Christmas Vacation

NC Museum of Natural Sciences

Museum lunch break- in the car

Chinese Light Festival

Who loves pandas?

Best display

A unicorn

Weekend at Steph and Ben's

The afternoon hike- that turned into 4 hours

Sister love

Carriage ride thru Charleston

Charleston Aquarium

View from our condo

And then it snowed

Palm trees look sad in the snow

Walking in a winter wonderland

Just another day at the beach

-From Cleveland we drove 10 hours to Raleigh, NC and stayed with Steph and Ben for 3 nights.
-We visited the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Ben took the older boys TPing, Julia made brownies with Steph, Nate took everyone on a "short" hike, we played games and ate all their food.
-We went to the Chinese Lantern Festival which was very cool. We enjoyed the acrobat show and Lexi declared, "I can do that." We had 4 adults for 5 children and yet we lost Stephen. We all walked away from the dragon display and after a couple minutes we realized he was gone. Thankfully he had been smart and stayed put, told the adults his Dad's name, and Nate could hear him crying. Gpa and Gma J flew down for the weekend to join in the fun. 
-On New Years Eve we drove to Charleston, SC and rented a condo.  Steph/Ben joined us for one night and we celebrated New Year's Eve with them.  The older boys made it to midnight with us.
-Everything was closed on New Year's Day so we played games, ate snacks, and watched movies.
-On Tuesday it was 30 degrees, but that wasn't going to stop us! We took an hour long carriage ride of downtown Charleston and froze ourselves. We then had an amazing lunch at a seafood restaurant. It may have been amazing because we were frozen, but we warmed up with hot cider/hot chocolate and let the kids try some Charleston cuisine- grits, hush puppies, fried crab legs and popcorn shrimp.  After that we went to the aquarium- very over priced for not much to see. 
-On Wednesday it SNOWED- about 3 inches so everything shut down.  We tried to make the most of it- games, snacks, movies and playing charades.  We took a drive to the beach and saw the Atlantic Ocean- looks like we are in the arctic.
-On Thursday everything was still shut down so we said, that's enough, time to head back to MI where we have snow clothes and nothing shuts down because of snow. So we left for home a day early.

When we made plans this summer to spend Christmas in Charleston it sounded like a great idea. Usually temps are in the 50's/60's- perfect for taking walks, riding bikes and so forth.  Well, this trip was not what we had hoped for.  But, we still had fun and made memories together!