Suzanna

8.26.2006

Vacation




Hope your weekend is going well! We got back from vacation on Sunday night and now I'm frantically trying to get ready for school, which starts in a week and a half. It sounds like I should have plenty of time, but between teacher meetings and this last week we could only be in the school until 3 p.m. - it really feels like time is going quickly and I'm not getting enough done!

The vacation was great although we felt like we were really busy through the whole thing and didn't get quite enough time to just relax. We were trying to pack a lot in since we were traveling all the way to the East Coast and who knows when we'll do that again. We started in Charleston, SC and spent about a day and a half there - which was plenty since it was so hot and humid!! We toured the city, which we decided was the quintessential southern town (we really felt like we were almost in a different country it was so different than Seattle or Kansas City.)

Then we went to Surfside Beach (just south of Myrtle Beach.) Surfside Beach was great - the water was just the right temperature and we stayed at a great resort, but we decided Myrtle Beach is not so great, Erin described it as a redneck version of Vegas without the gambling. There was just a bit too much neon and airbrushed t-shirts! After that we went to the Outer Banks in NC and also had a great time on the beach there. I think we could have used a day or two more at both of the beaches to really be able to totally relax. In the Outer Banks we also visited Roanoke Island where the Lost Colony was and the site where the Wright Brothers flew for the first time.

From NC we drove up through VI and stopped to visit a cousin of mine in Charlestown, VI where we toured James Monroe's house and Thomas Jefferson's house. That same day we drove up to a town outside of D.C. where we stayed with cousin's of Erins. We toured D.C. for two days - went to all the monuments and to 4 Smithsonian museums (Natural History, American History, Air and Space, and Holocaust.) D.C. was great, but of course while we were there the whole London terrorist thing happened, so that was a bit unnerving.

After D.C. we went up to NYC and stayed with Erin's cousin. We had a great time there, except Erin's cousin's apartment had an infestation of cockroaches. It would have been one thing if the place was clean and his cousin was really apologetic about it, but the place was a complete mess and he never mentioned a thing about all the bugs crawling around!! Boston was our last stop on the east and, like Charleston, we just walked around the city - got to see a lot more of history. We flew back through Denver and spent a few days in Colorado with my cousins and my family, who were also out there.

So, all in all, it was a great vacation. We both decided, though, for our honneymoon in Maui we're just going to relax on the beach...no trying to fit all this stuff into a little bit of time. What was nice aobut this vacation is the only place we had to pay for lodging was in the Outer Banks, all the other places we stayed with either family, friends, or in Myrtle Beach Erin's mom was able to trade around their time share and get us a room at the resort. We also got to see so much that neither of us had ever seen.