The Saez Family Blog: #296

For more than 10 years, the Garces/Worth (and more) families travelled to Crescent Beach, Florida for an annual vacation at the beach. Some of my earliest memories take place there, playing with Jenifer and Heidi and Joey and Holly and Alex and Becky all my other cousins and friends-that-are-so-close-they-might-as-well-be-cousins. I don't know when we started going, but there are pictures of Jenifer in diapers on the beach, so it was at least the early 80s. I think I was 14 the last year we went. And, for the past 20 years, my cousins and I have often reminisced about those weeks at the beach, and promised that one of these days, we were going to restart the tradition. I think this was the year.

It's tough to describe how meaningful it was to return to the Crescent Sandpiper with my husband and two children. The Sandpiper looked the same, just newer. The beach was bigger than my mind remembered, the pool smaller, and the beauty of the area more magnificent. It exceeded my expectations. And, to make it even more special, we celebrated Owen's 5th birthday while we were there!

Our unit was fantastic, and so conveniently located to the pool and beach. Really nice with two small kids. Although we were the only ones that rented a unit, I think the rest of the family was as eager to return as we were. Over the course of the week, we had 19 different people in our condo! (Jenifer, Kaylin, Aunt Kay, Uncle Joe, Little Joe, Maria, Baby Joey, Papa, Dad, Catherine, Mom, Leighton, Aunt Christy, Uncle Bobbie and Aunt Debbie, and the four of us)

I'm pretty sure the tradition has been restarted!

I've uploaded 75+ pictures, so I'll probably need to break this up into two posts, so here goes the picture recap:

This was our view out of our condo the first morning we woke up in Crescent Beach. Just beautiful!

We had a great location - second unit from the end, on the ground floor. It's the condo on the left in this picture. Literally just steps from the pools and the beach.

Looking back at the condo from the beach on our first night there. The setting sun was so pretty.

The evenings proved to be the very best time to be on the beach. We had the entire beach to ourselves, and the weather was just perfect.

Benjamin being goofy. You'll notice that in many of the pictures he is not wearing pants. It's because his bathing suits were giving him horrible rashes where they rubbed on his thighs, so we eventually just left them off him.