Hilton Head in September!

Just got back from a cool week at the beach. It was a great vacation with the family, and the weather was perfect pretty much the whole time. Emily and Brian and their kids intersected with Melanie last Saturday in Beckley, West Virginia. She was coming back from a week in Williamsburg with Dad and Sue. Granny and Grandpa came to Pittsburgh on Friday and made the trek with us. We did a marathon drive of 12 hours pulling into Hilton Head at about 6 p.m. (Yes, we left at 6 o'clock in the morning.)

We stayed at Turtle Lane Club out on Sea Pines, and our place was on the second floor with a view of the ocean and a big porch that we enjoyed pretty much 24 hours a day. The water was really warm so late in the season. Here's a picture that Greg took on the beach on Saturday night when we first arrived. The sun was getting low, and David's hat is shadowing Granny's face. The rest of us are squinting.

This is Emily and David on our first beach walk on Saturday night. David got the prize for the best beach hats of the whole trip.

After we arrived, we started getting phone calls from Ohio saying that the wind had knocked out the electricity and there wouldn't be power for a number of days. It turned out that Em & Brian and Melanie were out until about Wednesday and Grandpa and Granny in New Carlisle didn't get their electricity restored until Saturday afternoon the 20th! So they missed the big excitement; and we were especially glad that Grandpa and Granny were with us since they have a well and would have been without water and everything all week. Our place had high winds, but the electricity just flicked and didn't go out. I think we are on a different power grid.

For the most part, we swam in the ocean, rode the bikes we rented all around, walked on the beach, read books, and generally relaxed all last week. We made one side trip to Savannah, Georgia, to visit the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum, which is the unit Dad served in during World War II. This was a really nice little trip on Tuesday; and Dad bought our lunch at the Cracker Barrel on the way back to the beach. Otherwise, Greg made his beef stew (which is more like McHenry vegetable soup with gravy in it) and generally kept us well fed with French Toast in the morning and other treats in the evening. We ate pretty well and just made it out to Hudson's on the Dock our last evening for some amazing seafood.

Here is our week in a few pictures.

This was Tuesday morning on our way out to go to Savannah. Please note Dad's shirt, which I purchased for him on e-Bay specifically for this trip. I think it is the first shirt Dad has owned in about 40 years that is not a solid color. I did stay with 2 colors and made sure one of them was either blue or green. But our deal was that he needed a beach shirt and would wear it in public! He wore it TWICE! Once to the museum and again when we went out to eat on Friday!

This is Dad working with the librarian at the museum to find some of the pictures and books about his unit, the 445th. He updated his information in the database with more details. Some of the info was lost in a fire in St. Louis at an archive center.

Here is a picture of Dad in front of the museum for posterity. Mom is standing in the wing on the left.

Back at the beach, David liked to sit on Grandpa's lap and chew on things. (He is cutting his first two teeth.) Here he sports his second sun hat with Hilton Head on it.

Katy is a real water baby. She couldn't get enough of those waves . . . even when they knocked her down! We had a lot of fun running around playing in the water and . . . chasing those silly birds around, of course.

This was taken Friday night before we went to Hudson's. Emily has another family picture that has everyone in it which I'm sure she will post on her blog as soon as she recovers from the trip. She and Brian had the tripod and the camera with the timer.

It was truly a wonderful week! It is going to be hard to go back to work tomorrow after so much relaxation. The worst part is wearing shoes . . . . .