Thanksgiving this year was looking to be a solo event, so we decided to surprise Nana and Pop-pop by driving down to Florida to spend it with them! On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, we loaded up the car and brought the kids to their regular meetings of American Heritage Girls and Trail Life. They finished up around 8pm and we piled back in the Suburban and got on the road.
We had toyed with the idea of just showing up at their door unannounced, but the community in which they live is gated, so we knew we'd have to get through that somehow. Rather than take the chance that they might be out somewhere in the morning, we called Nana and Pop-pop as we were leaving to see how they were doing. When we were about to hang up we put them on speakerphone and had the kids shout, "We'll see you in the morning!!!" Nana's reaction was priceless. She may have uttered a word or two that I won't repeat here, but their excitement was evident. With that out of the way, we got on the highway and drove through the night, arriving at their place around 9am the next morning.
Their community is a 55-and-older community and everyone drives golf carts to get from house to house. This fascinated the kids to no end when they first heard about it and had been looking forward to learning to drive them, but more on that later.
Their neighborhood has a really cool natural area where you can take the carts through and see wildlife and various plants.
It's got a Jurassic Park vibe to it with all the Spanish moss and palm trees. We half expected to see a T-Rex wander past.
We saw tree frogs,
egrets,
a Sandhill Crane
and, while not a dinosaur, it really is an alligator. If you zoom in on the picture, you can just spot 5 or 6 small striped baby gators hanging out on the band to the right of the culvert.
Of all the plants, this one was the coolest. Yep. Wild coffee! I considered taking a cutting home with us for a personal supply,
but then I picked a cherry and saw the size of the beans... you'd have to have a LOT of plants to just make a cup of coffee. Oh well...
This is the lake that their house sits on. This is actually taken from the opposite end of the lake looking back toward their house, which is the yellow on in the middle of the picture. From their porch, it's maybe 10 steps down to the water, but you don't want to go swimming... thar be gators in that thar water. The day we left to come home, just after we left, a big gator managed to catch one of the egrets right on the shore by their house. Just a shame we missed it!
Of course, we couldn't pass up a trip to the beach, considering the Gulf is only a mile away.
Even though it was late November, the weather was warm enough to swim, though the water was a little chilly.
The kids loved the waves.
There had been a storm the previous evening and the surf was unexpectedly high. And by high, I mean like a normal day at the Outer Banks. My previous experiences in the Gulf of Mexico were that on a nice day, there was almost no surf at all, but maybe that was just where I went...
A very cool feature of the beach was what it was made of...
Shells! Tons and tons of shells! If you dug down below the very thin (less than an inch) layer of sand, you just found layer upon layer of tiny shells and pieces of shell.
This is literally just a picture taken of the beach up close. I didn't dig for it or pile any up.
The boys decided to make use of the shells to make a design in the sand. (Look in the background... That's a ton of shells!)
After a while, they made a shell heart in the sand above the high-tide line so it would stay until someone covered it up.
In between all these things, we did have Thanksgiving dinner. The community had a big potluck dinner in the clubhouse by the pool for everyone who didn't go to visit family for the holiday. Somehow I thought this would be a small-ish gathering of maybe 20 or 30 people, but boy was I wrong! There had to be close to 150 people in the clubhouse and a whole lot of food! We brought food with us from home to make sure we were prepared, but considering how much there was, we probably could have shown up empty-handed and left full.
Now, going back to the golf carts. Each of the older 3 kids got lessons from Pop-pop on how to drive. Emma wasn't really tall enough to reach the pedals and the steering wheel and Irene... Well. She's driven enough for the next few years... I did get a video of each of them driving, so enjoy!
