A Beautiful Sunset on Captiva

On our last night at the beach, we decided to drive over to Captiva and go to a restaurant that a friend had highly recommended...The Bubble Room.  It was very interesting, to say the least!  It had so much stuff, I mean like tons and tons of random, fun, and funky decor EVERYWHERE!  It was definitely fun for kids and the food was really, really good.  We wish we had driven over to Captive before our last night because it was just gorgeous!

Our friend suggested we get this famous orange cake and boy, are we glad we did!  I've never had anything like it, and I probably won't have anything like it until we go back some day.  It was a sweet explosion of orange and brown sugar mixed with the subtle tone of the plain white cake.  YUM y'all!

A train drove through the top of our room about every 3 minutes, so the boys were thrilled, I tell you!  Just thrilled!

Here they are looking out over a "Christmas room".  In a restaurant.  Like I said, just a fun, different kind of place!  Our waiter said the wait is about 2 hours in the summer but we were there later in August, so it was perfect.

After dinner we packed up and drove just a mile or so down the road to a public beach at the end of a road.  We had planned just to look around and explore but then we noticed lots of people standing around on the beach.  We all got out, took our shoes off, and headed down to see what everyone was looking at.....

Everyone was waiting on the beautiful sunset!!!

The boys ran around the beach,

played in the water a bit,

and generally had fun while I snapped pictures and looked on in amazement at the show that the sun was putting on for us.  Just absolutely beautiful!

These pictures are just precious to me.  It was the very end of a long, but wonderful first family vacation to the beach.  I think watching that sun set and burn up the horizon while I watched my boys play, kick their feet in the gentle surf, and hold their Daddy's hand, will be one beautiful memory that is permanently etched in my mind.  Oh, to keep them this way forever!

A Little Lighthouse Exploring

One night after dinner, we drove around and found a public beach where you could park and then take a walking trail to a lighthouse.  We thought we'd give it a try and see where the trail led us.....

It led us to an old lighthouse and then out onto a beautiful public beach FULL of shells!

We could have stayed there forever collecting (and for the boys, throwing, ahem!) shells!  The shells at Sanibel are crazy-awesome!

The fun thing about going to a new place for a family vacation is exploring and finding new places or restaurants that you like.  Even though we were there a week, we felt like there was so much we didn't get to explore or see.  I hope we can go back one day!

What's a Vacation Without Shuffleboard?!

 

 Yes, I'm STILL sharing summer beach vacation pictures.  I just can't help myself.  We had so much fun, plus I want our families to see the boys on their first beach trip.

We tried not to eat out a ton, but we did go out to eat several times.  Most of the restaurants had a really good selection of things for the boys, plus they always had crayons and kid cups for them as well!

 Shrimp Eggs Benedict at the Over Easy Cafe!  It was wonderful!

After a fun breakfast out, the boys were dying to play shuffleboard!

They did a pretty good job of using the pole to shuffle the puck along.  Even Noah got in on the action!

They wanted to do shuffleboard most mornings!

It was such a fun, neat walkway to the beach.  There is so much natural vegetation on Sanibel Island.  We just loved it!

The boys really, really enjoyed the pool!  They wanted to be there everyday and they would have swam all the way through nap!  They were some tired little boys.  Noah wasn't as thrilled with the pool, so we kept him occupied with other things, or I would take him back and put him down for nap.

We  just loved the place we stayed.  It was so wonderful and it's just beautiful, isn't it?!

Hurricane Interruption

We knew when we were driving down to the beach that there was a hurricane coming.  We kept a good eye on the weather while we were there and we decided to "evacuate" to Fort Myers the day that it was supposed to hit.  We packed up our stuff and headed insland, as to not be on a barrier island during a hurricane!  We had a fantastic lunch at The Shrimp Shack and then we went to this fun orange place.  We sampled different juices and then got ice cream!

It was raining so hard but everyone enjoyed their ice cream!

After that we checked into our hotel, ate dinner, and then swam in the indoor pool.  After that we got everyone ready for bed and tried our best to get everyone to go down to sleep.  It's pretty hard sleeping with 3 kids in a hotel room, but we did our best!  Noah woke up a good bit, so by morning, I was exhausted!  We were happy to head back to our resort the next morning when the hurricane had passed.

We were greeted by flooded areas and angry, dark waves!

I was just glad that no serious damage had been done to any structures and generally, people were safe!

Aaaaand Just a Littlle More Vacation!

Our last morning at the resort, we had breakfast in our room, started doing some packing, and then headed down to the splash pad.

We played at the splash pad and then had another swim before it was time to go.

It was a really fun 2 days and we definitely made some sweet memories.  He boys said this was their favorite part of the trip!

It was a beautiful and fun resort!  I have no idea when we'll be back, but we had a great time while we were there!

More Art of Animation

 I know my blog posts are out of order now, but I'm trying to get it done while Noah is sleeping and the boys are at school!  Just pretend that they're in order!

The next morning we headed down to the cafeteria to eat breakfast.

Then we walked around Radiator Springs for a bit.

The boys loved seeing the cars and getting up close and personal with them!

It was all so cute!

We had some naptime for Noah and swimtime for the boys.

Then after dinner we headed back over to see the Cars one more time!

JM and Matthew loved their little bed that folded out of the wall!