Sunday our Kids came to see us! Becky and Kevin, with Grandkids Dayna and Peter. Dayna shares my birthday, and turned 6 this week! (I’m older than that…) Cherryl’s birthday is the following day, so we had lots to celebrate!
We spent couple of days at the beach – it was hot, but the water was perfect and the grandkids loved playing with a bucket and shovel as much as playing in the water.
Cherryl made a cake (First cake baked in our boat!) and Becky decorated it with very adamant instructions from Dayna. (This girl needs a blue dress with red spots, the boat has to look like this, this girl needs brown braids, etc.) Artwork and cake were both awesome!
Kevin and Becky locked me in a room as a birthday gift. Really… but they came in too. We did an escape room “game”. Our challenge was to break into a “The world’s most secure” vault, and transfer a few hundred million to our offshore account. There is a backstory that I won’t go into here, but we had one hour to untangle dozens of interesting puzzles, each one letting us move onto the next, through three rooms. It was really challenging and intriguing, but the best part is WE DID IT! So cool!
We spent a bit of time cruising part of the ICW to get out to the ocean. Grandkids did great till they were lulled to sleep!
About 8,000 alligators are on display at the Alligator Adventure. And some lemurs, lots of snakes and lizards, and a bobcat. We petted a small alligator (OK, Peter did), saw them eat, and got to see what they claim is the largest captive alligator in the world. I’m not sure how big he really is, but he’s big enough for me.
The marina has a nice pool, which kept the kids happy for quite a while too. Dayna learned how to float, and Peter proved he can laugh for over an hour continuously!
A couple of evenings the lightning went on forever, off in the distance. Not the bolts, but where the entire sky lights up. We sat on the boat deck and just watched in awe.
Our wonderful family left Thursday, after one last trip to the beach. It was great to have them here, and they are talking about next time, so they must have liked it too! (One of Peter’s favorite activities was “fishing” with an empty water jug)
On Friday our birthday present to each other came… an inflatable kayak! The goal is to stow it in the lazarette, and let it magically inflate into a tandem kayak when desired. So late today we put it together, and spent its maiden voyage tooling around the marina. A couple enjoying Sundowners on the bow of a nice catamaran called out that they liked the looks of our kayak, so of course I steered over to their boat, and met Kevin and Christie (hope that’s spelled correctly). We had a great time chatting, and then toured each other’s boats. We both got our boats about the same time, and have similar goals. In fact, Kevin was in the same diesel maintenance class that I took last fall. Cool people! I’m betting we meet them again in other ports!