Woosh. Tuesday night and into Wednesday (Sept. 15) it rained and it rained and it rained. Tropical storm Nicholas was causing all kinds of trouble in Texas and we were reaping the outside edges of it. My anxiety was rising with all the water everywhere and I told Mike I just needed him to take charge. We decided to go forward with our plans to get breakfast from the Lighthouse Bakery and stayed semi-dry getting in and out with our umbrellas. Mike had to get the van in his flip flops because the first floor of the parking garage had standing water. Oh the adventures we have.
We got huge cinnamon rolls and ate out on the covered porch.
After we went to the bakery, Mike said, "You know what? We're here. Let's just get wet and go see Fort Gaines in the rain." When he said that it was drizzling. By the time we got unloaded at the Fort it was dumping buckets of rain from the sky. Ha!
If hind site worked in reverse we would have gone ahead to the fort on Tuesday when it was just drizzling and done the estuarium on the day it was pouring. But hind site is just that - in the rear.
We put the four youngest children in their water shoes and said just have a good time. I'm an old woman now and don't mind walking but I cannot walk in crummy shoes, so I wore my good tennis shoes and so did Natalee and Mike. I told them we'd figure out a way to get them dried out to go home! We had to walk through a foot of water at the entrance to get into the fort, so that broke us in really quickly. Regardless of the rain and the flooding, we actually really enjoyed the fort. We did our best to read what each marker was and saw a lot of really cool things.
Shocker - we had the whole fort to ourselves!
tide flushing latrines
By the time we left the rain was pausing. Isn't God comical? As we were buying all of the kids a dry souvenir shirt, I was making convo with the people waiting to buy tour tickets, who had come in behind us about how we weren't the only silly ones out in the rain and they had the same philosophy as us "we're here, we drove all this way." Turned out they were from a town that neighbored our hometown and one gentleman worked with my dad! What a small small world.
Lots of water at the main intersection on the island.
While the weather was um, kind of paused, we rain back to the condo so that we could "fresh" up just a smidge, and then decided to continue our outdoor day by visiting the bird sanctuary. This was probably the thing I wanted to do most as far as "extras" and I was so excited. Turns out, it wasn't actually a great choice. The water had caused the one handicap walkway to flood and Natalee needed her chair since we'd already done the Fort. Besides that, though, the mosquitos laughed at our bug bracelets and repellant and they ate.us.alive. I mean feasted. We walked as far as the lake and turned back and quickly got in the van again. All the while watching warily for alligators because there were dozens of signs warning us about them. Eesh. We saw exactly zero birds. LOL.
So, we did what all good parents do when one plan goes awry. We bought everyone ice cream.
By this point we were all a hot mess, so I just gave Ev her bowl of chocolate ice cream and let her have at it.
I learned on our vacation that it's a hard role to be "the magic maker." I hope our kids are able to look back on this vacation and say "oh it rained, and things didn't go exactly as planned, but we had a blast." We tried really hard to make it that way.
We went back to the condo and took everyone to the pool.
The humidity in the south did some magical things to her hair.
While the kids were in the pool, with the rain stopped, I really wanted to go get some landscape pictures so Mike stayed on duty while I ran up to grab the camera.
The bridge and bay were pretty from the upstairs looking out.
I was stopped from going out on the beach by some flooding that I didn't feel like wading at the end of our boardwalk, but I snapped a couple of photos from the boardwalk and more from the balcony later.
After they exhausted themselves in the pool, the kids came up for supper and bedtime routines. I loved this sweet moment of Natalee voluntarily reading aloud the book Ameliya needed to read for book club to her (and big brother listening in, too).
While we tucked the kids into bed, the rain started in full force again. As I laid on the couch and listened the the rain pounding, I actually messaged Darl and Linda (the condo owners) to ask how much water was too much for an island and if we would have trouble getting out (either on the island or mainland) if we remained for the duration of our booked dates.
Water. Lots and lots of water.
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