First gulf coast visit

A couple of weekends ago, we noticed the potential for beautiful weather and finally made our first trip to the gulf coast since moving here. We were looking forward to showing the kids the calm, warm (for November) waters.

Before moving, Ronan liked watching YouTube videos featuring the children's museum in Tampa. When we told him we were moving to Florida, he immediately said, "The Tampa Children's Museum!" Now we had our chance to actually take him there.

 

We drove directly to the museum to spend our first afternoon there. It was really fun! Their favorite part was climbing on a tall, artistic play structure made of planks held up by fishing-net-type strings.

They also liked a really cool sand table that had overhead lights that were responsive to the depth of the sand. If you dig a hole, it "fills" with blue water. If you build a hill, the sand turns yellow or brown. We spent a lot of time playing with it.

The kids were proud of their building.

And just like any good children's museum, they had a pretend veterinary clinic and grocery store.

At late notice we were still able to get a nice, reasonably priced hotel room that was walking distance to the beach. It was a small business with rooms that included a small kitchen area. The kids love staying in any kind of hotel.

The first evening we walked to the beach to catch the sunset over the ocean.

 

We love that in Florida you're always running into random birds, including really large ones.

Our hotel room was right on the edge of a harbor with a seating area on the water right outside. Since we were just feet from our hotel room, Kraig and I saw the opportunity to hang out on the outside deck while watching the kids using a Skype connection.

The next morning we explored the outside of the hotel and the harbor.

The kids know that I've been selling stock photography, so for a while Brielle has been saying, "Take a stock photo of me!" By far, my best-selling photo is one I took of her with a sad expression, looking out the window. So most often she wants a photo of her looking sad or looking out into the distance. Recently Ronan has been asking me to take stock photos of him. In this one he was smiling.

The hotel had a cool large chess set right outside of our room. I kind of told the kids how to play so we could have an activity.

After the cloudy skies cleared, we headed back to the beach, and boy was it beautiful!

The kids noticed a beautiful shell, but unfortunately it had an animal in it. We threw it back into the ocean.

Our hotel on the harbor was one of three hotels owned by the same people. One of their hotels was actually on the beach, so we had privileges to hang out there as well. We swam in the beach-side pool and enjoyed looking at the colorful beach chairs on the white sand.