Family fun in Florida

Some of our greatest family memories are made each summer during our much anticipated beach trips to Perdido Key.  Each summer since 2007, we've been blessed with the opportunity to enjoy a week away from home at my brother in-law's condo on the Florida coast.  We usually plan our vacation around the 4th of July, so with this year's holiday falling on a Saturday we spread our vacation over 2 weeks with a Wed-Wed trip 7/1 - 7/8/15.

This year we planned to do a couple of new activities in addition to visits to some of our favorite traditional restaurants such as The Hangout, Lulu's, and Cobalt.  Also, I was looking forward to making a return visit to one of my favorite ballparks - Pensacola Bayfront Stadium, home of the Blue Wahoos, the Reds (AA) minor league team.

The ballpark is situated facing the Pensacola Bay and offers a view of the ocean beyond the outfield which rivals the Giants AT&T Park in SF as the best view in all of baseball.  On our first night there, the girls were more anxious to hang out at the pool than take in a ballgame so I made the short 25 minute drive over to Pensacola solo and arrived just in time for the 630p game.

The next 3 days we enjoyed full days of sun and fun in the pool and the beach, including a visit from Cindy's friend Cissy and her twin 6-yr old boys, Colin and Connor.  Taylor, Nicole and I also enjoyed our daily walk across the street over to Dave's snow cones!  On Sat July 4th, we continued our tradition of having dinner at the Sunset Grille followed by watching the fireworks from our balcony at the Indigo condo.  With rain in the forecast for Sunday, we began our day with Worship on the Water at the Flora-Bama, then to Lulu's in Gulf Shores for lunch and a movie ("Inside Out") and shopping at The Wharf in Orange Beach.

One of the new activities we planned this year was visit Waterville Water and Amusement park.  The girls enjoyed riding the go-carts and the wave pool, but the highlight was the huge water slides.  Taylor and I enjoyed going down the Dune Racer slides (face first on mats); the Great White and Gold Rush slides (in single inner-tubes or 2 and 3 person-tubes); and the really big, high-speed slides: Screamin' Demon, Triple Dog Dare and Jet Stream slides.  Unfortunately, the park wouldn't allow Nicole to wear the swim mask she prefers to wear when swimming so she refused to ride the slides this year - hopefully next year she'll outgrow the need for these goggles!  We saved the other new activity - a sunset cruise on a catamaran for our last night, and we all enjoyed this relaxing 2 hour cruise in the gulf and around the bay.  We'll definitely look forward to including both of these fun activities again next year...now if I could just get the girls interested in doing the zip line tours with me!

Another fun tradition I've enjoyed each year is making a slideshow to capture the memories of our trip.  Here's a link to my youtube page with all the videos from prior years.

And, here's a link to the video from this past year:

Florida 2015 beach trip