photoblogging: a vacation retrospective

By Ryan Byrd

lucy, family, children, christen, olive, max, personal, favorites, general life
1 Comment

a long, long time ago in a faraway land, a diminutive pack of 2 intrepid adults and 3 wide-eyed children set off for a journey toward our destinies. [cue the epic danny elfman music]

ok, so it was a trip to florida…last week.

alright, maybe it wasn’t exactly the march to mount doom in the lord of the rings, but trust me, hauling 3 children 3-years old and below on an 11 hour car ride to florida is a decent little adventure. in the end, we traveled just over 1,800 miles (little rock to panama city beach | pcb -> new orleans | new orleans -> shreveport | shreveport -> the rock), with the trip on the way down beginning at 8:45 p.m. and concluding at 8:45 a.m. it also included a last-minute audible that landed us in new orleans for an overnight stay. that’s plenty of epic-ness for our little crew.

from start to finish, we genuinely had a blast. the beach was amazing, the weather was nearly perfect and lucy, olive and max were (generally) well-behaved and soaked up the whole trip. i’m deeply thankful that we had a great first family vacation. admittedly, i was a little apprehensive about hauling 3 children that young on a trip like that, but ultimately, it was much more than i could have hoped for.

one of the things i made a decision about early on was that i was going to take plenty of pictures. yes, memories are great, but there’s something about having those physical, touchable memories that is necessary on a trip like this.

this may sound nerdy or goofy, but i mean this completely honestly: this is a trip made for an iphone 4. no doubt, we brought our big daddy slr, but i literally shot over 500 pictures on my iphone. it’s handy, unobtrusive and outputs relatively high resolution, printable photos. also, as you’ll see below, you basically get the effects of several different cameras via various apps. yes, hipstamatic has become a bit of a joke and can be grossly overused, but when it’s used in the right circumstances, there are fewer more beautiful and useful apps.

as long-time readers (and, um, readers of the last 6 paragraphs) know, i get a little, um, wordy, so i’m going to try something new. less words. more photos. how about that? i’m going to try to let the photos do most of the speaking. i might add a little commentary where it could be useful, but i hope to let the photos tell the story.

for most of the photos, if you’d like to see them larger, just click on the photo and a larger version will open in a new window.

lucy, the amazing one-legged wonder… (so you can sleep at night, i included the picture on the right that shows that lucy, in fact, still has 2 basically functional legs.)

the national weather service in panama city beach issued a severe nerd alert… lucy’s going to have to learn that she has a lifetime ahead of being drug into her daddy’s nerdery.

christen votes creepy for this one…i vote beautiful… maybe both?

the last night we were on the beach, olive wasn’t feeling well and decided to lay down. after short break from the action, she had to get back up and play…only, for some reason, she wasn’t in the mood to get fully dressed. there was certainly a full moon on the beach that evening…

lest we forget that we didn’t spend this wonderful time alone, here’s a couple pictures of all the kids (sans max) sitting on the beach on our final evening eating their watermelon suckers from the sugar shak in rosemary beach. we had a great time spending the week with one of our best friends stephanie, her 3 children and her mother-in-law, sheila.

we couldn’t bear the thought of ending our week in paradise with an 11-hour drive back to little rock, so we made a last-second audible and decided to drive down the coast to new orleans. christen and i visited there in february and loved every second of it. we were excited to bring the kids there for an overnight stay and a trip to the aquarium.

for lucy and olive, the stay in the hotel room was one of the highlights of the entire trip. they’ve never been in one before and you would have thought that it was chuck e. cheese by the way they ran and jumped on the beds (sorry marriott…) and laughed. their favorite thing to do in the room was stand in the big window and watch cars drive by.

as proud as i am of my little photos that could, the image of the week goes to christen (who would have imagined the actual photographer getting the best picture??). max and i were hanging out on the beach one afternoon and she captured this. i’ve got a feeling we’ll be seeing this on our wall pretty soon.

so there you have it. that was our little trip. it was an amazing time, honestly even better than i expected. it was so good to step away from normal life and spending time with my entire family was priceless.

alright, when’s the next vacation??