sgi... saint george island... VACATION!

If you don't know it already, we do not take many real vacations. I am talking about the go somewhere where relatives do not live, be gone for a week, stay in a hotel, have fun all day type of vacations. Thanks to my sister-in-law, Alisha, this year we did just that. Yes, I, Lisha, have a sister-in-law named Alisha, who goes by Lish. If you think it is confusing, just imagine how hard it is for our nieces and nephew! Anyway, back to the story. Lish called me this past January when she found a 4-apartment condo while researching for their yearly beach trip. She thought it would be nice for my siblings and I (along with our families, of course!) to go to the beach together for a combination family reunion/vacation. The rest is now history...and we all survived to tell about it;)

We began our trip by travelling to Milton, Florida where we all met to have dinner with our dad and his wife at Nichol's Seafood Restaurant. We recently learned that our dad has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and we all wanted to make sure we saw him while we were traveling near where he lives in Florida. It was wonderful to spend time together with him and we were able to capture the memory with all the family.

The next morning, we met up with my cousin, Lora, at her church in Fort Walton Beach for a great worship service. After a lunch with Lora and her daughter, Lundy, at Cici's, we started the final leg of our journey to Saint George Island. We arrived at the condo around 5:30 pm and, after getting settled, joined Jeff and Lish and their girls for dinner at The Blue Parrot. There I renewed my taste for raw oysters and Lauren tried them (cooked, with butter and parmesan) for the first time.

During the week, we rode bikes (some of our gang went from one end of the island to the other), played in the pool, danced in the ocean waves, basked in the sun, visited the state park, went fishing (Desi caught a shark!), searched for oysters (walking through the marsh to find we had arrived too late and high tide was coming in), celebrated Lauren's 19th birthday, visited the quaint town of Appalachicola, and enjoyed a beautiful rainbow on our last night there.

The weather was almost perfect the entire week we were there. Then, on Friday night the storms came in and it stayed through the morning. In the end, it was good that the weather was poor so that we would not be tempted to make one more beach run. We still did not get back home until almost 7 pm.

I came home and started googling properties at SGI for next year...