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Monday morning we get breakfast at the Sunrise Restaurant as is our tradition now.  One, because we get such awesome service and two, because the “breakfast” that the HoJo offers is not fit for human consumption.  Seriously.  I’d rather get my breakfast out of a random tupperware container at the bottom of the communal fridge in a halfway house.

Sunrise Restaurant breakfasts are always good.  Ordering off the menu is, however, preferable to the buffet.

Afterwards we headed down to the beach and played and played and played.  Emily kept her old man quite busy.  The waves were quite rough, though, and Emily and I weren’t as into wave hopping as we normally are.  We explored some and ended up coming to the conclusion that the tidal pools down the beach a short walk were preferable for the kids to play in.  We decided that Tuesday’s campsite would be nearer to those.

About 11ish we went back to the room and got cleaned up.  Kinda. And took naps.
I just want to say at this point that being in a hotel room with Jonathan is like checking in with Quiet Riot.  You know something is gonna get trashed at some point.  It turns out that the second you take off his diaper in a hotel room an excretory function is going to get triggered.  All in all Jonathan did a number 5 on the hotel carpet.  If he had thrown the fridge into the pool it would have completed the rock band motif.

We decided to go to lunch kinda late and couldn’t really decide on what we wanted, so we just cruised the island a bit to see what struck our fancy.  What struck our fancy was Boonmas Thai & Hawaiian Cuisine.  I think technically it is called the Norased Grill, but it recently changed ownership and will be changing names shortly, too.

The food was great, with Marilyn having a vegetarian Hawaiian Fried Rice dish and me having a Pineapple Curry dish.  Both were excellent.  They gave Emily some plain white rice and chopsticks just like she likes and Jonathan had the chicken fingers and fries, which is a staple of his diet.  The missus and I (mostly me) also partook of a bottle of Way Kuhl Riesling from Mosel-Saar-Ruwer in Germany.  Actually, it was the name that caught my eye, but the wine was quite tasty.

We will definitely be partaking of food from that establishment again.

After that, it was back to the hotel room for awhile and then I headed onto one of them there casino cruises whilst Marilyn and the kids chilled and saw a friend from home who happened to be vacationing, too.

The casino cruise deserves it’s own post, so I will leave it at that.

We are back from Tybee and we had a great time.

Sunday we headed out after breakfast at The Cracker Barrel with my Mother-in-law. The ride was pretty uneventful and we made good time, getting to Savannah about 12:30 p.m. Check-in isn’t until 3 at the HoJo so we decided to kill some time on the Savannah Riverwalk. We got some treats at Savannah Candy Kitchen (go there and get the chocolate-covered pretzels, I’m serious) and had some lunch at Spanky’s just down the street. After that we had burned up enough time to head for Tybee.

We got to the hotel still a little early, but they let us check in early so everything was cool. We decide that it is waaaayyy too hot to hit up the beach and pool right away so those are crossed off the list right away. I wanted a new pair of swim trunks and we forgot our beach towels so shopping seemed like the thing to do.

I would just like to point out that this is the start of the man/woman/venus/mars section of vacation.

The shops we want to go to are approximately 200 feet from the hotel. At absolute most. Marilyn says that it is too hot to walk and wants to drive. 200 feet. I make the argument that by the time we load the kids into the car, drive there, park, and unload the kids we would be better off just walking. I don’t win the debate, though admittedly, I didn’t try real hard. Didn’t seem worth the effort.

So we drive 200 feetish. And pay the parking meter a dollar to park for one hour. That’s just insult to injury there. We go shopping.

I picked up a set of Corona swim trunks and 2 T-shirts, Emily gets a crocodile and a frog made out of some weird rubber that gives me the creeps when I squeeze them, Marilyn picks up a little dress. Jonathan was completely uninterested in the whole shopping thing.

Our parking hour is almost up and we have gotten a little peckish. So we talk about eating. Here is the deal though. The restaurants are actually farther away from the hotel in the same direction. But marilyn is starting to have buyer’s remorse about paying the parking meter a buck an hour when the car is only 200 feet from it’s free spot at the hotel.

Venus/mars again.

I think we’ve made a mistake by driving. But I think it is even sillier to get the kids back in the car, drive back to the hotel, get them out, then walk back past where we just were to walk twice as far past that. I’d rather pay another dollar. After you make the mistake, the conditions have changed and now you try to make the optimal decision on the new conditions. My thought is that paying another buck and going to dinner is optimal. Or if you have to get in the car, seeing as how we are are on a one way street that goes past the restaurant now, let’s just park in front of the restaurant and pay another buck. I didn’t win the debate, but again, I didn’t try real hard. I’m on vacation, I’m not there to argue over the logistics of eating dinner. That’s for home.
So we drive back to the hotel, get the kids out, walk past where we just were and walk twice that far past that. And eat dinner at Spanky’s. Yes, same place we ate in Savannah. Good stuff if a bit Applebee’sish.

We finish dinner and get the kids ready for the walk back and it starts raining. POURING, I should say. Jonathan is in the stroller, so he has his head covered. Marilyn has an umbrella so she is covered. I’m not made of sugar, so I really don’t care if I get wet, but Emily doesn’t want to walk and Marilyn can’t carry her and the umbrella at the same time.

Logistics like this are a biotch sometimes.

Emily ends up standing on the back axle of the stroller, holding onto the handle, with my shirt over her head. I’m still wearing my shirt now. I just look like I’m pregnant with Emily’s head. So that’s how we walk back in the rain.

I was wearing denim shorts so it didn’t take long for them to become thoroughly soaked and begin to want to slide down my hips. Denim gets heavy when it is wet, you know.

So get you a good mental picture of this: Me pushing a baby stroller, Emily in front of me on the stroller’s back axle with her head under my shirt. I can’t go very far back because I will pull her head back, but I can’t get really close because she is between me and the stroller. My shorts are trying to slide off my hips so I have to keep my legs spread apart to halt the slide. This is making me waddle since my feet are wider than my shoulders at this point. It’s raining like hell.

At some point in the proceedings, Marilyn starts laughing at me. I can only imagine the look on my face as all this is going on. In other circumstances I might have gotten pissed. But I honestly had to admit that this had become a comedy of errors. That and my wife is so beautiful that it is almost impossible to be mad at her when she smiles.

We stopped under a store awning and had a good laugh about the whole deal and then I duck walked my kids back to the hotel to dry off.

At this point, we are only two, maybe three, hours into Tybee. I will tell you about the rest tomorrow.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that going to the beach is one of our favorite things to do.  We go fairly often.  Like 3 or 4 times a year.  Today we are keeping that tradition going strong by heading to Tybee Island.

We will be staying in our normal HoJo haunt and I might partake of a bit of casino cruising.  But most importantly, I will be chillin’ with chirren.  And chillin’ with the wife.  And chillin’ on the beach.  Did I mention chillin’? Cause I’m gonna be doing that.

We thoroughly enjoyed out trip to St Simon’s Island last weekend. It’s not a bad ride, though a tad long at a little over three hours. The atmosphere and amenities of the island itself were great. I look forward to going back sometime soon.

We arrived at noonish on Friday and checked in early at the Holiday Inn Express. Lovely hotel, very polite and charming staff. Every single person we saw working there was just as nice as they could be. Even the maintenance staff stopped and held doors and greeted us.

The room itself was nice, if a bit unremarkable. I’ve gotten pretty used to having a small fridge and microwave in every toom we get anywhere we go. This room didn’t boast either of those amenities, which seemed a bit odd. We didn’t end up needing them, but it would’ve been nice just having them available.

We set out for lunch and went to a local shopping area called Redfern village. We wandered about the overpriced shops for a bit (Marilyn saw a watch that she absolutely loved but couldn’t bring herself to buy), then I declared my need for sustenance. We decided upon a place called Gnat’s Landing, which seemed pretty jumping for Friday lunch.

It didn’t take us long to realize that the clientele of this establishment was, ummm, monoethnic. It looked like everyone else there just came from a J Crew photo shoot. I have to admit to enjoying it more when the crowd is a bit more diverse. The biggest difference I could see amongst the women is that some were pre- and post-boob job. That was about it. I caught myself hoping the whole island wasn’t like that.

The lunch tself was good, we ordered way too much and I drank a couple of margaritas (yummy). I had the Fried Green Tomato Sandwich which was good, but not stunningly so. The tomato slices needed to be a tad thinner, in my opinion. But I did enjoy it. Our final tally for lunch hit $60 which was a bit of a sticker shock for the wife and I. We decided to reel in the ordering frenzy for the remainder of our meals or it was going to be one seriously expensive weekend.

After lunch we went back to get the watch Marilyn wanted (and that Emily has been wearing the past few mornings) and then back to the room and got changed and headed for the beach. It was a short little jaunt and there were plenty of well marked public beach access points available. We picked one at random and went down to the water’s edge and set up our base camp.

The wind was blowing pretty strong and the water was chilly, but Emily is not to be deterred by such triflings. In we went. She and I jumped in the waves and scoured the beach for shells so that Emily could take a souvenir to her Nannyboo. As a side note, I din’t find a single intact shell the whole time that did not have a living creature inside it. I found dozens of shells with hermit crabs inside of all of them, from the biggest to the smallest. I just didn’t have the heart to evict the crabs for our own selfish purposes, so back into the drink they went. We played and explored and Marilyn and Jonathan took a stroll down the beach and we wore ourselves out.

After packing up and heading back to the hotel, we got showered up and chose our dinner venue. We ended up choosing Locos Grill & Pub which was just around the corner from the hotel.

I have a general rule that I don’t do franchise restaurants whilst on vacation. Why travel if you are just going to go eat at Applebee’s? You could’ve stayed home and done that. So I have to plead ignorance when agreeing to go there. I didn’t realize it was a franchise and I surely didn’t realize there was one in Martinez. It only took a few seconds inside to realize that we were in a chain restaurant, but at that point, what the hell.

Still full from lunch, I had a salad with buffalo chicken wing stuff on top. It was the same salad you could have at TGIFriday’s or Applebee’s or Chili’s, etc, etc. Acceptable, but unremarkable.

We spent a relaxed evening hanging out with the kids at the hotel and slept like logs.

In the morning, we partook of the free continental breakfast, (there is a reason it is free, too, you couldn’t get people to pay for that) and then frolicked poolside for most of the morning.

After the pool, we went down to the pier to check out what was happening down there.

As soon as we got there, we knew we had found the place we wanted to spend some time in. Much, much more diverse crowd here (a small group of black bikers, mostly older women, roared past us on some absolutely gorgeous Harley’s as we were getting our bearings) and the kind of cheesy “beachiness” that I like so much about Tybee Island was more apparent here. We had lunch at the 4th of May Deli, with my choice being the Poblano Burrito. Quite tasty and pretty big.

We stopped at a nearby ice cream parlor, named Zuzu’s and bought a round of cones.

Wired up on all that sweetness, we took Emily over to a nearby playground, which had a huge number of kids, and let her go wild. Now Emily is not really the wild type, honestly. She doesn’t just go diving in feet first. So it took her a few minutes to acclimatize to the frenetic pace of the playground. But once she got into it she made a new little friend (Madison, I think her name was) and they climbed and explored and dug and whispered things to each other in secret child talk. Jonathan was asleep in the stroller for most of this and Marilyn and he took another stroll while I watched Emily play.

A few hours later, we pried Emily off the playground, kicking and screaming, and headed back to the hotel to clean up and chill out.

For dinner, we headed to Kobe Japanese Steakhouse. Yes, I know, another chain. But Emily and Jonathan had never been to one and we thought the show might be entertaining for them. It was good, Emily loved the fire and always enjoys using chopsticks. Our chef had a hard time understanding that all Emily wanted was plain white rice. He kept slipping different things onto her plate to try and spice it up for her, she would look at me and I would dutifully remove it. She won’t even eat the rice that something else touches. Once it is no longer stark white, she doesn’t want it. Go figure.

That was the end of that evening and again, we wound it down in the hotel room and slept like logs.

Continental breakfast, again. Bleh.

So we hit the beach again Sunday morning and did our new routines with Emily and I jumping in the waves and building doomed sandcastles too close to the water. Marilyn and Jonathan strolled and explored. By 10:30 we packed up and headed back to the hotel to check out.

So all in all, it was a really nice weekend. Not too frenetic, just enough beach time and play time to keep Emily and Jonathan happy, enough relax time to keep Mom and Dad happy. It’s a nice, relaxed, friendly island with lots of family activity things to do (we barely scratched the surface). I think we most definitely will be going back sometime soon. Probably not this year, but I’m hoping we can work it in to the schedule next year.

Next up, Tybee in July!