Impromptu Beach Trip

I woke up Friday morning knowing that Mom had left a few days before to go Idaho to help Michelle get her house together to move and thought what are we going to do this weekend? Dustin had it off and wasn't racing anywhere so I thought lets get-away and take a quick weekend trip to the Beach. I had a ton of hotel points through Sheraton so I found that the Sheraton Atlantic Beach was available and booked it. I also realized that there was an Aquarium minutes from the hotel which was perfect since we are NC Zoo Society members and would get in free. So unbeknownst to Dustin I got he, Abby and I all ready and packed, found some great friends to check on the puppies for the weekend and we were all ready to go.

I made sure that Dustin was going to get home on time so we could leave as soon as he got home an showered. So when he got home I told him to hurry up and get showered because we were going to the beach. He was definitely surprised and excited to get away for the weekend as the week had been long at work. He said later that he was surprised that we were going but yet not really because he never knows what I'm conjuring up in my head for our family to do...yep, I always keep him on his toes haha.

So we headed off to Atlantic Beach, NC which was about a 4 hour drive away. We got there about 11pm and headed straight to bed. About 1am we heard this beeping and in a groggy state asked each other what it was. From working in hotels for years I started realizing that I thought it was the fire alarm but the majority of the time it was a false alarm so we laid there for awhile. After hearing several hotel room doors shutting I thought I'll just call the front desk to see what the deal was. Indeed it was a fire alarm and indeeed we needed to evacuate. Despite the inconvenience we decided we weren't going to let it ruin our vacation. So we grabbed Abby in her jammies and her blanky and headed down 6 flights of stairs. We waited outside for awhile and found out it was probably someone smoking in their room (it was a non-smoking hotel) and they dismantled the smoke detector so they wouldn't get caught. This is a common occurence in non-smoking hotels and it doesn't make sense since there were balconies off each room. So we hiked back up the 6 flights of stairs and went back to bed. Oh what fun!

The next morning we got up and went to breakfast at a local diner (the food was mediocre) and then went to the beach outside the hotel. Abby had never been to the beach before and loved every minute of it. She especially loved grabbing big handfuls of sand and eating it...yum! The weather was perfect and so was the water temperature. We had a great time!