Thanks to some Southwest vouchers that had been long lost until a few months ago, we took our first family vacation to South Padre at the end of June. We left on Saturday morning, flew to Harlingen, drove to Padre and came home on Monday night. It was a short trip but one we’ll remember.
He did a great job on the flight down.
We had a really nice time. It was definitely different from pre-baby beach vacations. We went down to the beach a few times, but didn’t spend too long there each time since there were naps to be had, precious baby skin to keep from burning and, since we’d flown, no beach umbrella and lounge chairs.
Carson was cautious at first, but by the last day he and Ben were out jumping in the waves. He loved it. The place we stayed had a balcony that looked out over the beach (a balcony that we got locked out on in the first 10 minutes we were there) and Carson would look out and say “bee” which I think meant beach.
While Carson and I were walking down the beach one time he stopped in front of a group of people who were playing perfect Carson dancing music. So Carson stopped and danced for them! He does this thing where he bends his arm and sticks his elbow up in the air and then he just bounces. They started chanting, “Dance, baby, dance!”. When we walked by them again he did the same thing. It was pretty funny.
We ate some good food. Our favorite meal was at Cap’n Roys. It’s a small, friendly place that had really tasty food. Ben had the Camaronitas Diablitos and they were terrific. I had the grilled fish tacos, also delicious. Carson had fries at almost every meal. And let’s be honest, I did too.
We did some souvenir shopping.
And saw these beautiful paddle boats! I can’t imagine you could sit on these and not get a third degree burn.
Check out time from our place was 10am. Our plane didn’t leave until 6 (which ended up being 7:30) so we had a ridiculous amount of time to kill. Ben and I decided not to ever have that much free time with little ones. After driving around for hours, letting Carson get some sleep we ate lunch and eventually ended up spending over an hour at Bass Pro Shop letting Carson explore. The flight delay once at the Harlingen airport didn’t help matters and made for a rough flight home. Thankfully it was only an hour.
