Me and Ben, Jake and Kate, and my mom took off around 9:30 pm Tuesday night and headed for Daytona. We thought that it would make more sense to make the 10 hour drive to Daytona at night so that we could use the day on Wednesday to lay out on the beach and relax. So we pulled out of my drive way at 9:46. The drive was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. We took Jake and Kate's Trailblazer. Jake and Ben took turns driving and the girls mostly hung out in the back. We had planned on sleeping most of the way but we were so uncomfortable that we weren't able to sleep. We all took "no-doze". Apparently its a caffeine pill that is supposed to keep you awake. It worked really good because we never got tired. We made sure we stopped every now and then to stretch our legs. We watched a few movies and sung a lot of songs!! We stopped once we got past Valdosta, GA and ate at Waffle House. It gave us the energy to make it the rest of the trip.
Before we knew it the sun was up and we were in sunny Daytona Beach, FL. We called the hotel ahead of time and let them know that we were going to be here WAY before check-in. They told us that if we got here before check-in they would give us a visitors key and we could get into all the areas in the hotel except our room.
We got here about 10:00 am or so Wednesday morning. We immediately went to the pool. It was hot but there was a nice breeze. It was great to finally be out of the car and sitting with a good book starring at the HUGE Atlantic Ocean. We layed out for about an hour before we realized that the Waffle House breakfast had worn off long ago!! So we got our cover-ups on and went to find some food. The hotel is really nice and has a little restaurant thing but it mainly has appetizers and it didn't seem like anything we wanted so we headed to the car.
We found this cute little area that has a ton of restaurants and shops. We ended up eating at Bubba Gump Shrimp. It was delicious!! It's all about Forest Gump... Kate amazed us with her skills of naming shrimp...
While we were there we noticed that the National Guard was setting up for an event for later in that day. Our waitress said that Dale Jr. was going to be there for a meet and greet and to sign some autographs at around 6. After talking it about, we decided that we wouldn't wait. It was so hot already and we really didn't feel like sitting around waiting to possibly see Jr for 5 hours! So we headed back to the hotel.
Wednesday afternoon went by extremely slow. We kept looking at the time and going, "What the heck?? It's only 2:00?" Our room wasn't ready until about 4 so we layed out in the sun until then. We got ready and headed to town. We went down to the boardwalk. It brought back a lot of memories being back there. We used to play in the arcade and stuff when I was little and would come with my family. We ended up walking down the boardwalk all the way to the little shops that we had been at earlier in the day. We decided that since it was so late Dale Jr would probably already be gone, but we would check it out anyway. We walked around for a while and were about to leave when the announcer people said that they we about to draw names for people that were going to play in a football challenge that Dale Jr was going to help judge. We decided that we would stay since he would be coming back.
We went and stood by a little fence that they had set up. A literally not 5 minutes later Dale Jr walked down the stairs and started signing autographs for people and taking pictures with everyone. We were so glad that we stayed. We ended up being like 2 feet from him! It was awesome! We always make fun of my mom because how fanatic she is, she gets all crazy happy. Well I know now that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Once he passed by us, I realized I forgot I had my cell phone and could take pictures with that. I was running around trying to get more pictures with him.
Once Jr left, we left as well. We walked back down the board walk and ate pizza. We thought a storm was coming so we ate inside an arcade. The storm ended up passing over us and we were able to walk around and shop at all the little shops at the Boardwalk.
I'll write more about the rest of our trip tomorrow... Right now I'm going to spend some quality time with my husband!!
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