You can catch up with our California trip here: Carlsbad | San Diego Zoo | USS Midway Museum, but keep reading for details on our first day in Los Angeles and how we conquered the less than sunny city! When you think of sunny California, you think of sunny California, right? We had been stalking our weather app for weeks and all signs pointed towards blue skies and high temperatures. I'm sure native Californians were surprised at all of the rain they got in February, but we were not going to let it ruin our week. When we woke up in LA to grey skies and scattered showers, we started looking for indoor options and decided to make the most of it. We stayed in an AirBnB, right off of Hollywood Boulevard. When I say right off of Hollywood Boulevard, I mean we were a block from the ...
travel
Travel Diary | USS Midway & San Clemente
You can catch up with the first and second days of our California trip, but keep reading for details on the U.S.S. Midway and our drive up the coast of Southern California. Things to Do: U.S.S. Midway Museum - This was honestly one of our favorite stops of the week. There is so much to do and the kids were far more engaged than I expected. There is a super nice portable potty outside the museum (think Bryant Denny quad potty nice), so go there first. I also wouldn't recommend buying tickets ahead of time. That line you see in the photo below is for the people already holding tickets. We had to buy them when we arrived and were ushered immediately inside, with no wait time at all. For little kids, I highly recommend the Junior Pilots' Program! When Josh first suggested that ...
Travel Diary | San Diego + La Jolla
You can catch up with the first few days of our California trip here, but keep reading for details on the San Diego Zoo and our afternoon on the beaches of La Jolla. Spoiler alert: it provided one of our favorite meals! If you've been to San Diego, you'll know that everybody's number recommendation is the San Diego Zoo. We did a ton of reading and tried to decide whether to spend multiple days here and if we should hit up the zoo and the safari park. Ultimately, we decided to spend a single day at the zoo only, and not feel terrible if we couldn't fit every exhibit into our day. We got up early enough to grab brunch in Encinitas (details in our previous post) and still wound up in the zoo parking lot about twenty minutes before they opened the doors. We grabbed our tickets ...
Travel Diary | Carlsbad, California
When I made our travel arrangements for California, I was thinking the earlier, the better when it came to our arrival. Getting to San Diego by ten o'clock in the morning sounded great, but the two o'clock in the morning wake up call was not cool. We managed to get the kids in bed pretty early the night before and get almost all of our bags in the car and ready to go. Fortunately, they were so excited about our trip (and their first flight) that we had no problems getting them up and ready. They giggled the entire way to the airport and were rock stars when it came to navigating the security and boarding process. We even got compliments from a few nearby passengers on how well behaved they were <just insert all the praise hands here>. We actually arrived in the San Diego ...
Where to Visit: Chattanooga (Part 2)
On Sunday, the kids were exhausted, but we decided to sight-see our way out of town. We let the girls sleep in and then got a slow start over breakfast before making our way across town to the Tennessee Aquarium. After I realized we would have a few extra days in Chattanooga, I reached out to a few highly-recommended children's attractions and we were gifted tickets in exchange for a mention on the blog and social media. This is not a sponsored post, but we were so thrilled to visit Chattanooga's Tennessee Aquarium and share our experience with you! The aquarium is divided into two different buildings showcasing the Ocean Journey and River Journey. We began with the Ocean building (because it's our favorite) and started our morning with a quick break in the photo booth. Paige ...
Saturday Night Kinda Pink
Alternately titled: The post 89% of my readers won't care about, but I share it anyway because it's my blog. For Josh's birthday, way back in January, I bought him tickets to see Houndmouth in concert and got us a room to stay in Atlanta overnight. The kids spent the night with his parents on Friday night, so we got to sleep late on Saturday morning and be lazy around the house for a few hours before we left. My plan had been to eat somewhere fun once we got into town, but we were later leaving and were starving, so we stopped for lunch on the way. We got to our hotel just in time for check-in and had a few hours to ourselves before we had to get ready, so more laziness (and a few episodes of Game of Thrones) ensued. And true to form, we can't seem to ever go on a trip together ...
Wild at Heart
As a little girl, I always loved hiking and navigating the trails in Fort Payne with my daddy. It was one of the things I looked forward to the most and I couldn't wait to share it with my girls. We loaded up the truck on Saturday morning and made the fifteen minute drive to Little River Canyon and my girls loved every minute of it. We started off at the top of the falls on the boardwalk, but of course my girls did not enjoy being contained. We did look out over the falls and posed for a few pictures, but they were itching to get their hands and feet in the water. But not before we got a picture of Rainbow Dash in front of the falls. Sophie insisted. We found a set of rock steps that led down to the river and these wild ones were at the shore before you could blink. We joked ...
Thanksgiving Camp
Our Thanksgiving vacation was touch and go for a few days, but we managed to pull it off without a hitch. Josh and my dad drove us up to Fort Payne on Sunday afternoon and helped us get our camp set up. They both had to work the first part of the week, so they left us later in the day and came back up on Wednesday afternoon. Desoto State Park isn't somewhere we go annually like Gulf Shores, but we do enjoy a visit every once in awhile. The last time we went for Thanksgiving was right after Josh and I got married and we stayed in a cabin that year. We've gone back to camp twice since then, but neither time was for more than a few days and it was earlier in the season. This is even less exciting that the beach trips because there isn't much sightseeing to be done and there aren't any ...