January 2 to January 7th

New Smyrna Beach FL.

While we were at the cat place, we also were packing up to go to a beach house that the cousins (Meridian, Acadia, Sawyer) rented because of Meridian’s soccer game in Orlando. We rented a car and drove to their house with some presents and beach things. It took around 3 hours to get there because the traffic was so bad we didn’t even get to the hotel, we had to go straight to the soccer field. When we got there, we had a lot of fun and Sawyer and I found a big lock on a chain and started whacking random things like anthills, trees and propped up sticks. After the game sawyer and I went with Uncle Peter and Janice back to their hotel and sawyer and I started watching stupid cartoons on TV for no apparent reason. After that Grandpa took us to a fancy Japanese Steak House where the cooks bring all the food to your table and cook it on a small oven and do fancy tricks with the cooking utensils and food, including the onion volcano (see the picture), they also juggled eggs and used fire to cook a lot. The food there was really good and if you go to one, bring a camera.
 

  In the morning we all headed to the beach house which had an icy pool, a fancy pool table, a weird hot tub, some cool luxury things like that, the only thing I didn’t like was that Sawyer and I got the only bedroom with absolutely no windows. But you would have to wear your wetsuit in the pool unless you were fond of hyperthermia, and the hot tub was green and smelled funny (the two things connected) but it was at least warm. Soon after we explored the house we got our wetsuits on and went to the beach to play in the waves.
We didn’t have a wide selection of body boards so we had to improvise using some old ones and pool floats. The waves were really big and there was no current the first two days. The waves that we rode actually already crashed and reformed and were still over four feet tall. Grandpa was awesome and rented us some extra body boards so we could all have one. One day we went to the beach for six hours and I think we all ended up pretty tired because I was sore the next couple days. When we were back at the house though we were either playing pool, hiding in our bedrooms doing stuff, or in the pool/hot tub. We still had lots of fun at the house though and we sometimes played blackjack of poker and some other card games like that. Sadly in a couple days we had to head back to the boat. But when we got back we found out that a cat got in and was curling in a ball in the corner of our cockpit which was really cute.