Memorial Day Weekend Trip

Over Memorial Day weekend we drove down to Corpus Christi and South Padre Island in the south of Texas for a fun little vacation.

We spent two days in Corpus Christi, where we went to the beach, toured the USS Lexington (a retired aircraft carrier), and went swimming a lot at our hotel. I think we picked the wrong beach to go to, because it was not that great, especially for little kids - the waves were pretty big and strong, and there wasn't really a shallow, mellow area for the girls to hang out. Also, there was not a lot of room for playing in the sand - the water came right up to a sandy area that cars used for driving up and down the beach. So I was constantly trying to keep the kids out of the way of the cars - kind of a dumb setup for a beach. Anyway, the boys had a lot of fun, but I felt bad for Rachel because she had been so excited to go to the beach and then within the first 5 minutes she had gotten knocked down several times by the waves and her face/hair/swimming suit were completely full of mud and sand, and she was pretty much done after that. She much preferred the hotel pool after that first beach experience.

(click on the first picture to start at the beginning of the slideshow)

The USS Lexington was pretty neat, though. We've never done anything like that. There were lots of little self-guided tours all over to take you through different areas of the ship, and there was also a neat IMAX movie about fighter pilots that the kids loved. We were glad we went.

Monday morning we headed down to South Padre Island (about a 3-hour drive) for the next part of our trip. The plan was to spend Monday afternoon at the beach and then go to Schlitterbahn Waterpark in South Padre on Tuesday and head home Wednesday morning. Things didn't exactly work out as planned. First of all, Rachel cried almost the whole way there, complaining that her ear hurt. That probably should have clued me in that she was sick. I felt bad for her, but kind of brushed it off, and mostly just thought it was annoying. Whoops.

After we got to our hotel, we ate lunch and then headed down to the beach - there was a little path right behind the hotel that led straight to the beach, which was nice. It was definitely a much better beach than the one we went to in Corpus Christi. All of us had an unbelievably fun time except Rachel. She pretty much sat on a blanket and cried the whole time. I thought it was just because she hated the beach after her first experience. I didn't realize that it was because she was deathly ill. Looking back, I am so mad at myself that I was so clueless - it should have been obvious that she was sick. Daniel and I kept making her come in the waves with us - we thought she was just being whiny and grumpy because she was afraid, so we kept trying to "help" her get over her fear. She wanted nothing to do with it. All she wanted to do was lay down on a blanket and try to sleep. At least I tucked her in periodically and tried to shield her from the sun. What a nice mom, right? After that we pretty much ignored her because she was acting so grumpy. Anyway, we stayed there for a really long time because it was an awesome beach and everyone else was having so much fun. So she was pretty miserable for awhile. She just layed on a blanket and tried to sleep and every once in a while sat up and cried because nobody was helping her (poor girl! I probably shouldn't even be admitting to the neglect that was going on). Finally, we went back to the hotel, showered, left and got dinner (Rachel didn't eat anything), and then went back to the hotel to go to bed. That's when I noticed that Rachel had a raging fever. I don't know if I've ever felt her so hot. She was crying and crying about her ear hurting, and pretty much didn't sleep all night. She was burning up and her ear and her head hurt. She could only sleep if I was holding her - if I held her and sang to her she would calm down enough to go to sleep. As you can imagine, I felt really horrible and mean for not taking better care of her at the beach earlier in the day. In some ways it was good that I felt so guilty, though, because I was happy to hold her and sing to her in the middle of the night - it felt good to comfort and help her like I should have been doing all day. I'm not sure if it made up for it, though. It still makes me sad to think about it.

Anyway, Tuesday morning she still had a really bad fever, and we decided to skip Schlitterbahn and come home a day early. I considered staying at the hotel with the girls and sending Daniel and the boys to Schlitterbahn, but Daniel and Tristan had both gotten pretty sunburned at the beach on Monday, so we decided we would all have a much better time if we just wait a few weeks and go to the Schlitterbahn in New Braunfels (about an hour from our house). Daniel took the boys down to the beach one more time to look for treasures (they found a bunch more shells, an old coin, a giant sea slug, and several jellyfish, much to their delight) and then we packed up and started the drive home. I'm so glad we did - Rachel had a pretty high fever and some pretty major diarrhea the whole drive home, which wasn't fun in the car, but would have been a lot worse at a water park.

So besides the whole disaster with Rachel being sick, it was a really fun trip. And Rachel is feeling a lot better today. I'm hoping she doesn't even remember her awful day at the beach. I don't think I'll bring it up.