A Nice Change with a Dab of a Miracle

After reading a friend's blog today, I realized I had failed to post a recent entry about our latest adventure. As many of you Facebook faithfuls know, my family and I journeyed to the beach last weekend. This was a trip of both business and pleasure. I was elated that the business part was at the beginning of the trip, so that we could enjoy the remainder of the trip relaxing.

We were so blessed to be given a "condo" for the weekend by some friends of ours in our local church. I say condo very lightly because it was a 3 bedroom 3 bath plus a loft 2200 sq.ft. "condo". Needless to say we were very surprised and blessed when we arrived. We arrived late on Thursday evening, but not to late to enjoy one of mine and Joshua's sinful pleasures, BlueBell Ice Cream. Yes, we stopped at the local grocery store on our way in (the condo is 11 miles from the closest grocery) and picked up two pints of ice cream.

On Friday and Saturday, we literally felt like we were doing nothing. After Joshua attended some dangling business items, we journeyed down to a blustery beach front. Samantha Grace was not too sure about the sand between her toes. I have my fears that we have a prissy girl on our hands. Below is a picture of Samantha-Grace and me exploring the sand just before a large wave pushed in and soaked my shorts.



We also discovered that our friends evidently had the mack daddy of all golf carts in the neighborhood. I will say that it was large (3 rows and off road tires), but we didn't realize it was that fancy. At least we didn't realize it until all the "Snow Birds" (Senior Citizens who "migrate" south for the winter) would stop us in the neighborhood to admire the cart. Samantha-Grace favored driving the cart rather than riding in it. Below is a picture of her trying to find the horn to beep.



After a relaxing and enjoyable dinner at Lulu's (a restaraunt owned by Jimmy Buffett's sister), we dove into an oldie but goodie movie "The Breakfast Club". Needless to say, I was exhausted and fell asleep after 30 minutes. On Saturday we leasurely took our time exiting what seemed like a very relaxing weekend. This is when the miracle took place.

Once back to Montgomery, I sadly handed the keys back to our friend within the same breath she told me she had a story to tell me. She said that Saturday night (around 2 AM) the house next to theirs at the beach burned down. I truly believe it was the good Lord telling us to come home on Saturday and not leave extra early on Sunday for church. The other amazing thing is that with the houses practically being right on top of each other, we figured there would be some damage on the east side of the house; but, much to our amazement and the wonderful work of the Gulf Shores Fire Department the house was left without mark or blemish!