Isle Of Palms

Today my entire family and I decided to take a quick day trip to the beach. I told them about Isle of Palms which is a beach my cousin and I visited the other week and completely fell in love with.

We left around 7:30 that morning and drove about 3.5 hours to arrive at the beach a little after 11:00. Damon did excellent during the trip there. He sat in the third row of my grandmothers SUV with my mom so they were able to entertain themselves. We of course had to make a couple of stops and surprisingly enough not for Damon. At one of the gas stations my Dad took a picture of Damon. He dressed himself in this getup...he had his baseball gloves on too but those didn't make it in the picture.

We arrived at the beach and Damon was ecstatic! It's been about 2 years since he has been to a beach so this was a special trip. My family piled out of the car, grabbed all of our beach gear and headed for the ocean. The water was not cold at all. It felt kind of like bath water so it was easy for all of us to run in and just start swimming. After being in the ocean for about 20 minutes I decided to rent a boogie board for all of us to catch some waves with. We all took turns showing Damon how it worked until it was his turn...

Now this next video you are about to see might be a little scary but I wanted to share how tough Damon is...

So he fell under the water for a second but what you didn't get to see is me hauling butt and grabbing him out of the water. He was okay, really mad when he first came up from the water but didn't give up. He let us put him on the board a few more times until he was not interested in going under water anymore.

This was not one of the times Damon did not fall off his board but I was running right behind him to make extra certain.

Damon was not interested in playing in the sand which is a little strange seeing as most kids are; all he wanted to do was swim and run in the water. He would lay on the beach, flopping from his stomach to his back, while the waves crashed over his body. We would all take turns taking Damon out into the ocean as we would tire pretty quickly...Damon was non stop.

"Unc", Damon, and me. Tyler did such a great job playing with Damon and I know we were all happy that he joined us for the trip. Damon loves being with his "Unc" and I know the beach trip wouldn't have been the same without him.

Damon and G-maw giving the peace sign and thumbs up in the ocean.

Damon was trying to ride G-paw like a whale...or was it a shark??

And of course we couldn't end our beach trip without sharing a kiss in the ocean.

We started packing up our stuff around 3:00, loaded it up into the car, and did a little souvenir shopping before we hit the road to Charleston. We were desperately looking for a place to eat whole crabs but didn't have any such luck so we ate at some restaurant in Charleston that was equally satisfying. I got the Carolina Platter which came with crab legs, a crab cake, and shrimp. Damon ate all of the crab legs while I did all of the work to get the meat for him and ate most of the shrimp. Before getting back in the car, Damon and I ran across the street to get some ice cream for the ride home.

We were all exhausted from the beach and I was sure it was going to be a quite ride home because Damon would be falling asleep...wrong! He stayed up the entire ride. I, on the other hand, doze off for few minutes here and there.

The trip was a success. Damon had a blast, we made it back safe, and spent little money. Damon is already asking when we are going back.