4th of July Weekend Recap

We spent our 4th of July holiday weekend in Orange Beach, AL with Eric's brother and his fiance.  It was a WONDERFUL weekend, a perfect of balance and relaxation with a little bit of excitement in between.

Eric picked me up from work on Friday afternoon and we headed down south.  Luckily there was not too much traffic, just a little bit once we made it into Orange Beach.  Saturday we were up and at em at 4:00 AM to head out to fish!  I fell asleep on the way out but had Eric wake me up just before sunrise--I couldn't miss it!

The sky opposite the sunrise right before the sun came up.

Eric and I right before sunrise....it was early give me a break.

There's the sun!

It was a pretty good trip.  We caught a limit of red snapper, plus a few other random fish:  trigger fish, white snapper, beeliner, and a scamp (type of grouper).    At one point during the day we realized  we were sandwiched between two thunderstorms.   One was to our left and one was to our right most of the day, but we never had rough water or anything other than blue skies above us!  We did get to see a pretty cool site in one of the storms.....a water spout.  I had no idea what it was but I quickly learned it was a tornado on the water.  It was pretty cool, and a little freaky. It lasted a good 5-10 minutes so I was able to get a bunch of pictures of it.   Because we were out on the water it looked like it was pretty close, but it was nearly 10 miles from us, so we were safe...like I said we had sunshine and calm waters. It was pretty amazing!

Water spout!

We slept in on Sunday and did not head out to fish until that afternoon.  We caught a few more snapper, and headed back in.  That night we caught some fireworks at one of the resorts on the beach.  It was conveniently located where we could see it from the boat in the bay so we got a nice show.  

After we got back from the fireworks.

Monday we did next to nothing and it was WONDERFUL!  We were all pretty exhausted, so aside from cooking lunch and a short stroll/impromptu photoshoot on the beach, we slept, and watched movies (it was too hot to go outside), and laid around all day long. Our choices for lunch did not help our lethargic moods.  We had an All-American feast of barbecue ribs, potato salad, baked beans, and garlic bread.  And as if that was not enough, we topped it off with a very patriotic red velvet cake made by my very talented soon to be sister-in-law.

Here are a few pictures from the beach photo shoot.  I was playing with some new editing features I just discovered on Picnik so I had some fun with the pictures.

The only near-not-so-fun thing we had happen was the AC going out in Eric's brother's house on Monday night (hence the reason the boys agreed to come walk on the beach with us).  Believe it or not we found not one but TWO different repair guys who were working on the 4th.  Not only that, the guy who came had a bunch of calls so he didn't make it to the house until 11:15 PM that night!  Luckily it was a quick fix and we were able to get a few hours of good (cool) sleep.  Eric and I were up early and headed back home by 5:45 AM so we could both get a full day of work in.   I decided about 3:00 PM Tuesday afternoon that I was really glad we napped for so long on Monday because I would not have made it otherwise.