This morning I’m recovering from a fireworks hangover, hubby is back at work after having 19 days off and the kids are (thankfully) still sleeping.   So I’m taking time this morning to try and blog some more about our road trip.  I’m going to write another separate Haven post some day soon,  well at least before the next Haven Conference.

After checking out of our hotel in Atlanta on Saturday (23rd of June), we had no plans, no hotel reservations, we were brave, we were adventerous, we were winging it.  After a brief discussion of where to head next we decided to go to Savannah for the night and maybe head to Jacksonville Florida for a few hours on Sunday or Monday.

I also always imagined myself on a front porch with a sun hat, sipping sweet tea and smelling magnolias, and always I was in Savannah.

We drove around Savannah just oohing and ahhing over the beautiful homes and the tree lined street that was my favorite.

I’m a big lover of old homes, history, Gone With the Wind type stuff so this was my ideal vacation!  I will say it is hard to take good photos from a moving vehicle.  So excuse the bug guts on the windows, I tried hard to get some good shots to share with you all!

The shot above isn’t for the homes but the beautiful palm trees.  Being a mid-westerner, we obviously don’t have gorgeous tropical plants growing in our yards.  The trunks with their decorative lattice type branches?  fronds?  whatever those are called, I just love those!

After getting my fill of beautiful scenery, it was time to find a hotel and eat, people were getting a bit crabby (possibly including myself in this).  While winging it on a trip is fun and exciting, it is sometimes an adventure.  Perhaps having adventures with four cranky children (and one mom)  isn’t always the best idea.  After filling up on Applebees of all places, we set out to find a hotel.  It soon became quite evident to us that the hotels were full.  We even were racing another guy to the next nearest hotel trying to beat him out for a room.

Can you picture the two dads, intent on finding lodging for their families for the night, racing out of their SUVs, battling it out at the front desk, running back out to drive off to the next hotel, tires screeching, kids crying, wives yelling at them to slow down.  For a few minutes I thought perhaps we were starring in a new reality tv series, Survivor Vacation Addition and the challenge was finding a hotel to sleep in for the night that didn’t contain bed bugs or cockroaches and cost less than $500 a night.

Thanks to his mad driving skills and perhaps some help from a front desk clerk who must have felt bad for us, we managed to score one of the last hotel rooms in the city at a Hampton Inn out by the airport at 10pm.   Before we found this room we were thinking we might need to drive to another city and briefly thought about heading to Florida for the night, it was going to be a two hour drive to cross the border into Florida.  The next morning as we are planning our day, we see this on the weather channel.

Hmmm…..maybe we aren’t heading to Florida today after all.  Debby threw a wrench into our plans as the Jacksonville area and even Savannah were going to be affected by this tropical storm.  After some heated debate, it was decided that maybe abandoning Florida was the best idea and perhaps going a bit further up the coast to Charleston might be best.  For those of you that are experienced tropical storm/hurricane people and are perhaps laughing that we were running from Debby, I was not about to head into flooding, torrids of rain, rip tides and possible tornadoes just to mark Florida off our list of the 48 states we’ve visited.  Maybe it wasn’t that bad but I can only listen to the weather people and take their advice.

Before heading to Charleston we did decide to hit up the beach so we headed out to Tybee Island which is like the Mackinac Island of Georgia.  It was a pretty drive out there and I was really excited as Alex and the kids have never seen the ocean before.

We were a little grossed out by all the seaweed/vegetation on the shore, not sure if that is normally there or if it is from Debby churning out in the ocean.  Anyone else been to Tybee Island?

After playing on the shore, picking a few shells and experiencing the ocean, it was time to head back onto the open road.  This time we actually booked a hotel for a few days in Charleston so we were not playing Survivor Vacation again.  I was sad to leave the beautiful city of Savannah behind but was really looking forward to seeing Charleston!

If you missed it, you can check out part 1 and part 2 of our road trip series!