, but I eventually embraced that moment of crazy as well. I embrace the fact that I have to wear panty liners EVERY day and when it was really hot I started to sweat and after I sat down the bottom of pants were damp. Nice. I embrace having to eat at least two prunes a day or else things just don’t move right in my body. I embrace that sometimes I have to walk at a pace meant for people 3 times my age. I embrace, for the first time ever, my husband rubbing my feet (under a blanket of course) because it actually feels amazing right now. I embrace that my skin is perpetually flushed and blotchy. I embrace that a portion of what I eat ends up in my now enormous cleavage and it is totally ok for me to reach down in there and pick it out and eat it. Don’t judge me. I embrace having to take a huge vitamins that make me gag EVERY single time I take them. I am trying to embrace the fact that I am hungry every 2 hours but there is a very fine line of eating too much which will most likely cause me to have to take Tums after I eat. And I spent most of the vacation embracing the fact that our lives are about to change and to just relax and enjoy this time because soon it won’t just be T & I anymore but we will have a little one in our life to take care of. And that this is totally worth EVERY SINGLE MOMENT of this so-called uncomfortableness I am going through right now. This vacation really helped me step away and take time to reflect on what is going on, spend time with my family and helped me to embrace this beautiful and slightly scary moment in our lives. This vacation was planned a year ago, but couldn’t have happened at a better time!!

So in summary: Vacation was great, I ate A LOT, I am sort of a gross person to be around right now, I am embracing pregnancy, and I feel so thankful and grateful that we all got to go on this vacation. Thanks again Mom & Dad….it was wonderful and we are SOOOOO appreciative.





*We borrowed our friend’s TomTom navigation device and I must say that I believe that thing saved our marriage. We ordered maps and a trip tik from Triple A, but I fully believe that human error is possible and can cause some heated discussions when you are already tired of driving and being in a car for so long. We have gone places like Ann Arbor or Cincinnati and had our “trusty” google directions, but it never fails that at some point those directions are wrong or one person think they know the route better or you miss a step in the directions and then let the arguing commence. But TomTom, in his wonderful British accent, told us with plenty of time to spare “in 2 miles you will exit on the right”. What, ok…thank you Thomas (we called him Thomas…seemed more fitting for such a wonderful English gentleman). His directions got us where we needed to go and he never tried to mislead us. That TomTom knew what he was doing and I thank him as it saved T. & I from what I can only imagine would have been inevitable fights and possibly one person left somewhere in Kentucky.