As many of you know, I have this crazy bucket list. One of my “things” is visiting all 50 states before I’m 50. While it’s ambitious, I’m confident I can get it done. I mean an average of 3.45 states per year is no biggie…drop in the bucket really.

What most of you may not know is that our wedding anniversary falls right at the beginning of the school year. Sorry husband, back to school means no wifey for a few weeks while all the classroom organization and overall getting my bleep together is occurring.

A solution is to plan an anniversary trip each year. It accomplishes two things:

1. Beau and Angie time without the everyday distractions.

2. Check, check, checking states off my list.

You’ll be excited to know that I’m down to only 36 more states to visit. See no biggie…I’m on a 40 before 40 and 50 before 50 roll.

Here’s how the first part of the trip went down…

We flew into Orlando, Florida (I’ve already been to Florida but we wanted to see the coast). We arrived at Orlando International Airport around 5:00pm Eastern time, picked up our rental car from National Car Rental. Their Emerald Isle thing is pretty cool…too bad we didn’t sign up for that! Instead we drove off in a Chrysler 300…it was kind of an old person car and definitely not the convertible Camaro Beau wanted. The Chrysler was new and nice and it had AC which is really all that mattered because HUMIDITY!

We drove the hour or so to Daytona Beach where Beau’s awesome boss hooked us up with two nights at his timeshare (for free). Total score…well, except for the part where the hotel that I originally booked as Hilton Honors members was non-refundable. Ya, ya, ya…fine print blah, blah, blah…it’s still rude that they wouldn’t refund us when our plans changed. So I guess technically it wasn’t free.

We stayed at the Wyndam Daytona Beach. Great place. Go there. Don’t book with Hilton…they have stupid fine print that you need to read.

Anyway, after we checked in, we walked down the ocean walk to Joe’s Crabshack and ate dinner.

 

When we returned, I set an alarm for 6:00am. Why, you wonder? So did Beau…

Let me explain:

We were on the East coast.

And we are told all of our lives that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and if you’re from the west coast you use that to help you find your way. The ocean is to the west where the sun sets and the mountains are to the east where the sun rises. This was before GPS, of course.

I’m really bad at figuring out which direction I’m facing, so I guess that never helped me anyway.

I set my alarm because IT’S THE OPPOSITE ON THE EAST COAST and I wanted to watch the sun RISE over the ocean.

It was beautiful and peaceful. There is nothing like watching a sunrise (or set) to the sound of crashing waves. I think the sunrise is best because there were hardly any people up at 6:58 am. I guess people on vacation sleep in…weird.

Later that day (at 9:00 am and already 80 degrees) we swam in the pool and floated in the lazy river. The lazy river was glorious. Perfect for a “can’t ever sit still person” like me. I was still moving, but slowly so it was relaxing.

Later we ventured back out to the beach (which was literally out the door of the resort). We rented two boogie boards. Ate sand and salt water and returned the boogie boards after 15 minutes.

But I swam in the Atlantic Ocean! I’ll spare you bathing suit photos and share only the well-placed boogie board photos…

The rest of Daytona in no particular order:

• More swimming
• More lazy river
• 11pm night swim
• Anniversary dinner #1 at the Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse. I highly recommend it if you are ever in Daytona Beach. Oh, and whenever you are on a trip tell them it’s your anniversary…people hook you up. Besides it wasn’t a lie…it’s technically our anniversary trip.

Daytona was cool, but after two nights we loaded up the car and began our road trip to Georgia.

How many of you know this song?

 

Total throwback. In 8th grade, I pushed play and pause on my boom box and cassette tape so that I could write down every lyric to this song. Remember when you had to do that? There was no “google it”. If you wanted to know the lyrics you had to write them down yourself. And more often than not we got them wrong and sang them wrong forever until our mind was blown when the correct lyric was discovered.

There’s this one lyric in the song, “A1A, Beachfront Avenue”

Beau kept saying, “Hey now we can say we drove ‘A1A, Beachfront Avenue'” (in Vanilla Ice’s rapping voice).

So ensued the quest to capture the perfect photo of an A1A Beachfront Avenue sign and maybe there was this small, teeny-tiny Angie meltdown because Beau refused to:

a. Stop in the middle of the road so I could take the picture

Or

b. Turn around so that I could take a picture from a better angle.

So instead of the perfect photo, I ended up with a bunch of imperfect ones and a great story to tell.

Oh and these two for Jaxon:

Next blog post:

Georgia and South Carolina