Summer vacation

This year was the first time in a very long time that we’ve taken a true vacation with the kids. We usually spend our vacation time visiting family (not that there's anything wrong with that -- in case family members are reading). But this year we took the plunge and went to the beach for an entire week.

It. Was. Awesome.

Destination: Massachusetts. Now, being a southern girl, I have to resist the urge to balk at the idea of Massachusetts as a beach destination. But we’ve been Northeasterners for about two and a half years now, so we figured we might as well act like it.

We rented a cute little house in Duxbury, Mass. It’s a suburb of Boston and really not a touristy spot at all. So we slipped into a day in the life of wealthy white families (the town is 98% white – I looked it up. It felt like the whole town had been bleached.). They all knew each other, were incredibly friendly and gracious and by the end of the week we even had some pseudo-friends.

What was so great about the trip was that we were able to mix touristy-stuff with lazy beach days. We made day trips to Boston, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, but between those we had lazy days filled with sleeping late, playing in the big backyard, teaching the kids to ride their bikes, and going to the beaches. There was a public beach in the town and a tiny private beach at the end of our street that had the most drastic high and low tides I’ve ever seen. Very cool. It was a completely different place depending on what time of day you went.

Bodhi at low tide:

Kids playing at high tide – about 20 feet inland from where Bodhi had been above:


Watching the tide roll in:


What made it even better was that my sister, Karen, and niece, Rachel, came with us! Karen was my buddy while Brian golfed and Rachel was babysitter-extraordinaire who helped entertain the kids while we did other very important things like drink beer and sit on the deck.



The BP oil spill was the backdrop of our trip, so I found it amusing that Martha's Vineyard was seemingly very prepared for a spill of their own:
I tried for a week to get a good picture of Dylan -- he's evasive -- but finally caught one:

So the kid likes to play soccer in his underwear:

Old Silver Beach on Cape Cod. Beautiful:
The only downfall of the vacation is that I’m already ready to go back. Oh well, maybe next year.

(I really dislike Blogger's photo upload tools. For one, every one of these pictures is set at large. Ugh.)