This is the LAST of our beach posts! Wahhhh. We had such a fabulous week and if you want to recap the whole thing: here is the post covering days 1 and 2, days 3 and 4, and days 5 and 6!
Friday we left completely open so we could do the beach ALL DAY. We headed out first thing in the morning and I ran ahead with the kids. Since we didn’t take time out of our trip to have a set “picture time” I wanted to snap a few of the kids together. I don’t always get cute pics of all three and I wanted to make sure I at least had one good one from the trip! It worked out great because they were giving out donuts on the beach so that was my bribe for cute smiles 😉 (Yes, sometimes bribery works!)
Reward time!
I think I married Big Foot.
The kids loved the seashell grid Zach came up with and did the same thing again…but this time they decided to SELL the seashells. Straight up Sally style 😉
We made some friends at the beach the day prior and the kids were all excited to play with them again. They were sweet siblings and got along great with our crew! Zach handled all 5 in the ocean like a boss. 😉
They helped make a ball corse again and the girls won!
Britt somehow SOLD A SHELL. And instead of just getting a penny for it (the advertised price) she got a stinking QUARTER.
I told the kids if they can sell seashells AT the beach, then they can truly sell anything 😉
Y’all know I’m all about the cheap cheap on pretty much everything. But I’m in my 30s. And I can’t go cheap on my skin. I am LOVING this sunscreen. It’s perfect to protect my face AND it’s tinted!
We saw some dolphins which was super exciting! Tess just LOVES animals so much!
During naps we watched the last episode of How I Met Your Mother!
Or not. I swear we were like overly eager to end this show. First we skipped an entire disk of season 8 and then we didn’t realize there were more episodes of season 9 left haha!
Kye ASKED for me to come nap with him. Who can refuse that offer? I love these sweet snuggles with my boy!
And Daddy was CASHED within 5 min!
Zach slept so hard that Britt even woke up before he did so she watched Kye play Slither IO.
We let the kids have dinner on the beach…but forgot our beach chairs for them and our beach blanket so we made do with boogie boards 😉
Tess really had such a great week! She bonded a lot with Zach more than she ever has and she was just SO HAPPY!
View of the condo where we stay (Ocean and Racquet)
It was bedtime. But why not hit up the pool for a few more minutes? It gave Z a chance to get all the beach stuff hosed down and he met us there just as the storm clouds rolled on in!
Last night in their special room!
We had a date night and FINALLY finished How I Met Your Mother.
My thoughts on the show:
We LOVED The Office. We LOVED Parks and Rec. How I Met Your Mother? Just eh for us. Barney MADE the show. Without him it wouldn’t have been anything worth even watching. We couldn’t stand Ted. Couldn’t stand the Robyn and him storyline.
Marshall and Lily were great. Lots of the writing was great. The “mother” was fabulous and perfectly cast!
The finale? If you haven’t seen the alternate ending PLEASE watch it. It’s sooooo much better than original. Robyn clearly belongs with Barney. NOT FREAKING TED.
We reference the show decently often. It’s a good feel good kind of watch…but we’re happy to be moving on. We bought both Sunny in Philadelphia and Entourage. I know Entourage is pretty raunchy so we’ll see. I liked it back in the day. I heard Sunny is super vulgar so again, we’ll see. But Seth says it’s the funniest show ever so maybe we’ll love it too!
Took pics of the artwork Kye made on the trip so I could toss it haha
Love seeing our past guest book signatures!
Writing the one for this year!
So so sweet mentioning the baby 🙂
Check out was at 10 and normal Parker family style would have been to just drive on home. Buttttt this wasn’t a normal Parker family style trip. It was a yolo trip 😉 We talked about going to Jax to do an indoor trampoline place. We’ve never been to one and didn’t realize they aren’t really geared towards little kids? Plus omg so pricey!
In my googling for things to do I came across a Pirate Museum that I’d NEVER heard of. Turns out it’s in Old Town directly across from the Fort (hence why I haven’t seen it because we never walk down that far). The reviews were great so we decided to spend our Saturday checking it out!
We got to meet a real “pirate” who finds hidden treasures in the ocean!
Fierce Pirate
The site I found didn’t list a price so I was all hopeful that it’d be free. Ha. Ha. Ha.
We decided to go ahead and buy tickets for both the Pirate Museum and the Colonial Quarter next door. I saw that online too and it sounded neat.
IF you visit St Augustine…the Pirate Museum? IS A MUST. The Colonial Quarter? Is a SKIP.
Since the Pirate Museum was inside we decided to go ahead and do the Colonial Quarter first. We had some time to kill before the tour started so we went up to a watch tower and checked out the views.
Like of the beautiful parking lot 😉
They had different areas set up that represented “back in the day” when St Augustine was founded. Kye and Zach both tried to lasso!
Y’all know I like to keep it real and I just don’t love tours or museums. I get bored. Which is not something you’d really think is like me because I do love to learn and always loved school. I just enjoy quick fun facts and like to move on to the next thing. My brain can’t hold all the info a lot of tours and museums have to offer, so give me a couple fun facts and I’m good.
The guy who did our tour at the Colonial Quarter WAS great. He was! He was very passionate and went into lots of details. I’m sure a lot of people enjoyed it. But it wasn’t really my thing. He actually was very longwinded so our whole crew ended up needing to dip out early in order to make it to the pirate museum in time for that tour.
The coolest parts were the black smith area where he taught us about heating metal and, of course, when he shot the gun like what they used back in times of the Civil War.
We dipped out and headed back to the Pirate Museum…passing by my lucky number 😉
I’ve been to a lot of museums in my time. Zach enjoys that type of thing and whenever we travel we take tours etc. This Pirate Museum? It was my ALL TIME FAVORITE museum ever. Yes. Even more than the Louvre haha It was just SO well done and was fun and entertaining and factual all at the same time. Some rich guy red a book about pirates and was very inspired by it. He used items in his own collection to put together the museum and clearly dropped some dough on it too. Disney even had a hand in elements of the museum! It was legit awesome in every way and I highly recommend a visit!
Lots of interactive spots to explore and they had a treasure map to use throughout the museum with a prize at the end!
They offer tours and it was great too. Our pirate was very legit and maybe I’d just been watching too much of How I Met Your Mother but I SWEAR he was just like Barney doing some sort of skit to score with a girl or something haha!
One of only TWO pirate flags left in existence!
A REAL pirate treasure chest!
Legit hidden Mickey 🙂 Disney Imagineers made elements of the museum so I’m pretty sure they did this on purpose!
They also had an entire room about facts and fiction from pirate related films including items from the movies. Right up my ally 😉
Seriously y’all. WORTH A VISIT!!!
We spent a couple hours there and could have stayed longer. We all agreed we loved it. It kept us ALL entertained. And it was super interesting and educational. The kids all turned in their treasure maps and got to pick out some treasure 🙂
Kye is at an age where he doesn’t get as pumped about things anymore and seeing him SO excited about the museum made my heart really happy 🙂 It was a big win for our last day for sure!!!
They also have a reasonably priced gift shop and Kye spent some of his money to get a gun 🙂
Had to get a pic with the authentic pirate (his wife was super awesome too btw)
We walked down St George Street for a bit and debated what to do about lunch. We didn’t want pizza again but we also didn’t want to spend a lot of money. Hello Old Town ain’t cheap! We opted to just go to the car and stop at some fast food on the way home!
Zaxby’s for the win!
Someone kept stealing big brother’s fries 😉
We had SUCH an amazing week. I still can’t believe what wonderful weather we had when the prediction was hardcore rain every single day. Our yearly trip to St Augustine is our favorite family vacation every year and this year did not disappoint. All three of the kids were in such great moods all week (which you mama’s know makes a big impact on how the flow of the trip goes!). It was great being able to be so relaxed with schedules and just have more TIME to really make the most of our vacation. We had a BLAST and are already counting down for next year!
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