Vacation - Our Travel Day to Mackinaw City

We are home from vacation and it is time to share all of the fun we had!  We started talking about vacation with the boys about a week prior to leaving.  We count "sleeps" when we talk about time so we had about 6 sleeps before leaving on vacation.  Needless to say the boys were very excited about the thought of going away so I made a countdown chain (I totally forgot to take a photo) to help them have that visual.  Let me tell you, every morning the boys were very quick to remind me to take down a 'sleep' (remove a loop from the chain) and they would then count how many more sleeps we had left!

I spent Friday and Saturday working on my lists, laundry and packing.  Saturday dawned hot and steamy so I worked first thing on some packing.  Then, to get out of the heat, the boys and I ran errands, went out to lunch and turned in all of our change to use for vacation.  Once Darryl got home, we finished up a few things and officially started our vacation with dinner at "our" Chinese Resturant.  The boys love it because they can pick their own food AND get ice cream.  We ordered the boys some lemonaide - we usually only order them water - when Josh took a drink he said, "Thank you daddy for making money so we can have juice to drink" HA!

Sunday morning we actually slept in a little but the boys were still up at 7:30 - ready to go on vacation HA!  We had basically decided that we would get up, get ready, load up and go.  We ended up hitting the road at about 10:30 which was perfect.  The boys loved the travel bags and dug right into their activities.  Just like clock work, about an hour into our trip poor Nate got carsick.  I feel so bad for the little guy - he knows to grab his puke bucket like a true champ.  The only good thing is that it was right at an exit with a car pool lot to boot so we could clean it all up and hit the road again.  We made our first official stop about half way to Mackinaw City for lunch at McDonald's.  We were there for 90 minutes.  No lie.  The service was super slow, my kids are super slow eater's, and then came the bathroom trips.  The joys of potty training boys - one that is 100% trained and one that is when he wants to be means LONG trips to the potty.  Wow!

The boys were so excited when we were close enough to see the bridge and then to our hotel.  It was really cool because our hotel, The Clarian Beachfront Hotel, had a huge clock on the front of it so the boys had that constant landmark to look for each time we headed "home".

 Our room had a fabulous balcony - it was one of the things I prayed for on our drive North - I wanted a view of the water.  We had a view of the water that was just wonderful and my boys loved having that balcony where they could watch the birds and the boats.

Once we settled in, we drove down the main drag and headed to the Lighthouse park so the boys could see the water and the bridge.

To say that the boys loved the Mackinaw Bridge is an understatement.  They did not want to leave to go to dinner - they just wanted to stay and play.  Once we dragged the boys away . . .and changed them out of their wet clothes . .. we headed to dinner and then went back to the hotel where we then headed down to the beach.

The boys had so much fun in the sand and the water while Darryl and I enjoyed some lounging in the beach chairs in the sand.  It was a fabulous private sandy beach right behind our hotel; the perfect spot.  Needless to say, bedtimes were thrown out the window, it is vacation after all :-)

Day one of vacation to Mackinaw City was a huge success.