Thanksgiving Surprise!

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!

Turtle Rescue

We heard about a sea turtle hospital during the Turtle Talk at Holden Beach and found out that give tours, so we decided to detour on our way home up to Surf City and check it out. They are a facility that rehabilitates sick and injured sea turtles from up and down the east coast. A large number are turtles that didn't make it out to warmer waters before the winter hit in New England and have to be shipped down here to recover from nearly freezing to death. 

They're kept in these huge pools and are fed, brushed (though some don't like that much) and examined daily by trained medical staff in the hopes that they will eventually be released back in to the ocean.

They range in size from 200+ lbs down to 10 lbs.

They do have one permanent resident because the turtle is blind and wouldn't be able to survive in the wild. 

This one had had a major wound on its shell, probably from a boat propeller, so they had to put medicine and lotions on it every few hours.

He was not happy about the process and was constantly slapping his flippers on the table trying to get away.

Turtle Nest walk

One evening at the Holden Beach Town Hall, they had a session of "Turtle Talk" where the local volunteers explained about the sea turtles that nest on the beaches at this time of year and what they to do protect both the turtles and the nests. One big thing they do is they mark where each nest is with caution tape, a sign and a length of plastic webbing that prevents animals from digging up the eggs. Holden Beach gets about 175 nests each year on it's 7-mile length (which is small compared to places like Topsail that gets in the tens of thousands) and these folks try to find and mark every single one. So far this year, they had marked about a dozen.

The next evening, we took a walk on the beach to see if we could find any of the nests that had been marked so far.

There was a pretty cool sandbar that the waves would wash over and make a sort of river that ran along between it and the main beach.

There were tons of shells along the beach.

The kids found some super thick clam shells

and some broken whelk shells.

Along our mile-plus walk, we found 3 nests.

We also found a turtle! :)

Irene wanted to stop every 5 feet to dig through the sand for shells.

The littles had a lot of fun running in the sand, though they weren't quite as cheerful on the walk back...

On the way back, we finally got to see a little sun in the form of a gorgeous sunset.

USS North Carolina

Day 3, still raining. Today, we took a drive up to Wilmington to see the Battleship North Carolina, which goes along with the Sea and Sky curriculum we did with the boys.

I've lived in NC for a total of 20 years (besides our 5-year stretch in CO) and I had never been to see this ship. It's HUGE!

The boys got a kick out of the huge guns, but thought it was cooler that they could actually touch the smaller ones and pretend to shoot down planes.

That's a big shell... not the kind you want to find on the beach.

There were all kinds of cool interactive exhibits on the ship for the kids to touch and experience.

Of course, Ezra and Irene were hungry and demanded to be fed...

Even though the kitchen was permanently closed. ;) Walking around, it seemed like such a big, open space inside the ship, but then you consider that they had 2500 men working, sleeping, eating and bathing inside her and you realize that it was probably pretty tight quarters.

Manually steering the ship from the belly of the ship was apparently an optin they had if there were damage to the Bridge or steering controls.

This is one of the many policies I'm considering instituting at home... You leave your stuff out, it's an extra hour of work to get it back. The kids were not excited.

For entertainment, they had movie projectors they could use in the Mess Hall. They also had ice cream and candy they could buy, a post office, and an on-ship newspaper. 

These are the kid of bunks I wanted to put in the kids rooms, but could find anywhere for sale. They fold up against the wall to make space to move around when nobody's sleeping in them.

The "Navy Shower"... another policy I'd like to implement for the kids...

The pharmacy was way impressive... I guess when you're out to sea months at a time, you'd better be able to make your own medicines.

They even had a surgical bay on board.

The doctor had some decent quarters, but they weren't exactly roomy, and they still had to share the showers with the rest of the men.

I told the kids to weigh anchor, but they failed. It as just too heavy for them.

On the bridge, the kids got to see where the real controlling of the ship took place. 

Ezra, the crotchety Captain.

Quite a view...

Gabe and I learned how to plot the position of friendly and enemy ships.

Ezra figured out how to tell the engine room how many RPMs to set the propellers for by turning these little brass wheel.

On the way out, Ezra wanted to sit in an anti-aircraft gun. It was crazy just how big even those were...

After I walked the rest of the family towards the exit, I took a quick run back to the Engine Room, which we had somehow missed on our tour. It was incredibly cramped with all the pipes and such, so it was hard to really make out anything that made a decent picture until I found this console. That's a lot of dials and gauges to watch... Cool note: see that brass plate with the 3 squares in it? the wheel that Ezra turned on the Bridge changed the numbers in those squares to tell the Engine Room how fast to go.