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I have lived on the Gulf Coast for almost fifteen years but didn’t hear about this Gulf Coast phenomenon called the Jubilee until recently. Once I did a little research on it, it promptly moved up my list of things that I want to see while I live on the Gulf Coast.
The Jubilee is a natural phenomenon that usually occurs early in the morning before sunrise. The water loses its oxygen forcing the sealife to push its way to more oxygenated waters. They push their way shore and become lethargic making it easy for fishing for flounder, crab, shrimp, etc. Once the water begins to mix the oxygen will level out again and the bottom-dwellers will head back into the ocean.
Apparently it is a sight to see and those who have grown up in the Mobile area describe how they can sense a Jubilee is going to occur. There are a few things according to several articles I read that said that it usually occurs during a rising tide and will stop when the tide falls, the wind is usually coming from the east, and they usually occur in the summer (August and September being the most likely months according to one article).
I can only hope that the oil slick will not affect this and that maybe sometime this summer we should make reservations at a hotel on the Mobile Bay and take our chances to see a Jubilee in all its glory!
To see pictures of a Jubilee, visit this site. For more information about the Jubilee, see Wikipedia and this article in the Clanton advertiser. To read a wonderful narrative from a local who spent many summers on Mobile Bay, visit here.
Stop by Mother of All Trips to see what others are dreaming of today!
The beginning of June means that it is blueberry time down here in the South. The blueberries are almost ready and we will be picking pounds and pounds of them next week! I know that it is time to go blueberry picking because I just finished up the last bag of frozen blueberries that we picked from last year.
I love blueberry picking with the family because the blueberry bushes are tall enough so that the adults don’t have to stoop and they are low enough so that the kids don’t need a stool to reach!
My daughter loved to pick the blueberries but once she realized how tasty they were, she was often found sitting in the middle of the blueberry bush eating! She wasn’t much help after that!
Big S loved to pick the blueberries, but he still refuses to eat them!
These are the things that we take blueberry picking so that it makes the adventure an easy and fun one:
- bottled water – The sun starts beating down quickly and you will be glad you remembered your water.
- an empty cooler – If you plan on picking more than a bucket full, you will want to bring an empty cooler to put the berries in. If you put the bags or buckets of berries on the ground for an extended period of time, the potential for ants finding said bucket increases exponentially!
- bubbles or something equally quiet – The kids lasted for quite some time but they were definitely done picking blueberries before we were finished. The bubbles kept them occupied while we finished picking.
- plastic bags – for storing your blueberries when your bucket is full
- cash – Most places take cash only. The farm we went to did take checks.
Here are some blueberry patches in our area:
What are your favorite U-pick items?
Stop by DeliciousBaby to see where other travelers are this week!
If you haven’t been following Trekaroo’s blog this past week you should drop by. They have been showcasing National Parks and have had some great articles lately about Yellowstone, Yosemite and other great National Parks. I can’t believe that I have never shared one of my favorite things about living on the Gulf Coast! Being close to the Gulf Islands National Seashore! The Gulf Islands National Seashore is located in parts of Mississippi and Florida. Here are just a few of the things that you can do at the Gulf Islands National Seashore:
1. Visit real forts – Visit Ft. Pickens and Ft. Barrancas and see how the Pensacola area was protected. You can take a self-guided tour or join a ranger for a guided tour.
2. Go camping – There are several options for both primitive and developed camping at the Gulf Islands National Seashore. Our favorite camping spot is Ft. Pickens.
3. Play in the sand and the surf – The Gulf Islands National Seashore is full of miles and miles of beautiful powdery white sand. Play in the sand and then cool off from the humidity in the surf…mild as it may be!
4. Go fishing – No one in my family is a fisherman so we don’t have much experience with this but there is always tons of people fishing throughout the seashore.
5. Go for a walk or a bike ride – There are so many trails for walking and biking. It can’t get much better than watching a sunset while biking on a trail or walking hand in hand along the water.
Stop by Trekaroo’s Spotlight Thursday to read about other national parks.
The other day a friend told me that I definitely paint a pretty picture of family travel but that it truly can’t be as full of singing birds and perfect sunny days as I make it seem. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I guess I want to share the happy side of traveling with your kids because we are such advocates of it. I am always honest but usually if we have an awful experience, I just choose not to write about it. I try to be an optimistic person in my every day life so naturally that is going to come out in my blog. That being said I realize that I have left out a major part of traveling with kids…the mishaps and disasters! I give you my (and my husband’s favorite) traveling with kids mishaps and disasters (in no particular order of miserable-ness!)!!
- I am pretty sure that if I googled “screaming toddler in a puffy pink jacket” that I will find a video of me trying to jam my temper tantrum throwing, screaming, flailing, red-faced two year old into a backpack stroller in front of a hundred laughing tourists (all of whom were taping the entire process with cell phones or video cameras) on the Hofburg Palace grounds in Vienna, Austria. I eventually got her strapped in and we were able to run in the opposite direction but those ten minutes truly haunt me everytime she starts to act up in public. This probably falls into the top ten embarrassing moments of my whole life…well, most of these probably fall into that category. If you have seen the video, please email me the link…on second thought, never mind.
- In the summer of 2008, we flew to Colorado, rented a car and in the time span of one week drove from Denver, Colorado to Casper, WY and then to Jackson Hole, WY through Yellowstone to Cody, WY, back to Casper and then to Denver to fly home. It was this trip where we learned that a minivan is a must when we travel. We only have two children so we were trying to save money by renting a compact. Our children saw nothing but the inside of the car for the entire trip because they couldn’t see out the windows. I think my daughter cried the entire week we were there and my son had me take pictures out the window and show him the camera screen so he could see what he was missing. And to top it all off, I had stopped to buy a bottle of wine halfway through the exhausting trip only to have the thing shatter into a million pieces on the front step of the store. That was my breaking point and I cried. Some kind woman handed me a wet one from her perfectly behaved child’s stroller to mop up my tears and the blood from my fingers.
- When my son was two (I am sensing a two year old theme here) I took a red eye flight leaving California around 8 at night and arriving in Atlanta, Georgia at 4:30am with a connecting flight to Pensacola, FL at 6:30. You might ask why I remember these details so vividly. This goes down as the worst. flight. of. my. life (next only to the one where Little S screamed the entire time because of a busted ear drum). Big S had a night terror thirty minutes after taking off. He screamed at the top of his lungs for two hours (if you have ever seen a child experience a night terror, you know what I mean…yikes!) and sobbed for the rest of the flight while I took turns taking up space in the bathroom and standing in the galley. Thank goodness for amazing and sympathetic flight attendants.
- While we were in Amsterdam, we had just arrived by train from Brussels. We hurried out of the station to grab the GVB tram (the local public transportation) that we thought was correct. The doors closed on our stroller so while my husband and I were inside the tram, my son was on the outside. I had a moment of panic before someone got the driver’s attention so he could stop the tram and open the doors so we could get the stroller inside. After all this, we found out we weren’t even going in the right direction.
- When my son was 10 months old we attended a family vacation on my husband’s side at Disneyworld. Big S got incredibly sick with explosive diapers while we were at the Animal Kingdom. By 10 in the morning, we had gone through all of the changes of clothes and every single diaper in the diaper bag. On the Disney bus back to the hotel no one would sit near me (including my family) because I was covered in poop and vomit holding a baby that was covered in poop and vomit. Everytime I see a picture of the T-Rex near the dinosaur ride I think about those miserable diaper changes.
- During a layover in Atlanta my son knocked a brand new 32 ounce soda over. Unfortunately the soda was sitting on the ground at the top of one of the many ramps that are found in the airport so instead of creating a small pool that would have made cleanup easy, the soda rolled about 12 feet down the ramp spreading all over and then pooled.
So there you have it…some of our favorite disasters! There have been many more and I will continue to share them. These mishaps could have kept us from our next vacation but we wouldn’t have as many great stories to tell!
What is your favorite family travel disaster moment? Do share!
Monday night, Mara over at Mother of All Trips announced on Twitter that I was the winner of her San Antonio giveaway. It includes two nights in San Antonio as well as passes to several attractions. So why am I mentioning this in my Travel Blogger Tuesday spotlight?
I have been following Wandering Off for awhile now. She lives in San Antonio and has written a ton of articles about her adventures. I love to read about a place that I have only visited briefly during cross country vacations or moves. I will be visiting her blog even more over that next month or so as we plan our trip to San Antonio. I love that she explores her hometown with as much excitement as her other travels. Here are some of my favorite posts:
It is your turn! Do you have a favorite post from this week? Leave the link here!
Today I am dreaming about summer vacation. My son has NINE days of school left. Count ‘em with me…Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday…NINE. Nine days of Kindergarten left. The first school year will be tucked tightly under his belt and we will have survived having to get into a routine, a daily schedule that forced me to realize my children are getting older.
In nine short days, Big S will be off of school for two months. Yesterday we took a little day trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama and as we were driving around I realized that we were going to be able to do much more of this over the next two months. We are very lucky to have several road trips planned this summer: Tennessee, two separate trips to Virginia, and a trip to Orlando. There are a few other trips in the works if we can save up the funds and we will be taking plenty of day trips in and around Pensacola.
We won’t be flying on any of these trips but if you will be, check out the Bing price Predictor Summer Forecast before you purchase. We have been eyeing the Price Predictor for the past few weeks because we are about to make a ticket purchase for an anniversary trip in October!
Before you plan your summer vacation, stop by Trekaroo to learn about family friendly activities, hotels and restaurants. Trekaroo is one of my favorite review sites (kind of like a Trip Advisor except for families) and we have found so many great activities that we might have missed otherwise. You can check out all the reviews, see my reviews and their Summer of Travel Contest that is currently running.
I wrote this blog post while participating in the Bing Travel and Trekaroo summer vacation spotlight for a chance to win a $500 gift card. For more information on how you can participate, click here.
What is it? Part zoo, part children’s museum, part educational museum, part aquarium. The Virginia Living Museum is possibly one of the best museums I have been to in a long time. It is educational and kid-friendly but at the same time it will captivate adults for hours as well. The building is set up so that you walk through different Virginia habitats. In each gallery, you will see exhibits that showcase the animal and plant life from each habitat.
I have an ASTC Membership card so the visit was free, which definitely makes the deal even sweeter! We went to the Virginia Living Museum with the intention of spending an hour or two and then heading to the next activity but we ended up spending hours wandering around inside and out and then back inside again!
There are interactive stations throughout the entire museum where you and the kids can learn more about the animals and the lives they lead.
There are Discovery Centers where you can interact with animals. Our favorite was the Chesapeake Bay Touch Tank.
The Coastal Plain Aviary will allow you to get up close and personal with more than 16 species of birds native to the area.
The Outdoor Boardwalk is a wonderful walk and along the way you will see beavers, bald eagles, bobcats, wild turkeys and more. This was one of our favorite parts!
There is also a Planetarium, a Butterfly Garden and an observatory.
The Virginia Living Museum is located at 524 J. Clyde Morris Blvd., Newport News, VA 23601.
Stop by DeliciousBaby to see where others are traveling today!
For Travel Blogger Tuesday this week, I am going to share with you this amazing project launch that I was lucky enough to be a part of. If you obsessively read travel blogs like I do (or just read a few favorites!), you might remember a blog tag by Tripbase that was going around for the past 8 months or so called the Best Kept Travel Secrets. We participated here at Two Kids and a Map and also at my Pensacola with Kids blog. I had so much fun following everyone’s best travel secrets on the web. I was honored to be asked to contribute my best kept travel secrets to the E-Book.
Today, they have announced the launch of the Best Kept Travel Secrets E-Book. For every FREE E-book downloaded, one dollar will be donated to Charity Water, an organization that provides the funding to build freshwater wells and clean drinking water to people in developing nations. You can also make your own Charity Water donation.
Be sure to stop by and download the book! You will be amazed the secrets that you will learn!
I’ve helped, please help too
Bluebird Gap Farm is not what you think it is by name. When we made the trip Bluebird Gap Farm, we were expecting a farm in the country…you know stereotypical stuff…rolling hills of crops, animals roaming, etc! When I got off the freeway exit, I thought for sure the GPS took us to the wrong place. We were in the middle of the city. Houses on one side, businesses on the other…but we turned down the last street and here was Bluebird Gap Farm!
The kids loved walking from one animal area to another naming the animals, talking to them and taking pictures. There were cows, goats, horses, llamas, pigs, deer, turtles, geese. It is a city park with animals! There are feed machines around so that you can give the animals a snack. There are clean restrooms, a great playground and covered seating to get out of the sun. And the best part?!? It is FREE to visit!
Stop by DeliciousBaby to see where others are traveling today! I am also linking up to the Talking Trekaroo Weekly Spotlight.
Ok…I am a slacker. I haven’t posted a Travel Blogger Tuesday in several weeks. We will try again, but I am letting myself off the hook. I will post Travel Blogger Tuesday as often as I can but I am not going to stress!! I probably would have skipped another week but I just have to tell you about The Lollipop Road. I have been reading The Lollipop Road for a few months now and I love to read about their adventures.
Through this month, The Lollipop Road is celebrating cruising with kids. My husband and I have been cruising before but we have not been with children yet. We went to the Bahamas for four short days with two friends and had a blast. There is a reasonable priced cruise ship that sails from Mobile, which is about 45 minutes away from us so we have thought about it but just haven’t bought the cruise tickets. The Lollipop Road likes cruising with their kids. They are cruising with their kids for the entire month.
The. Entire. Month.
How cool is that?!? They are cruising three different cruise types and reporting back on them. A few of my favorite articles:
Now it is your turn! As part of Travel Blogger Tuesday, I would love for you to link your favorite travel post. Even if you don’t keep a travel blog, if you wrote about a cool place you want to tell us all about leave the link here!
