A little R&R

Once upon a time, Grandma showed up at our house.

That was the cue for Ed and I to leave the kids and head out of town.  So we ran away to Pensacola.  Why not?  It's only a 9-hour drive away, and it has some fabulous things for history/military nerds like this:

The National Museum of Naval Aviation



 (Ed thinks I have a secret obsession with Tom Cruise and Top Gun...why else would I have married a pilot?)

 The Dauntless, which Ed's grandpa flew during WWII.

Next up was the Pensacola Lighthouse, circa 1859, a.k.a., "the most haunted lighthouse in the U.S." as evidenced by it's appearance on an episode of Ghost Hunters.  I don't have a fascination with ghosts, but I DO have a little obsession with lighthouses.  Doesn't make sense since this is the first one I've actually been in.

 177 steps to the top.

 The view was worth it.

One morning we went back to the Aviation Museum to watch these guys practice:

 We made friends with a family wearing BYU paraphernalia who were completely fascinated by our military lifestyle.  Ed wowed them with his pilot knowledge and I got their "Bless-your-heart"s for surviving deployments.  One asked if being in the military was boring...I can think of many words to describe it, but "boring" is definitely not one of them.

 Oh, you know what else Pensacola has?  Some really, really good seafood.  And you know what else?  You wouldn't know it from the number of pictures we took, or the gray, rainy days, but we really went there for the beach.

Despite how it looks, I promise we were happy to be there...

See, here's a happy one:

 I have a picture from about 18 months ago of my Cocok's toes in the Hawaiian sand.  This one is much less glamorous - hugely swollen feet with my badly-painted toes - but the sand was still luxurious.

 On the way home we made a quick stop at the Vicksburg National Military Park.  Beautiful, peaceful place.  Wish we had had more time to see it all.

 The vacation accomplished it's objective: we relaxed and missed our kids.  We came home to find they didn't miss us at all.  There's no way around it - Grandma is just going to have to move in with us.