It all started low-key enough…

We packed up the car and started our 12 hour road-trip and were happy to make it to Hilton Head Island, SC in record time with no traffic along the god-forsaken interstate that is I-95.

When we arrived, the sun was shining (sort of), but it was already dinnertime so we unpacked, had pizza, and went to sleep dreaming visions of the beach, the pool, and wearing my cute new sandals…

and then we woke up to rain.

and wind.

and COLD!

We figured, oh well, there’s always a chance of a couple of duds when it comes to vacation days. We went to the movies wearing the warmest clothes we had and thought little about it (by the way, we saw Star Trek and it was AWESOME!!! highly recommend!)

Then the next day came, and it was pouring rain. And it was hellish windy. The thermometer never reached over 62 degrees that day, but it felt like 40. I rewashed the only pair of jeans we brought (each of us had one pair of jeans and one sweatshirt).

I washed those items for 6 days straight.

It rained every. single. solitary. day …but one. It wasn’t warm, almost hinging on downright COLD.

And on the day it didn’t rain, we were in Savannah, GA. Not near the beach or a pool. We rushed back in the afternoon and relished in 3 hours of swim time.

That was it for the WHOLE 9 days.

Three frickin’ hours.

We never went to the beach.. not once. We SAW the beach last Tuesday, and it was windy and cold so we left (notice the size of the waves).

We literally sat in the room watching the skies open up over and over, prayed that the “Heat Miser” would go kick Mother Nature’s ass and provide warmth. We spent the days going to the movies (later in the week we saw the new “Terminator”… which sucked btw) or shopping in between raindrops. We ate. We slept (a lot). We were vegetables by Sunday when we left.

The locals that live on the island all said the same thing, “Gosh, I’ve never seen this kind of weather in my life here!”

Mind you, we go to HHI every year, the same week in May. The temperature always in the mid-80’s to 90’s, and maybe (MAYBE) one day of rain or an afternoon thunderstorm.

This was persistent, driving, cold, rain. On the “warmest” day it was 77.

We literally ran out of things to do. I even reached my shopping limit (made even more challenging since we had a small shopping budget this year due to our personal economic situation). GASP!!!

I don’t even have very many pictures to share with you. The weather always made the camera fog up outside, and how many inside pictures can you take (or care to take?)

This is as close to a sunset that we could find.

Desperate, we started doing some touristy sites IN THE RAIN. Specifically, graveyards. Not that we meant it to be a metaphor for our vacation, but somehow we ended up at graveyards everywhere we drove. Most of the civil war era, depressing places made even more lonely and scary with the weather. Check out this headstone. Poor guy’s grave is halfway grown into a tree hundreds of years old.

Everything was grey. This is the view of our deck from outside.

The upside to our vacation from hell… we rested. We worried about David not having fun, but that was all ridiculous in the end. He painfully wanted to take a few more runs down the water slide at the pool, but really, he could have cared less that it rained. Six year olds can have fun anywhere (plus, he did get his hands on “extra toys” bought because Mommy and Daddy felt bad for him).
Does this look like a happy kid, or what? (this picture taken in Beaufort, SC… we drove to look for sun that day and got about one hour of it)

I guess it could have been worse (better than being bored at home for sure), but what the hell happened? I bet we will talk about this vacation for years and years to come, because isn’t it the bad ones that you end up remembering most?

When we got home to Jersey? Sunny and 83 degrees, I kid you not.

I wistfully put my sandals on the shelf for another (sunny) day.