Our trip to the beach while we were in Texas was magical! ❤️ We had the best time there!
And it was a trip full of miracles! Rose has been asking to go to the beach for over a year. Every once in a while she'll say "Let's just go at the beach!" and I'll say "Good idea! If only there was a beach close by!" and I was spoiled because I grew up in Florida with the best beaches so Utah's lake and reservoir "beaches" with dark ice cold water just don't cut it for me. Anyway, so I asked my mom if there would be any way for us to go to the beach for a few days while we were visiting and they made it happen! (Somehow none of us had ever been to the beach in Texas in almost 14 years of living in Texas!)
My mom checked and double checked the weather for weeks leading up to our trip, and it was supposed to be cloudy and maybe rainy but the trip seemed good to go. It was a 3 hour drive from Round Rock to Port Aransas and when we were about 1 hour away, I was looking at the map and there were all these little red hurricane symbols all along the coast. 😬 I looked up the weather and turns out there was an unexpected tropical storm headed towards the coast of Texas! And up until the night before there had been no such warnings on the weather! We were already almost there, so we decided to keep going and the whole place looked like a ghost town. 😂 Dark skies, hardly any cars on the roads, and signs saying "Prepare for Tropical Storm!" (They weren't saying evacuate though, so we decided to stick it out like true Floridians who have been through countless hurricanes. 😅) We made it to our beautiful airbnb and the property manager stopped by that night to warn us about flooding and told us that if the tropical storm was too bad this close to the coast (where storm surges were now predicted to be almost 3 to 4 feet) that he would move us to one of their other airbnbs and if it turned into a hurricane they would refund us the money or let us come another time. I prayed and prayed and prayed that the storm wouldn't be too bad and that we would get to go down to the beach just once so that Rose could see it because she was so excited about it (and I was too!) The sunset our first night was beautiful, the way the sky looks when a big storm is on its way.
The next morning, the storm was supposed to hit but when we woke up it was predicted to hit later in the afternoon, so my dad and I woke Rose up early and decided to go check out the beach in case that was our only chance to see it. It was CRAZY windy, but other than that the weather was fine, it wasn't raining at all. We had a bunch of fun looking at the water and finding shells and I tried to take pictures but the humidity fogged up my camera for about half an hour, so all my pictures are hazy. I was feeling so grateful though that I got to take Rose down to the beach for a little bit though.
We watched the storm on the weather channel and throughout the day the predictions moved it further and further up the coast and we ended up not getting touched at all by the tropical storm. It was so miraculous because our second day at the beach actually ended up being warm, sunny, clear skies so we got to spend the morning playing in the water and the sand. I went boogie boarding with my dad and Rose and Lucy played in the sand with Carson and made sand castles and looked for shells. (Rose was afraid of the water, so she made it really easy for me to keep an eye on her.)
One funny story while we spent the morning playing at the beach in the sun: I was playing with Rose and Lucy in the watery sand at the edge of where the water comes and burying Lucy's squishy legs in the sand and this girl about my age ran over to me and said wanted to know how I was handling the stress of taking kids to the beach, her and her husband were on a vacation without kids and she was impressed that I was doing so well with my kids 😅 and then she said "would you like a shot of tequila?" 😂 and I politely declined and said thank you haha. Then she left. I've never been offered tequila before and I don't think I would have expected my first time to be at the beach with my 18 month old and 3 year old, but it was a very kind offer. 😂😂😂
Later that day, my dad rented a buggy and we drove around on the beach exploring. We got the buggy for the rest of the trip so I took it out the next morning to see if I could find anything fun to take pictures of. I walked on the pier and watched someone surf in the water, and then wanted to take pictures of some of the colorful houses but I was worried about someone finding me and getting upset (I need an extrovert friend to go around with me so they can be brave for me haha)
We also had lunch at a seafood place where I had some yummy coconut shrimp and fried okra and hushpuppies (Some of my favorites!) and then on our way out of town stopped at a candy shop and then walked inside a BIG shark mouth.
We crammed a lot of fun into 3 days at the beach and the whole trip really was just so magical and fun and I can't wait until I can make my way to a real beach again.
Here's a list of some of the miracles during the trip:
1. I think the reason that we didn't know about the tropical storm until we were almost at the beach is that we may have cancelled our trip if we had known beforehand, so I feel like God was in the details of that, as He always is.
2. That the storm moved so that we could stay at the beach for the full 3 days AND enjoy one full day of sunshine and warm weather!
3. I found a big beautiful shell one night and I was so THRILLED to have found it but then when we were packing up I forgot about it and it was lost. I was trying not to be sad about it because it's JUST a shell, and I'm an adult. But I'm an adult who loves beautiful shells and rocks, so even though I told myself it wasn't a big deal, I took the buggy to the beach the next morning to see if I could find where we had hung out the night before (which was not an easy feat, the whole beach looks pretty much the same for miles), but then I miraculously found where we had been the night before... and I couldn't find the shell. So, I walked along the morning shore and found some more pretty seashells, but still didn't find one that looked like the one I had lost and went home accepting that I wouldn't find it. And then as we were packing up to go home, my dad was shaking sand out of the chairs and he found the shell I had lost and brought upstairs to me! This story is probably pretty silly, but to me it was just a big reminder that God cares about me and about what I care about. He doesn't just take care of the big things, He also takes care of the tiny, minuscule things that don't really matter. God is in the details. ❤️
Okay, and there are only about a million pictures in this blog post, but they are some of my favorite pictures I've ever taken, so I couldn't narrow it down any more! 😭 Good luck making it to the end!
