Saturday, April 13, 2013

South Padre in the Sping

Our big trip for spring break this year was to visit South Padre Island and some of the places in Joseph's mission.  We rented a condo right on the beach with some of our good friends here in Texas, the Riries, and we all had a splendid time.  We also visited the USS Lexington in Corpus Christi, which Nicholas actually loved.  The pictures aren't in any particular order, but do show most of the highlights.  




This was the best picture I could get of Lexi and her hands behind the head approach to watching shows in the car.

Nicholas absolutely loved the cockpits you can climb into.  He wouldn't look at the camera since he was so busy exploring his surroundings.

 We asked Nicholas which his favorite plane was, and he chose this one.  As a side story, the stairs on board are really steep.  We always tried to have one of us go in front of him, but sometimes he would start first or we would forget.  One time I was trailing him going down and he slipped.  I had all of the emotions of a dad watching his son undergo what seemed to be certain serious harm as he started to slide step to step.  Impressively, he was able to keep his head above his feet as he went down about 5 steep steps and ended up on the deck below on his feet.  After a second to collect himself, he decided it was a really fun slide and got excited to try it again.  Needless to say, he didn't get the chance to repeat that adventure.

 The beach was gorgeous.  It was overcast, but kept the temperature just about right.

While we were there, there hundreds of Portuguese Man-of-Wars that washed up on the beach.  They did lots of combing to get rid of them, but they kept coming up.  We didn't spend much time in the water because of them, but we were all happy to stay and play on the sand.

This is where Joseph lived while in Port Isabel.  It looks about the same as it did then.

The original plaster cast used for the bronze Arlington Iwo Jima monument is in Harlingen.  It was really fun to see it as I'd heard about it as a missionary but never got the chance to go by and see it.

The porch in the back leads into the apartment I had in Kingsville.  It is also where my bike was stolen from. It would be nice to have it now, but alas, I got my just deserts for not locking it up.

The kids loved putting on the hats and sunglasses at a gift shop.

Happy on the beach.

Nicholas was too busy exploring to smile for the camera.

We had a fabulous time and Maren decided we should try to spend some time on the beach every year in the future.  We would love it if we could pull that off.

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