Our Memorial Day Weekend

We went down to Orange Beach, AL for Memorial weekend and enjoyed the gulf coast beaches. I think of them as beginner beaches. Sugar sand, baby waves, no gunk in the warm waters. Perfect. We found a condo on the ground floor with the sand just outside our patio and the beach constantly beckoning to the boys. They loved digging in the sand. Trace loved walking into the waves and seemed determined to walk into the deep end of the ocean if I'd only let him. Clint even managed to give Talmage and Jack each a solo boogie board ride. And we snuck into our the neighboring hotel's waterslide and lazy river one night and that was fun too.
It was awesome being there with Joey and Katie--they are pros at having fun and GREAT cooks of Cafe Rio sweet pork enchiladas. Katie wrote a great blog on this and featured some of these great photos of us (Thanks for taking the risks with your camera. What a great photographer!).
On Sunday we went to the greatest Memorial Day sacrament meeting ever. To accommodate the beach crowd they had to keep serving the sacrament and half of us ended up getting the water before the bread. The last speaker was 89 and a veteran of World War II, and served in the Navy for 30 years after that. He cried when he talked about some of the things he'd seen.
Our Memorial Day observance took us to the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. It was like a huge playground for the boys. There must have been 30 aircraft with cockpits they could climb into and a ship deck cannon that they got to "operate." Tal said, "Come on Cole let's go down there and find the bad guys." Cole: "I've got a bad feeling about this!" Our visit to the museum was a pilgramage for Clint to see the homemade sign that was made by his squadron in Iraq. It had his name and the names of all the guys who served over there. The museum wanted it because HCS-5 was the first (and until recently, only) Naval Aviation presence in Iraq. They were the air support for the Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces. Later they they helped train and operated with the Iraqi special forces brigade.