Thankful: Part 3

To wrap up this arch about our Thanksgiving vacation, I’m going to take a trip down memory lane. This post centers around the trip to my dad’s house in Fort Myers. Growing up, he and my mom took my cousin Mark and me on vacation to Sanibel Island (driving from Massillon, Ohio). Every. Year. You’d think being a kid, that might have been boring and repetitive year in and year out, but it was a blast.

Awesome memories from this period in my life include but are not limted to:

• watching Wayne’s World twenty times in the van
• playing beach volleyball for 23 hours a day, one time in a lightning storm
• playing shuffleboard for much longer than people younger than 72 ever should (but don’t knock shuffleboard, because its awesome)
•  swallowing saltwater during games of catch in the Gulf
• getting stalked by the resident alligator after it massacred our football
• regretting drinking the Keylime milkshake
• sneaking down the the condo with the awesome slide
• an epic rental bike ride in a downpour
• putting my scotch-irish excuse for a pigment to the test and seeing how many cycles I could burn and peel (getting a tan is still elusive…)

These might sound like odd memories to cherish, but I do. They really are legendary to me. But I digress.

I don’t know how it worked, but somehow, we always seemed to be staying in the vacation condo at the same time as a group of friends  that we met down there. Our days were filled with swimming,, hunting for alligators (not literally), and hanging out with all the cool people we would meet. One of our childhood goals was to walk the entire perimeter of Sanibel Island and end up back at our annual condo complex named Pointe Santos. Never quite made it (and I see why based on the aerials), but I’m not throwing in the towel. Man…. good times.

It was a really special honor for me to get to come full circle and take my daughter back there with my dad and see her frolic in the Gulf of Mexico and take some aerial shots of that and the greatness that is Sanibel Island.

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