Who’s up for a beach trip? When we sat down to discuss logistics for our move from Buffalo to Washington, DC, I threw out an idea, not expecting it to come to much – what are the odds we can squeeze a vacation into this schedule? Steve initially thought I was nuts, but here’s the thing – I was too busy closing out my cases to take any time off before my last day at my previous job, and I knew that starting a new job, I wouldn’t be able to take a vacation for awhile. So if we wanted to get a vacation into our 2016, it pretty much had to happen during my two weeks of “funemployment” – the time we’d budgeted for our move.
The plan was: roll into NoVA, dump our stuff, and roll out to Virginia Beach immediately thereafter. (We briefly considered Chincoteague, Smith Mountain Lake, and the Outer Banks, but VAB won out when my BFF, Rebecca, told me that her work schedule had changed and she would be in town after all on the week that we were looking to vacation.) Rebecca lives in Virginia Beach, and we’d been wanting to visit her for years. Destination chosen, we browbeat our movers into prioritizing our delivery so we could get to the beach as soon as possible. After an incredibly stressful moving day, we piled into the car the very next morning and rolled out to the beach.
And were we ever happy to get there!
I actually hadn’t been to VAB since I was about Peanut’s age. (Maybe younger? My mother would know.) I have vague memories of camping with my parents on the beach for a week, and of eating she crab soup. And that’s about it. But I’d stalked VAB on TripAdvisor enough to know that it was a good destination for little kids.
Our first act upon arriving at Rebecca’s house was to throw on bathing suits, load our stuff in her beach cart, and walk to her local beach. (Seriously, how lucky is Rebecca to have this beautiful waterfront just a few blocks away?)
At first, Nugget wasn’t too sure about this. But soon, Pisces that he is, he was splashing and playing harder than anyone else in the waves.
Peanut, meanwhile, picked up right where she left off after our trip to the Outer Banks last year: total beach bum. I was worried that she might have some of her old fear of the water, but I shouldn’t have been concerned at all.
After a very stressful summer – between closing my files and finishing up at my old job, and then the move, I felt as though I’d been wound tighter than a Swiss watch for months – it felt fantastic to collapse into the sand and watch my babies running, playing and splashing with their aunt. And to know that we had an entire week of beach fun ahead of us – annnnnd, exhale.
More to come!
[…] The first chance we had – at 9:00 the morning after the movers left – we rolled right back out of DC and down another three hours south, for a week on Virginia Beach. […]
[…] and organizing to do, we decided to spend our final week of freedom before I started my new job visiting my friend Rebecca in Virginia Beach. We spent pretty much the entire week barefoot and covered in sand and it was exactly what we […]