It is always a little hard to believe that summer is over so quickly and the kids have to get back to school, which means a very busy time for Kelly as she has to prepare for the new school year.  But we tried to make the most of things and spend time together as a family enjoying the waning warm days.  We didn’t originally plan to head to the beach this summer, but we reversed that decision and went anyway.  If you want to skip to the bottom of this post (as it might be a little long) there is a video.

I try to take each of the boys on a 13 year old trip, and since Max is going to be 14 soon, this was the time to go!  We took a long weekend and first went down to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Mammoth Caves…

… and then to the Corvette Hall of Fame and Assembly plant.

We each picked out a few of the Corvette’s that we thought would fit best in our garage back home.

We then traveled on to Asheville, NC, to visit the Biltmore Estate.

Before the start of our tours, we went through the gardens, which were truly amazing.

If you have never been to the Biltmore Estate, it is worth attending.  The architecture is amazing.

Max and I took a few opportunities to get shots from the roof of the mansion.

Cincinnati recently hosted the MLB All-Star game as as part of the preparation the city put in a new park down by the Ohio River called the Smale River Park.  Kelly and I had been wanting to take the kids down there, so one sunny Saturday we loaded everyone up and headed down to the river for a picnic dinner.

They really did a nice job with this park.  There were tons of activities for all of the kids!

And probably a few things that were not really supposed to be activities…

Everyone seemed to have a good time.  Well … almost everyone.  Ali wasn’t too happy in this shot, but she warmed up later.

We also found time to run over to the 2nd Annual Runway Fest at Wright Brothers Airport, just around the corner from our house.

This lady makes some great balloon balloon creations!

Everyone seemed fairly happy with their choices, although some balloons started popping not long after construction.

As the summer drew to a close, we took everyone down to Gulf Coast Alabama to the beach!  Well, everyone except Zach and Jake who were back in college.  We stopped at Huntsville, Alabama, the first night so that Ali, Riley, & Jessie could spend some time with two girls from their orphanage.

When we adopted Jessie and Riley, we took them back to their orphanage for a visit.  It was a difficult time for Jessie and one of the things we will always remember is how nice the girl in this picture was to Jessie during that time.  It was awesome seeing the two of them reunited again after almost two years.

Ali and Riley also enjoyed time with their old friend from the orphanage.

And then it was off to the beach!  The weather was just awesome.

Although the surf was non-existent, so there was little boogie boarding going on.

But the lack of waves meant that we could put Leah, and sometimes Charlie, on boards and pull them up and down the beach.  Leah said that she saw so many things in the water that she had never seen before.

Some people enjoyed the sand a little more than others.

When we were here two years ago, we went on a fantastic dolphin viewing cruise.  The dolphins were playing in the wake of our boat and were close enough that you felt you could touch them.  So we decided to head out for a dolphin cruise again this year.

Look out for Captain Caleb!

And Bosun Brittany!

In the end, the dolphins were just OK.  But it was a great day on the boat anyway!

One evening we went out on the beach at night to go crab hunting.  The challenge was finding hard, smooth sand on which to push Leah’s wheelchair!

We seemed to find more critters than our bucket would hold.

No crabs were hurt in the taking of these pictures.  Well, that really isn’t true.  Some did not make it …

In all, a very enjoyable trip, although I am not sure any of the girls can be called …

However, most importantly, we did get a time to relax!

The biggest excitement  of the week was a shark!  We had been warned that there were sharks out past the sand bar, but that was a couple hundred feet away, so we just stayed pretty close to the shore line.  I was out in thigh high water with some of the kids when a lady came running up the beach waving her hands!  There was a shark swimming right for us!  We got out and followed the shark up the beach as he swam in very shallow water just 15-20 feet off the shoreline.  Below is the video of our vacation in which the shark makes his appearance towards the end!

There are a ton more pictures in the gallery if you want to see them.  This blog was getting too long as it is!

Until next time …

Cameron