Kind of a Big Deal

This is my dad on his last day before retirement as our town's Recreation Director. He chose to go out in style, as you can see, by taking a ride down a slide he put in at the local pool. He had never ridden down the slide in all the many years it had been there. When it first went in, it was kind of a big deal. To me, he's kind of a big deal, too.

Tomorrow night I'll be leaving the West Coast on a jet plane and landing in Washington, DC early in the am on July 4. From there, my parents wil pick Mike and me up, and we will drive with them down to North Carolina for a much needed week at the beach with the family. This trip is also kind of a big deal because it's my dad's official retirement celebration, and it's one of the very few "real" family vacations my family has ever taken together.

(I know you probably stopped reading and for the last several minutes have been sitting in utter confusion wondering why in the world we would possibly choose to FLY to DC and DRIVE to NC when we could have simply FLOWN to NC to begin with. The answer to that is that would have made WAY too much sense. But, to be truthful, it was a lot cheaper to fly into DC, and saving $50 dollars here and there somehow becomes important when booking hundreds of dollars worth of plane tickets. $50 is not so very important when spending a day at the fair, going out to dinner, or taking a shopping trip to Target, but for some reason saving that $50 on my plane ticket was absolutely IMPERATIVE. And, truth be told, spending 7 hours in the car with my parents who I rarely get to see is not such a bad thing.)

Long story short. I'm leaving. On a jet plane. To the East Coast. And I won't be back for two weeks.

And, I am not at all together the way my wonderfully organized sister is, so I have not thought ahead enough to schedule anything to post over those two weeks. Not that it really matters, anyway, since 99% of my readership will be at the beach with me.

There are a couple things I am really looking forward to about this trip: *Giving my dad a hard time (I absolutely LOVE teasing my dad!), *Seeing my NEPHEW who literally ups his cuteness factor every single day by huge percentages, *Spending time with my pregnant sister, and *Possibly, just possibly, getting a smidgen of a suntan.. (which is NOT easy for me to do!)