Vacation Recap Pt I

Hello!

We are back home from vacation and I'm already planning out the next one!  I told Simon that I want to start taking quarterly vacations, so we'll see how that pans out.  In the meantime I wanted to share with you all some of the sights that were seen on our vacation to North Redington Beach, Florida.  We've never been to this beach, but our travel agent (more on that later!) was able to find a great hotel at a great price.  We were situated between Clearwater Beach and St. Petersburg, 30 minutes in both directions.  This area of Florida was pretty quiet which is perfect for us.  There were a lot of homes being built on the beach and they were GORGEOUS.  No photos of them, however, so just image huge homes with 3 and 4 car garages.

To start, we left on a Monday morning.  Atlanta traffic isn't too friendly, so although check-in was 4pm and it was an estimated 7.5 hour drive, we left at 6:30am in order to beat rush hour(s) and decided to make the road trip a mini trip in itself.  We stopped for breakfast once we were well outside of the city (in Macon, GA to be exact) and relaxed for about an hour.  We got back on the road, crossed the Florida line a few hours later...

...stopped for lunch at a gorgeous rest stop (that's an oxymoron right?) and ate at one of the pavilions.  The rest stop was so gorgeous I had to snap photos.  One thing that wasn't so cool though was the "Warning Beware of Poisonous Snakes" sign.  Huh??

Maybe they were being funny (or not), but there was an attraction there called the Snake Wall which basically is a bridge that you walk up and the end is an overlook of one of the state parks as well as the interstate.

We even saw caterpillars!  I've never seen this type in person and boy do those suckers move fast.

After about an hour here we finished our trip (even got a little turned around towards the last 15 minutes of the drive thanks to road construction/changes and Google maps not having current info) and arrived at our hotel, the Doubletree.  Here are a few photos of the beach in no particular order.

There were hula dancers on Friday night at the cookout that the hotel had, and on Saturday morning I was surprised to see a beach wedding!

I will be back with part two of our vacation soon!