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Memorial Weekend
May 23-26, 2008

Galveston Island State Park

Friday

On of my most memorable summers is the summer that Scott and I spent in California where Scott had a 3 month internship in San Francisco. It was like a 3 month vacation because we took every opportunity to go travel and go camping that summer. Then we moved to Texas… so where do you go camping in Texas? Apparently we have had no idea, because we hadn’t tried.

This last weekend we decided it was time to take the boys on their first camping trip. Samantha has been many times, but she was so young that she doesn’t remember. They have been looking forward to it all month. So Friday I packed up the car, picked Scott up from work and we headed to Galveston Island Beach State Park. We had reserved 3 nights, but were willing to come home if things just didn’t work. After all nothing is predictable with 5 kids including a 9 month old baby.

Friday night we got there just in time for dinner. We are part of the ExxonMobil Club campers, so this was a sponsored activity and dinner Friday and Saturday was provided. We weren’t too social because there was a little bit of pressure to get our camp set up. Once we were set up we started trying to build our fire, because that is what you do. Camping on beach is a little different than anything we had experienced before. First of all the wind never stops, and second it was very humid and misty. We set up our little teepee with anything that would burn, tried blocking the wind, but the best fire we got was when our paper towels were on fire and we were using our cooking spray. None of the wood would burn. You think we would have gotten a clue when no one else in the camp ground had a fire either, but the kids kept persisting because they were determined to have smore’s. We finally got the out the fixens and made do with what we had.

What you see is a lot of wood and no fire-

Saturday

Saturday the kids were ready for the beach. It took a while to clean up breakfast and gather the beach stuff. The beach was just on the other side of a foot bridge so we took what we could and I took probably 5 more trips back to the site for anything we had forgotten.

Out in the water there was a funny blue balloon floating in the water. Samantha and Jacob went to investigate and Jacob came back screaming. Jacob had been stung by a Man O War. I had no idea what it was at the time, we assumed it was a jelly fish. I would have taken a picture, but my camera was one on those things I hadn’t brought to the beach yet.

Jacob playing on his boogie board that we gave him after we got back from Hawaii

This one from google is purple but you get the idea

Alex sleeping on the beach. He fought going to sleep in the morning, but in the afternoon he just curled right up and knew what I wanted him to do.

Samantha

We entered all the kids in the shell finding contest and our family in the sand building contest. Shells were due at 11 am, and at 10:45 we were scrambling to find our shells and find a nice way to display them. We were trying to find 4 different ways to display them. After dinner there were ribbons on some of the other displays so we thought we hadn’t won, but we were then surprised to find out that Matthew had won 1st place for the most interesting shell which included a $15 gift card to Wal-Mart.

Samantha-her own creation

Joshua -went for the spiral look

Matthew-who was asleep at the time we were taking pictures.

Jacob with his oyster display

We believe this was the winning shell

Our next deadline was 2 pm for the judging of the sand sculpture contest. All morning we watch our neighbors build up a huge Octopus we were sure they were going to win. I had cleared some of our seaweed away to make room for our mystery sand creation and decided that it made a good body for a turtle so I added some arms and legs for fun. After lunch we got to work on a banana split. We put the two side by side and called it a Turtle Sundae. We once again won 1st place and another $15 gift card for the most unusual sand sculpture.

That night we broke away from camp to go to Wal-Mart to pick up needed supplies such as fire starter, and a new air mattress. All the kids fell asleep on the way home so we skipped the fire that night.