Saturday, July 19, 2008

And they're off....


When the Tramontana's take off for a couple days, they pack the house. The whole house. I mean, we can't even leave the hula hoops behind.

We were a SIGHT to seen traveling down to the OBX in 2 huge SUV with luggage, coolers, boogie boards, skim boards, beach chairs....two hula hoops.....Sam's new kayak, and the piece de resistance strapped to the back of the truck...........





People were actually - literally (not joking)

  • Pointing
  • Pointing and laughing
  • Pointing and laughing and taking pictures. (SERIOUSLY).

We looked like the Griswolds on vacation, all we needed was Aunt Edna on top. Sam had all the bigger kids in our Jeep, I had mom, Nanny Debbie and the twins in the Tahoe that we borrowed from a friend that Sam works with ... and there was so much stuff in my truck - Addison who was sitting ALL the way in the back looked like ET in the scene with all the stuffed animals. You knew she was there ---- but you could hardly see her ... though she thought it was great fun. In our defense, we WERE packing for 15 people. 10 kids, 5 adults. 12 of which were coming with US. WOW.

It took us about 2 hours to get there, and when we rounded the corner and got onto the beach ....OMG, it was worth every minute of the last 45 minutes of stop and go traffic. The beach is GORGEOUS. It had been pretty windy, so the waves were at least 8-10 feet high - it was amazing. We had to drive almost 8 miles down the beach (30 minute ride) to get to our house, and when we finally got there, it was great!!! The unpacking took forever but we got it all worked out and we finally ate dinner around 9:30 PM. (Smile!) Cute story: When we got there, Addie said "this is so so so great!"

We got up Sunday and went in the in ground pool and checked out the beach - everyone had a great time! We are so fortunate and lucky that everyone is happy and healthy and that we had the chance this year to do this. We also bought a kite - one of those huge ones made out of fabric with the spinning tail - it was so windy that it just stayed up tied onto the truck. Stay tuned for the first couple beach photos. I am going to warn you, though, I'm just going to do a Kodak Gallery - I have so many photos (400+) I know our families and friends want to see so I'm just going to basically dump them off my camera and get them out here on our blog --- rather than picking and choosing through them...or even photo-shopping them like I normally do to get the red eye out or center them (gasp!!) I'll probably go through and blog about a couple of them, otherwise, you know me - I love taking photos so I was (as usual) camera happy and of course in none of the pictures (though Sam did take a couple of me ---- in my bathing suit, so of course I won't post them here....ugh!! LOL!!!)

Enjoy the pictures and thanks for reading our blog! :)

Love to all ...
Rachel

PS: I promised Sam I would give him special kudos on my blog ... (smile!!) He packed the car on the way out there so perfectly NOTHING fell or broke, even after driving for 8 miles on the bumpy sand! And if you see the pictures above, you can only imagine how much STUFF was packed in, strapped down, tied on......! Literally, he had everything packed so well that of the three dozen eggs we brought, we only broke one. Not dozen eggs...we broke one single egg. Amazing. We did lose the strap that was holding the Kayak and some luggage at the VERY end of the beach road and as Sam was turning into our sand "driveway" (our beach/mile marker) two suitcases stuffed with food slid off the top rack and onto the beach. But believe it or not, we didn't break anything. Not the 3 jars of pasta sauce, the jar of Goobers pb&j, or the jar of pickles that was in the suitcases. Great job hun!

More posts to come shortly ........

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