Day 1 - Road Trip

Rachel and I both got to bring friends along on this trip. Rachel brought her best friend, Meredith, who lives in Madison, GA. I brought my friend Helen, who lives here in Anderson.

Mom told Helen to arrive at 8:00. And she did. We were almost ready to go (better than usual). We ended up leaving the house around 8:30, I believe.

We were meeting Meredith at the Chick-fil-a in Commerce. We got there around 9:15, but of course, we had to get out and talk for another 15 minutes or so. I suppose we got back on the road at 9:00.

Passing the time wasn't a big problem. We had a lot of catching up to do. About an hour or so later, we put in High School Musical 3. We stopped twice at rest areas before lunch. We didn't eat until 1:00 (2:00 Eastern time). We found a McDonald's, and sure enough, after five of us had already put our orders in, the employee messed it up on the last one. Then she wouldn't let us redo it - had to go and fix things. Only Meredith (the last to order) got what she asked for.

After lunch, we popped in Slumdog Millionaire and we arrived in Destin as soon as it was over.

We were in somewhat of a hurry to get there, I suppose, because it turns out we were passing our friends, the Wrights (we actually went to Destin with them in 2005 and 2006), and wanted to party the one day we were both in Destin, together.

We arrived at Shoreline Towers around 3:20, I think. Check-in was a breeze. We unloaded all of the luggage and unpacked, then Helen, Rachel, Meredith, and I decided to go walking down the beach to Inlet Reef where the Wrights were staying while Mom and Dad went to buy groceries.

That was a tough walk - mostly because there was hardly any beach to walk on. But finally, we made it. We chilled by the pool with the Wright teenagers (Emily, her best friend, Brittany, her boyfriend, Steven, and Steven's twin brother, Stewart) then headed up to their unit for drinks and catching up (there's always catching up to do!).

Gay-Gay (Mrs. Wright) called our mother and were trying to decide where to eat. Perry (Mr. Wright) wanted someplace "the locals eat" like Calahans (ew). I suggested Joe's Crab Shack (mainly because that's where we ate the first night in 2007), and we went with that.

They were going to drive us and meet up with our parents there, but we had left our shoes back at our unit, so we sent the teens to put our names in while Gay-Gay and Perry drove us back to our unit.