Girls' Beach Trip 2012

The next "event" that I want to blog about is my girls' beach trip that I took in late September. Fourteen girls from my Sunday School class packed up for the weekend, left husbands and children at home, and headed to Gulf Shores. It was so much fun! So fun, in fact, that I was too busy to even take many pictures. I did want to post the ones I took, though.

We arrived at the beach on Friday afternoon. I rode with Rebekkah, and it was SO great to hang out and catch up with her for hours in the car! That evening, our whole group walked to dinner and then a few of us made a TCBY/Target run :) Very fun, but nothing exciting enough for pictures. Haha!

Saturday was a beach day! We all went to the beach and enjoyed the sun and sand :)

Most of the girls enjoyed a lot of this:

But since I don't really do ocean water, I opted for more of this:

Unfortunately, I had forgotten to bring a book to read. And as much as I LOVE the beach, I can only take a couple of hours of just sitting there at a time, and then I'm itching to go do something. Thankfully, Rebekkah and I are kindred spirits, and she felt the same way :) So when we headed in for lunch, the two of us went ahead and got ready and headed to the outlet mall! No one else wanted to join us, but that was ok! We spent the rest of the day shopping, and it was so fun! While we were at the mall, it started pouring down rain, and it made me feel better about our decision to leave the beach. I did hate it for our friends who were still trying to enjoy the beach, though.

That evening, we ordered pizza and had a low-key night at the condo. We played a hilarious board game, and I really don't think I've laughed that hard in a VERY long time. I know I haven't laughed that hard since.

The next day, we were going to go to a local church and then head home after lunch. We wanted to get a group picture at the condo before we checked out, though. Let me tell you, that was a comedy of errors. First, I took a group shot, and it turned out cute:

But then, someone suggested that we set the timer on my camera so that we could all be in the picture. Great idea, except that I've never used the timer on my camera and don't know how it works. One of my friends was looking at my camera trying to figure it out, and I noticed that my battery was kind of low. She couldn't really figure out the timer, so she offered to just take another picture so that I could be in one. We got all in place, and she tried to take the picture, and apparently she HAD set the timer. So we got a lovely picture of the ceiling. Ha!

Well, then we got in place again, she set the timer again and ran to get in the picture. Nothing happened. The camera had died. Ughh! Another friend had a camera, so we figured out her timer and got in place. It took several tries before we got the camera in a good place where everyone would be in the picture. We FINALLY got it figured out with the camera stacked on a tower of random bowls and cereal boxes. We were all in place, the light on the camera was flashing to countdown till it took the picture, and just as it was taking the picture, the tower that the camera was sitting on toppled. right. over. Ahhh! We literally all screamed and laughed so hard. At that point, we were DETERMINED to get a group picture, so we tried one more time and got this picture:

Not perfect, but I'm so happy to have it! Our weekend away was very relaxing and fun, and I'm thankful for my sweet church family :)