here are some pics from our bi-annual trip to Anacortes, Washington to sail with Kit’s parents aboard the Molly Claire. This year they planned a special trip for us to Victoria, Canada, which was a fun and beautiful destination. This was both girls’ first international trip. The biggest perk of Candid? Kinder Surprise eggs are legally available unlike back home.
We made it up to Iowa for a Fourth Of July family reunion (Kit’s mom’s side) this year. This trip was Molly’s first to Iowa and her first time to meet most of the Iowa side of the family.
The girls had a blast. They met their first-cousin-once-removed, Jayvon, who was a boy but was close to Claire’s age and was lots of fun. He and Claire really hit it off and spent lots of time playing tennis, basketball, and just goofing off during the boring family farm meeting at the hotel. Molly tagged along some with them too. I keept an eye on them, but Claire didn’t want me to hover too close.
The whole family got to ride in the (locally) famous Yale, Iowa 4th of July parade, which really was a heck of a parade for a tiny little farm town. We set off daytime fireworks on the family farm. We spent hours in the hotel’s indoor pool. Molly was the lucky recipient of a swimming noodle with a head and tail. We named it Hydra, and she spent hours riding it around the pool. Hydra got silly and mad and tired. I spent 95% of my attention making sure Molly didn’t drown herself, so I didn’t get to play much with Claire in the pool. Luckily, Claire got to play with Jayvon and his dad, Scott, who had some really good ways to splash and toss the kids.
Here are some photos of the fun and patriotic weekend.
Kit was schedule to run an audit at a hospital in downtown San Antonio on Monday, and she had a nice hotel room right across the street on the Riverwalk, so she invited the rest of the family along to enjoy a quick trip to S.A. We had lots of fun for a one-day trip, mostly exploring the Riverwalk, swimming, and eating. The girls did not want to leave on Monday morning after a final swim at the hotel, but I had to get back to work in the afternoon to catch up with the team on the happenings at Apple’s 2015 developer conference (WWDC).
dsad
We finally made it out to Enchanted Rock on this beautiful Saturday afternoon. The kids were tired by hiking up the rock but had a good time. I’ll just let the pictures do the talking on this one.
After the big family meet-up in Siesta Key, the four of us headed towards Clearwater, Florida. While in Florida, we had to meet the most famous dolphin in the world: Winter! Winter is the real-life inspiration for the movie A Dolphin Tale, a favorite of 8-year-old girls around the globe. Claire had even donated some of her allowance money to Winter in the past. That is how much she likes Winter.
On the way up to Clearwater, we toured Sarasota a bit. We spent the morning at Selby Botanical Gardens, which Kit really enjoyed. The girls got to see some amazing tropical plants. Kit had also been scouting great local dining locations, and we ended up having some fantastic lunches at little restaurants like The Serving Spoon in Sarasota. We headed up to a family-ish resort called Tradewinds, in St. Pete’s Beach. It was not as cozy as our house in Siesta Key, but it was nice to have a swimming pool and a beach cabana. We did the paddle boats around the resort too, and the girls loved feeding the swans as they followed us. Kit nearly had a heart attack when she realized that her iPhone had slipped out of her pocket on the paddle boat. By almost freakish luck, the phone ended up safe and dry on a little inch-wide lip on the exterior of the boat. It was a quarter inch from becoming swan food.
Once in Clearwater, we spent most of the day at Winer’s home, the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, which is really a marine animal rescue and rehab hospital that suddenly got famous with the Dolphin Tale movie. Claire had talked about seeing Winter for years now. We got to see Winter floating around in her tank. The poor thing was indeed missing her tail and was somewhat lethargic. Having come all this way to Florida, Claire got do a special (as in expensive) “dolphin encounter” with Hope, who is Winter’s friend and apparently the star of the upcoming Dolphin Tale 2. Molly was too young to do the dolphin encounter but was familiar with the movie and enjoyed seeing Winter and all the sea animals. Molly got a Winter stuffed animal, unique with its missing tail.
After many hours at the Clearwater aquarium, we headed off for our last night of the trip, near the Tampa airport. Kit had picked out a local Greek restaurant for a nice final meal. When we finally fought our way there through the St. Petersburg sprawl, hungry and thirsty from a long hot day with only a small snack or two, the family restaurant was closed for two weeks for vacation. This was a disappointment to us all, especially our stomachs. Trying to avoid a small riot, Kit directed us to a family-owned Italian restaurant nearby. It was also closed for two weeks! We all started to complain bitterly, and Kit even went so far as to say that it was “Un-American” to just close like that. Late and now really hungry, we found a Chili’s on the iPhone and headed there, mostly on the grounds that it would probably be open and have, you know, food to eat. Mercifully, they were indeed open, and we stuffed ourselves on steak and pizza and even shared a big dessert.
Then next morning, we flew home. Claire and Molly spent the next two days resting up from our big, busy family vacation in sunny Florida.
To celebrate my dad’s 80th birthday, the family met up at his favorite place: Siesta Key, Florida. Phil and Noni flew in from Houston, Uncle Tim and Aunt Cindy came down from DC, and Kit, me, and the girls flew in on on our first family flight since last summer to the two Washintgon’s.
What you’ll find below is lots of pictures of this great but brief family gathering. We all stayed in a cozy off-the-beach house together. We had only one full day all together, and a couple of nights, but it was really amazing to have everyone together, especially for an occasion like my dad’s big birthday. His official birthday meal was a “taco bash”, which meant a huge volume of taco meat, shells, and fixings delivered to enjoy on the sunny patio, truly Phil-style.
A few quick notes, and then on to the pictures…
For Kit’s birthday, took a one-night trip to San Antonio. With her job, Kit can’t take a long weekend, so we had to keep this weekend trip short and sweet. This girls had not really seen the Alamo before, except maybe quick drive by. Claire had heard a lot about it in Texas history in school, so she was interested to see it.
It was a quick trip, but we did it right. We stayed at the Crockett Hotel right behind the Alamo. Luckily, we got a 4th-story room directly overlooking the Alamo grounds. For a while after checking in, we all sat and gazed past the old stone walls at the families wandering around the Alamo grounds. For a while at night, it was quiet on the streets except for the sounds of horse draw carriages clomping by below us. It was like being in 1888 for a while. Then the San Antonio Spurs won the NBS Western Conference championship, which resulted in celebratory yelling and horn honking all through the night. This was a nice sound too, and luckily it did not wake up the girls.
Molly’s says her favorite part of the trip was the water walls leading past the Hyatt Regency to the Riverwalk (in Molly’s words, “the big water things”). She wanted to just look at the flowing water and kept asking to go back. The water walls were big enough and on all sides, giving the feeling of being sort of in the water yourself. The water was loud but had a nice calming effect. Then a series of small bridges and rivers inside the hotel lead to the Riverwalk. I have enjoyed this amazing hotel lobby since I was young, and it was nice to see Molly appreciate it too.
Claire’s says she liked the water wall too, but her favorite part was the Riverwalk, the main part with all the restaurants, bridges, tress, music, etc. It was such a quick trip that we had to do basically a quick walk through, but we covered the whole main circle part of the Riverwalk on Saturday evening and even had dinner on the river. We also stopped by La Villita and did some window shopping in the old village and wandered our way back to the Travis.
The next morning, we visited the Alamo. It was nice to just simply walk across the street and into the Alamo. We spent couple of hours in the Alamo. The girls liked poking around. Molly did get a little impatient as we read the various history plaques. Eventually Claire got worn down too. Kit was enjoying it more than anyone, which is good since this was her birthday trip.
Then it was off to the southern reach of the Riverwalk. This is the more park-ish part than runs through the old King William residential neighborhood. We explored King William and the river. People were kayaking on the river, and there were lots of joggers. This was the part especially meant for Kit. She has always said she liked this part of town and the river. Claire, who loved the more dense central part of the river, was somewhat skeptical even before we headed down to King William. “I know what’s going to happen. We’re going to walk around a look at a lot of boring old houses and not do anything fun.” She and Molly got a little sluggish on this stretch, but they seemed to have fun too. We then had an awesome brunch at Liberty Bar, I think the best meal I had in many months.
By then it was Sunday afternoon, and we had to head home. The girls really wanted to see the Riverwalk again, but we were out of time. We never even had a chance to swim in the hotel’s pool. I felt like we had at least a week’s worth of stuff left to do in S.A. (more Riverwalk, El Mercado, La Villita, Fiesta Texas, kids stuff at the Witte Museum, other museums, and so on) but normal life called. At least it’s not a far drive if we want to come back.
We didn’t do a great job with the pictures on this little trip, but here are a few.
With Kit on vacation this week, we were able to make a quick trip to Houston to see my parents, for the first time in about a year (they had been to Austin several times, though). We were able to leave Friday after school and spend two nights at my parents’ house. This gave us all of Saturday in Houston, where we went to Hedwig Park, had Mexican food, and visited Kit’s cousins Cindy and Duane, who were in town at the medical center.
Claire was anxious to go swimming while in town “because it’s a tradition.” It is true that we have had many great swim sessions at my parents’ big, warm community pool, but this time it was February and not warm outside. I was not enthused, which is rare for me and swimming, but we brought along our swim suits and tried swimming at Cindy’s apartment complex. It was maybe 60 degrees outside, and the pool was too cold to be fun. We all dipped our feet and legs in the pool and eventually, much to Claire’s disappointment, called it a day, opting to explore the apartment complex in bare feet and swim suits instead.
We’ll get back to Houston in the summer sometime, so we can swim and splash in the warm water all day!
Kit and I both turned 40 in the last year, and it was our 15th wedding anniversary. So we decided to celebrate with a week trip together. Grammy kindly and bravely agreed to watch the kids wile Kit and I ran off to some corner of the world for a week.
Kit and I decided to make the most of this unique opportunity to go pretty much wherever we wanted. We decided early on to go international. California, New York, Florida, etc. all sounded great. But they also sounded like something we could do with the kids. After some vacilating about where exactly to go, we picked London, beating out Venice and maybe a Caribbean beach resort as the other final contenders.
It was a great trip. Some details and tons of pictures can be found on a separate post in the new non-kids section.
Back on the home front, Grammy and the girls held up very well while we were gone. They survived some flooding and the school carnival in Austin. We got a text message from the girls every day. Claire, in her messages, always wanted to make sure we were having a good time. Molly, who apparently thought we were in “Lindon”, went so far as to say, “I hope you come back.” (TODO: attach the messages.) Grandaddy stayed on the weekends to help out too, especially with the crazy school carnival.
As fun as our trip was, it was really great to see the girls again. Man, those girls are ridiculously cute and cuddly when you have not seen them in a while. They greeted us with a big “Welcome home!” sign, plus a happy birthday sign and homemade cake for my birthday. And there were lots of hugs. The girls got a treat too. They really liked the souvenirs we brought home from the British Museum: a glittery Union Jack notebook with matching pen, some “London landmarks” school supplies, some British chocolate coins, plus some leftover real coins.
It would be really fun to take the girls to England one day, but we’ll have to wait a few years to handle the long, cramped flight, the tedious lines at customs, and the jet lag. That would not have been fun for anyone right now. Hopefully we’ll get them to Florida or California one of these days, though.
Many thanks to Grammy for taking great care of the kids for us while we explored the world a bit.
McG Kids 