Monday, December 31, 2007

My Family's Trip to Crystal Beach

The weekend before Christmas, we went down to Crystal Beach. Crystal Beach is near Port Bolivar. From Galveston, you can take a ferry or you can drive to east Houston and go the long way around. For the drive down there on Friday night, we took the long way down, stopping at a McDonald's for dinner. One of the doctors that T works with has a house down there that he let us borrow.

We awoke Saturday morning and had a relaxing breakfast. At about 8am, right across the front lawn, two helicopters flew in and landed. They were very noisy! But we enjoyed watching them land and take off. Z was scared of the loud noise.




After we go ourselves together, we went over to the beach. You are allowed to drive your car on the beach, so we drove right up. The weather was mild, so we got out and played on the sand. Z is learning baby sign language. He knows the sign for cat, which is to trace whiskers on your cheek. Except he has translated that to tugging onto his ear. When we were on the beach, Z saw a seagull. He didn't know the sign for seagull, so he used the sign for cat to let us know he saw a seagull!



E loved the beach of course!


After we had been there for a while it started to rain, so we decided to take the ferry to Galveston. The plan for the day was to drive around and look for houses for sale, then have some lunch and then go over to Moody Gardens.








We found a wonderful place for lunch. The kids enjoyed themselves and we met another family that had a daughter from China. After lunch we went to the aquarium at Moody Gardens. E is standing infront of the seal display. They were absolutely huge and would swim infront of the glass in a rythmic, OCD kind of way.




We then saw the penguin exhibit. As you can see, E is almost as big an an emperor penguin!





The last part of the aquarium is a tunnel where you are surrounded by water. Check our the shark above E's head.



There was also a theater like place that had the aquarium behind the curtain. E wanted to put on a show for me. Here she is doing ballet.


At Moody Gardens we went to see the Festival of Lights which is a walking tour through many, many, many sets of Christmas lights set to music. it was lots of fun.