#Ceviche House Hawaii

[seniouesbabes]

Lily Maymac 🌸💋🍒🌸 Peruvian Cerviche 🤤

[tglifestyle]

Friday

Lox bagel at Sunrise Cafe

The first four days had been pretty busy, with us on the go, so the girls requested a “chill beach day” for Friday.  We had reservations for a luau that evening, so the plan was to hit up the beach, then head back to the house to shower and get ready for dinner.  We started out at Sunrise Café for breakfast.  This is a little hole in the wall place on Front Street just past the library.  The place looks like it’s been constructed of scrap pieces over the years, as it’s kind of patched together, but it has character.  It’s pretty small and they only have 3 employees, so don’t expect fast service.  However, we didn’t get there until after 10, so folks were starting to clear out and our wait wasn’t nearly as bad as we anticipated.  My husband ordered the Loco Moco, I had the lox bagel with a side of potatoes, and the girls each ordered pancakes and waffles.  The food was good, but not stellar in any sense of the imagination.  The “potatoes” I ordered ended up being a hash brown patty like you’d get at McDonalds. And Sydney swore her pancakes were the frozen microwave kind.  “I ate enough of those as a kid.  I know what they taste like.”  My bagel was actually pretty good and had sprouts and tomatoes on it.  It was tasty and healthy.

Ka’anapali Beach

After breakfast we headed to the beach.  This time we went to Ka’anapali Beach.  Ka’anapali is the resort area on the north end of Lahaina. The beach was much bigger than Kapalua and had plenty of free parking, as well as nice restrooms.  If you are deciding between the two, go to Ka’anapali. Same as the other beaches, we brought our own chairs, as there isn’t chair service on the beach.  I also suggest bringing a cooler of drinks because unless you are staying at one of the resorts, there really wasn’t anywhere within walking distance to purchase drinks.

After a couple hours soaking up the sun, we decided to get shave ice (here, it’s “shave” ice, not “shaved” ice!).  Since we own and operate a shaved ice business in Georgia, my husband and daughters are connoisseurs of the stuff.  We make New Orleans style snoballs at our business, which use a different type of machine than the Hawaiian shave ice.  But, for the most part they are basically the same thing, just made and served a little differently.  Ululani’s is the most popular place for shave ice here. They have several locations all over the island.  We went to their location on Front Street.  There is always a long line at this place, but don’t let that scare you; it’s worth the wait.  And, honestly, it moves pretty fast.  I had the Citrus Squeeze, which was pink lemonade, lemon, and lime.  It was very refreshing after our day at the beach! My husband had mango and it was so good – it tasted like fresh fruit.

For our evening dining and entertainment, I made reservations at The Feast at Lele Luau.  Supposedly the “best” luau is Old Lahaina Luau, but that sells out in advance very quickly and I couldn’t get tickets for they days I wanted.  I chose Feast at Lele based on reviews, and also because it offered table service for the meal – no buffet line to stand in!  Be prepared:  the luaus, no matter where you book, are expensive.  I spent over $500 for four tickets, plus tip.  Plus photo.

When you check in, you are greeted with a welcome cocktail (a maitai, of course) and a fresh flower lei, then escorted to your table by a hostess.  There are photographers on the beach who will take your photo, which you can then purchase at the end of the show.  You are also welcome to take your own photos if you wish, but it was nice to have someone take a good family photo for us.

To start, they serve freshly made banana and sweet potato chips with a delicious tropical salsa. My daughter liked the salsa so much, she kept the bowl for all of the courses, so she could add it to her food.  This is a five-course meal, featuring foods from Hawaii, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Samoa, followed by dessert.  The dancing and entertainment throughout the evening goes along the same themes with traditional dances and music from the four areas.  I think my favorite foods were the kalua pork served in the first course and the ceviche served during the third course (Tahiti).  But all of the food was very good.   I will say, however, there wasn’t much to choose from for vegetarians, and I don’t know if they make any special accommodations or not.

The full menu is available on their website.  Drinks are included, and they have decent list of cocktails and some wines.  The servers were AMAZING.  They turned around drink orders very quickly and served the food with a smile.  They were also good at explaining what each item was when they brought it to your table.  Even though the entire evening is prepaid when you make your reservation, they still bring you a check at the end so you know the appropriate amount to tip, because gratuity is not included in the price.

After the luau, we returned to the house with bellies very full for a quick 3 hour nap.  We had to be up to catch our tour bus at 2:00 a.m.!

Check out Saturday’s post for details on our trip to the Haleakala Sunrise.

Travel Diaries: Maui Day 5 Friday The first four days had been pretty busy, with us on the go, so the girls requested a “chill beach day” for Friday. 

[sensespike3-blog]

Eating Is an Existential Chore on ‘Forever’ and ‘The Good Place’

When I was younger, my mother and I would play a game. It started with a simple question: “If you could eat one [X] for the rest of your life, what would it be?” The [X] in question varied: sometimes we’d leave it totally open; sometimes reduce it to a cuisine or restaurant dish or a fruit or a cheese. But there would always be one condition attached: Every time you ate the thing, it would taste as good as the very first time you’d tried it.

The extended montage that opens the first episode of Amazon’s acclaimed series Forever explains why this caveat was always necessary. The show charts the slow decline and gradual rehabilitation of the marriage between Oscar (Fred Armisen) and June (Maya Rudolph), two contented-seeming, yuppy-ish types living out contented-seeming, yuppy-ish lives in the suburbs of Southern California. They meet-cute, bond over drinks and dinner, and eventually buy a lake house. Oscar appears to spend most of his time there fishing and cooking his catch. We later learn that his signature preparation is trout amandine, but at this point in the series, all we see is Oscar present it, with a flourish, to June. And he does so again and again and again, with consistent enthusiasm on his part, but visibly dwindling interest from his wife.

The scene illustrates the repetition and tedium of this dysfunctional marriage in microcosm: the initial excitement, followed by the slow decline into borderline-resentful boredom on the part of June in particular. Showrunner Alan Yang could have used anything to chart the evolution of their relationship — think of the equally masterful sequence that opens Pixar’s Up — but it’s hardly surprising that he lands on food. As anyone familiar with another Yang project, Master of None, will know, eating and drinking are central preoccupations in his work, somewhere close to a full-blown obsession.

The food on display in Forever doesn’t belong alongside the fine dining moneyshots, regional delicacy close-ups, or full-blown Italo-porn of Master of None, though. It’s domestic, in every sense of the word: homemade, on home soil, by one home-owner for another. The very intimacy of this kind of culinary act makes it a perfect stand-in for the couple more generally, and for the issues between them: The reliably conflict-averse Oscar, for example, cooks when he should talk, as though he could nurture the ailing relationship simply by fixing it dinner.

He even continues to do this when given the ultimate second chance. In a “holy-shit!” spoiler that Amazon somehow managed to keep secret in all of its marketing for the show, Oscar actually dies at the end of the first episode, during an ill-advised skiing trip in place of the usual lake house vacation. During the second episode, we watch June pull her life back together, slowly gaining some closure and starting to acknowledge that not every aspect of their life together was perfect. There is even a suggestion, as she prepares to fly to Hawaii and sips on a business class guava bellini, that she is ready to move on. Except she then knocks back a macadamia nut, and (spoiler again!) chokes to death. June regains consciousness in the afterlife, with Oscar standing above her.

June (played by Maya Rudolph) and Oscar (Fred Armisen) presenting mac and cheese to Kase (Catherine Keener)

Amazon/Forever

So her no-longer-former husband presenting a familiar dish of trout amandine at the end of the third episode is a decisive moment — a sign that the old routines of their life together have continued, unaltered, despite their very obvious change in circumstances. Rudolph’s facial expression at this point speaks volumes about her character’s broader discontentment in her new home and with her new (old) companion. It’s no surprise that June seizes on newcomer Kase (played by Catherine Keener). In contrast to the other residents of the bucolic Riverside community, Kase is brusque and self-sufficient. She also clearly has little interest in befriending Oscar and June, going so far as to throw the mac and cheese cooked by Oscar as a welcome gift into her garden flowerbed.

In rejecting Oscar’s food, Kase is also rejecting the cosily monotonous routines that he enjoys, giving June permission to do the same. She gives voice to her growing disillusionment in Riverside in a conversation between the couple, in which she complains that they do “the same five things every day,” and Oscar — again, rather than engaging — goes off to make dinner. His announcement (“We’re having ceviche”) is met with another look of consummate anti-enthusiasm.

June’s lack of appetite for Oscar’s food shows her dwindling appetite for him. The gregarious Kase (“We should be trying something different, we should be pushing the limits, exploring, having orgies”) offers her a far more rewarding form of emotional sustenance. While she remains well-fed, June is starved of something more fundamental. By the fifth episode, when she tells Oscar, “We do the same things every single day, and I don’t see it changing — literally forever — and that bothers me,” it is a foregone conclusion that she will abandon her husband in search of new stimulus in Oceanside. The eternity suggested by the show’s title has started to look less like a reward, and more like a punishment.

The use of food as a form of torture is not uncommon in popular culture. But historically it has tended to be more baroque, borrowing from medieval tradition. In the third circle of Dante’s Inferno, the gluttonous are kept like pigs in a sty, wallowing in a putrid mud that they are also forced to eat. Fast-forward a few hundred years to David Fincher’s Se7en, and John Doe’s first victim has been coerced into literally eating himself to death — a similarly Old Testament punishment to fit the perceived crime.

Forever, though, shows how food can inflict a more subtle kind of agony. Food is something that we must, by necessity, eat every day, but it is also something culturally imbued with specialness, the central aspect of religious and secular festivities the world over. As Helen Rosner’s essay “On Chicken Tenders” articulates, there is something quietly horrifying in the latter category collapsing into the former: the special becoming quotidian; the joyous becoming boring. You can, Rosner says, “have too much of a good thing.” You can, Rosner argues, become “inured to delight.”

We are never told whether the world that June and Oscar inhabit is heaven or hell or purgatory. Things are clearer in another comedy sort-of set in the afterlife: We spend the first season of The Good Place believing Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) and her companions are in heaven, only to discover – twist! — that they’ve been placed in a special kind of hell designed to torture them in far subtler and more affecting ways than the official Bad Place, with its hot spike pits full of lava and bees and lightning.

But in showrunner Michael Schur’s hands, or the hands of fake Good Place architect Michael (Ted Danson), food is used to inflict a very similar sort of agony as that endured by June in Forever. Schur and writer Megan Amram have discussed how they intend the food in the fake Good Place to be “part of Michael’s well-thought out plan to torture Eleanor and company.” It’s all stuff that “seems perfectly fine when you think about it, but is not particularly satisfying to eat,” like clam chowder (“a savory latte with bugs in it”) and Hawaiian pizza. Or, indeed, like frozen yogurt, ubiquitous in the show’s first episode and a perfect embodiment of the totally okay but also kind of meh foodstuffs that Schur and Amram fixate upon.

One of the many fro-yo shops of The Good Place

NBC/The Good Place

It’s certainly food that’s in marked contrast to the usual fare on offer in most depictions of the afterlife. Think of the purgatory-like Judgment City in Defending Your Life, where restaurants are lavish all-you-can-eat affairs and the food they serve is beyond delicious (added bonus: it doesn’t cause weight gain). It’s perfect precisely because it’s so divorced from the occasional downsides that come from having a hungry body on earth: our petty considerations about money; our mundane neuroses about appetite and weight gain. Food in The Good Place and Forever feels rooted in something much more relatable. Whereas most afterlife fiction seeks out extremes — the rosiest vision of heaven, the bleakest vision of hell — these are shows that find a middle ground that looks a lot more like what surrounds us on a daily basis, and use it to ask a more provocative set of questions about what it means to be a person, whether dead or alive.

The answer is fittingly complex. At one point in The Good Place, Michael ruminates on frozen yogurt: “There’s something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so you can have more of it.” This, in fact, might be the central thesis of both shows. They’re both about our eternal drive to find some sort of satisfaction, and the very human way in which we block our own paths on that quest. And if either show offers some sort of consolation, it’s in the realization that sometimes the route to true, meaningful satisfaction lies not in looking out for ourselves, but for others.

Elanor (Kristen Bell) and Michael (Ted Danson) in a sea of fro-yo shops.

NBC/The Good Place

June and Oscar eventually reunite and symbolically rediscover their love of food (and therefore each other) during a delightful scene extolling the virtues of the banana as the perfect beach snack. But they only find this resolution after they’ve moved out of their comfort zones and accepted responsibility for their faults and marital failures. Similarly, it is only through interacting with her fellow Good/Bad Place inhabitants that Eleanor realizes her selfishness on earth, and seeks to make amends.

These shows are far from heavy-handed morality tales: they’re comedies, first and foremost (The Good Place in particular is a treasure-trove for lovers of deeply silly food puns). But the way they handle food in parallel with the personal growth of their characters is certainly similar. We can’t always get what we want; what we eat can’t always taste as delicious as it did the first time we tried it. Being happy may also mean occasionally being incredibly bored. And being a good person may also mean occasionally doing stuff you really don’t want to. In life, as with diets, balance is everything.

George Reynolds is a food writer based in the UK. He is a regular contributor to Eater London. Editor: Greg Morabito

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/1/17/18183922/the-good-place-forever-eating-as-an-existential-chore-boring-food

[inb4vaughn]

Golf, Food And Fun In Punta Mita Paradise

Not five minutes had passed since the shuttle dropped us off at the Puerto Vallarta airport after three and half days in Punta Mita paradise when my wife uttered the words I knew I’d hear eventually.

“When are we coming back?”

And she’s not even a golfer. I am, of course, and I second her emotion. Third it, even. We gotta get back here, and soon.

After years of somehow avoiding the Mexico mainland (or any other part of America’s southern neighbor) for a tropical visit, we hit the getaway jackpot by taking part in the eighth edition of the Punta Mita Gourmet & Golf Classic, a late fall foray into the best cuisine, hospitality and seaside swinging that Mexico’s Riviera Nayarit has to offer.

Tucked between the towering Sierra Madre mountains and Pacific Ocean, the stunning stretch of coastline starts just north of Puerto Vallarta and includes the Punta Mita peninsula itself which, from the air, looks like a deep green camel’s head drinking deeply of the heaving, azure sea. Title sponsor American Express, Punta Mita’s real estate developer Dine (pronounced deen-ay), the Riviera Nayarit Convention and Visitors Bureau and St. Regis and Four Seasons resorts welcome hundreds of sun-seeking customers, clients and other guests to a luxury-steeped swatch of water, beach, manicured jungle and coiffed fairways and greens that, I realized as we sipped Mexican beer and soaked up sunset rays slanting through stacks of purple clouds, is every bit the equal of Hawaii — without the five-hour flight from America’s West Coast.

Speaking of beer: Negra Modelo, Pacifico and a few local brews that most Yanks have never tasted, but should, were just one ingredient in the beverage binge we enjoyed during our all-too-brief stay. After checking in at the Four Seasons and settling into our “standard” garden view suite that was anything but, we grabbed a ride back to the breezeway-slash-lobby on one of the resort’s ubiquitous multi-seated golf carts.

“We’ve got a special shuttle waiting for you,” an attendant told us, pointing to a brand-new Tesla Model X for a quick jaunt to the St. Regis’s Sea Breeze restaurant, sprawling public courtyards and cabanas for the event’s welcoming cocktail bash sponsored by Aeromexico and Delta. After stepping into the sultry evening breeze we were immediately offered champagne, and moments later we found our way to one of several well-stocked bars where the mixologist whipped up a pale pink concoction.

“What is that?” I asked. “Paloma,” came the answer. I held up two fingers, appropriate because the refreshing drink is made with Patron blanco tequila, pink grapefruit juice, a dash of sugar and fresh lime juice — Margarita’s lower-calorie cousin. We were in; the drink became our go-to as each evening’s festivities played out.

Incredible food greets every player at the Punta Mita Gourmet & Golf Classic

And the food? What a way to begin: Several tended stations prepared fresh takes on “true” Mexican cuisine from the kitchens of three renowned chefs from both sides of the border — John Signorelli from the St. Regis Houston, Erik Guerrero from DOS restaurant in Veracruz and Alex Branch from Hakasana Group in Los Cabos. In the dizzying array of tastes and textures, our favorite was a succulent bit of grilled pork belly on a warm tortilla, topped with fresh salsa.

Over the Gourmet & Golf tournament’s two days of competition in the strong Mexican sun, beer took precedence for me and my Guadalajaran playing partners, Pedro and Pedro Pablo, as we encountered the dozen or so food and drink stations dotting both of Jack Nicklaus’s Pacifico (opened in 1999) and Bahia (2009) layouts, breaking up the suds with the occasional mini-margarita, glass of south-of-the-border wine, shot of exquisite regional tequila or, better yet, mezcal, which is smokier — an anejo-based take on single malt whisky. With such libations and all sorts of incredible edible morsels from top-shelf chefs — incredibly fresh ceviche, lightly grilled octopus, succulent veggie burritos, addictive street tacos al pastor — under my belt, concentrating on each shot was tough, especially on the dozen seaside holes between the two tracks, including Pacifico’s famous “Tail of the Whale” hole with its green cradled among rocks and surf on a natural island some 185 yards from the beach-side middle tee. We took turns giving that island our best shots, as did everyone who came through, though, since the tide had come in and the green wasn’t accessible by cart — we’d have needed stroke backstrokes or scuba gear to get there — it didn’t count on the official scorecard.

The Tail of the Whale on Punta Mita’s Pacifico Course.

Actually, our threesome wasn’t officially part of the formal tournament due to a clerical error, and that was a blessing. We could just have fun playing our own balls rather than grinding over every shot and sweating the final team scores, based on a best ball format one day and two-person handicapped scramble the other, as the other 200 or so golfers did. And I didn’t have to stress when I thought my snap-hooked tee shot on Bahia’s handsome, beachside par 4 17th was lost to the waves; I just reloaded, hooked one even further left (this time with an unmistakable splash) and moved on, only to discover that my first ball had ricocheted off a rock and back into play at the very edge of the fairway, leaving a simple wedge home.

AVOID GOLF’S BIGGEST ‘DEATH MOVES’ WITH PUNTA MITA DIRECTOR OF INSTRUCTION AND GOLF TIPS 25 TEACHER TOM STICKNEY

Ah, yes, the good life in Mexico, and it never waned.

Not when I showed up for each day’s outdoor pre-tournament breakfast feast on the expansive practice range, digging into truly fresh fruit (you just don’t see mangoes like this back home in Reno), made-to-order omelets, colorful Mexican pastries and fried chilaquiles.

Not when we teed off just as the sun breached the tree-line and spread broad, dewy shadows over gently rolling fairways, trickily tiered greens and broad waste bunkers, including a big palm-dotted expanse on Pacifico that ties several holes together. Not when our rounds tumbled down to the ocean in one heart-swelling view after another, or when Mexico’s greatest player ever, Lorena Ochoa, and 1982 Masters champion Craig Stadler — the event’s special guests — greeted us during our rounds.

A crackling fresh salad at Punta Mita’s Gourmet & Golf Classic

Not when I reunited with my wife for several incredible meals, including Chef Atzin Santos’ six-course dinner lineup of Mexican and Spanish delicacies on Friday — again the pastor porkbelly with fermented pineapple and macha sauce was a standout — and Saturday’s delicious and delicate vegan lunch authored by Chef Leslie Durso, both at Bahia, the Four Seasons’ open-air restaurant overseen by Richard Sandoval (I skipped the tournament’s epic awards lunch back at the range, which, I’m told, was off the charts).

Not when we kicked the party up a notch at the American Express Platinum House, otherwise known as Kupuri Beach Club at the St. Regis, sipping yet more signature cocktails and supping on mini-miracles of deep, cross-cultural flavors lovingly prepared by Chefs Antonio de Livier, Yasuo Asai, Abraham Salum, Sergio Chávez, Andrew Ormsby, Betty Vásquez, Alfredo Villanueva and Pato Pérsico.

Trophies are awarded to teams and individual men and women for closest to the pin, longest drive, etc.

In fact, through the weekend, every bite of tender seafood, farm-to-table vegetables and spices and locally sourced meats was a revelation of freshness, chipping away at my stubborn gringo preconceptions of what Mexican food is, and should be. We savored that celebratory closing dinner to the sound of the crashing surf, which in turn was the backdrop for a full stage erected on the beach. As the music began we sipped and swayed and laughed into the night, enjoying every starlit minute among our fellow revelers. It was the second day of December but felt like its own holiday.

But the glorious gluttony wasn’t over. Sunday morning brought a farewell brunch to the Sea Breeze — a traditional buffet inside, yet more delicacy-dealing food stations outside, the Pacific singing its timeless song a short par 4 away, and a warm realization that we’d just taken part in the kind of getaway that should be shared not only by golfers, but by their significant others. All the smiling charm and gentle spirit of the Mexican people, all the beauty of Riviera Nayarit, that state’s best golf without question, and the luxuries of its two finest resorts are brought to bear on one sweet little peninsula. And early next December will bring it alive for the ninth time.

Then again, we may not wait that long. We fell hard for this place, we know how to get there with relative ease, and we know the welcome extends to every month and every sun-seeking soul, whether nor not you’re packing clubs.

Únete a nosotros por el tiempo de tu vida, ¿verdad?

For information on next year’s Punta Mita Gourmet & Golf Classic, visit www.puntamitagourmetandgolf.com; for year-round resort reservations visit www.puntamita.com

  The post Golf, Food And Fun In Punta Mita Paradise appeared first on Golf Tips Magazine.

from Golf Tips Magazine http://bit.ly/2AD8tm1

[vacationsoup]

New Post has been published on https://vacationsoup.com/happy-talk-lounge-princeville-kauai/

Sports Bar With A View - Happy Talk Lounge - Princeville, Kauai, Hawaii

With the exception of the Saint Regis Hotel, you will not find a restaurant in Princeville with a better view than the Happy Talk Lounge. Whether you are in need of an island cocktail, a light dinner or a place to watch the game, this sports bar overlooking the grounds of Hanalei Bay Resort is the perfect spot to witness a Kauai sunset (other than from Honu Point, of course).

The Happy Talk Lounge also offers live entertainment every night of the week. Local musicians perform from 6:00 to 9:00  PM. While the music can be a bit loud, depending on the kind of music and number of musicians, it definitely adds to the ambiance and keeps the place lively. One of my favorites is Michael Ruff who plays the keyboard and sings.

Happy Talk Food Menu

The video describes the Happy Talk Lounge menu as having “better bar food” and there was a photo of a personal-sized pizza. This was filmed two years ago and the menu has changed a bit. The “better bar food” now includes:

Pupus (Appetizers) ranging in price from $12 to $17. Some of the choices are: Baked Queso, Summer Rolls, Coconut Shrimp, Ceviche & Chips, House Smoked Baby Back Ribs, Pork Sliders, House Made Hummus and Chicken Wings Lightly Breaded.

Salads ranging in price from $12 to $14

Sandwiches with Fries, ranging in price from $18 to $22. Choices include HT House Burger, Teriyaki Burger, Mozzarella Bacon Burger, Swiss & Bacon Burger, Cane Sugar Pulled Pork Burger, HT House Chicken Sandwich, Teriyaki Chicken, Island Fish Sandwich and Poli-Pomi-Taro Burger.

Five Entrees range in price from $20 to $25. They include Baby Back Ribs, Happy Talk Ahi Poke Bowl, Coconut Shrimp Combo, Teriyaki Chicken Combo and Loco Moco.

Choose from three desserts: ice cream, Happy Toast (a local favorite) and Chocolate Molten Lava Cake.

The Keiki (kids) menu is $12.

Happy Talk Drink Menu

Tropical cocktails and Specialty cocktails range in price from $12 to $16.

Margaritas are $13 to $15.

Happy Talk Shots are $10.

Plenty of beer on tap

Wine by the glass or bottle

Happy Hour is from 3:00 to 5:00 – get $2.00 off appetizers, signature cocktails, beer and wine by the glass.

In checking for reviews I found a mixed bag and honestly this didn’t surprise me. I am sure the service depends on the time of day and how busy they are. The food? Some loved it, some said it was “okay.” Most gave the restaurant either 4 or 5 stars. I will include a couple of reviews I found on Yelp.com.

“We went to Happy Talk our last night in Hawaii, and we’re so glad we did! It was a perfect evening. We showed up around 5:30pm on a Saturday, the valet parking was easy, and we were able to get a table with a beautiful view of the pool with no issues. The cocktails were delicious, and we were also quite happy with our food. We had the coconut shrimp appetizer, which was delicious, and then I had the blackened fish sandwich while my husband had the poke bowl. The food was decent and also seemed reasonably priced for what we got and for the location. We also had the chocolate lava cake for dessert.

While we were quite satisfied with the food, what really made our night was the beautiful view at sunset – see the pictures! There was also live music, an added bonus. Overall, I would definitely recommend this place, and I’ll certainly return if I find myself in Princeville again.”

Brooke T.  10-10-18

“This restaurant combined the great dinner elements we were looking for right up the road from our condo in Princeville:  excellent food in a casual bar/lounge atmosphere with subtle music that didn’t vibrate our dishes.

We enjoyed an awesome poke Ahi appetizer, that frankly was one of the culinary highlights of our trip. Fresh, chilled, and with a nice side of perfectly sticky rice.  Delicious!  I had the seared ahi sandwich, and my wife enjoyed the blackened mahi mahi.  Our server was perfectly attentive, and brought us fresh drinks after draining our first round.  This would be a great lounge to relax and eat, or just relax and drink.

The views were of nicely manicured grounds with a gently cascading waterfall.  Very peaceful.  On the night of our visit and contemporary jazz group was playing in the lounge, with just the right amount of volume so you could converse and enjoy the music in between bites.  We were able to relax, eat, and enjoy the entertainment with no reservations at 6:30 in the evening on a Friday night.  The valet was super busy, but it was complimentary, so no biggie.  Overall a very nice experience here, we will be back.”

John T.  9-19-18

Happy Talk Lounge Hours: Daily from 3:00 to 9:00 PM

Reservations are recommended – Go to http://www.happytalklounge.com/

Phone after 3:00 for same day reservations or if online reservations are full – (808) 431-4084

The Happy Talk Lounge is located at the Hanalei Bay Resort, a bike ride away from Honu Point Vacation Rental.

5380 Honoiki Road, Princeville, Kauai

Enjoy!

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[endlessarchite]

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We brought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, car seats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

But one of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet published first on https://bakerskitchenslimited.tumblr.com/

[truereviewpage]

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We brought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, car seats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

But one of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

[billydmacklin]

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We brought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, car seats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

But one of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet published first on https://carpetgurus.tumblr.com/

[additionallysad]

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet https://ift.tt/2HJdmfF

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We bought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, carseats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

But one of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

[interiorstarweb]

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We bought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, carseats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

But one of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet published first on https://novaformmattressreview.tumblr.com/

[yesterdaysdreams]

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We bought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, carseats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

But one of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

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Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We bought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, carseats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

One of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet published first on https://ssmattress.tumblr.com/

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Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We bought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, carseats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

But one of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

[tyleroakley-obsessed]

Ed. Note: Tsunami in Cooper Young – with Ben Smith and Colleen Couch-Smith at the helm – is a stalwart and a gem of the Memphis restaurant scene. I’ve always thought of Tsunami as a fancy dinner kind of place but contributor Stacey has some big news: Tsunami is (and has been) open for your casual, happy hour, cocktail-appreciating business, and there’s a top-secret new concept coming in the space next door. All photos by Colleen Couch-Smith, used with permission. Want to sample Ben Smith’s menu for his new restaurant concept? Then keep reading… Chef Ben and his wife, Colleen Couch-Smith, purchased the building that has housed Tsunami for the last twenty years at the end of 2016. With that came a wave of renovations, upgrades, a new happy hour menu and plans to launch a more casual concept in the south dining room in 2018. (Similar to Sweet Grass & Sweet Grass Next Door.) Let’s start with the renovations and upgrades. Colleen, who has played many roles at the restaurant from bookkeeper to general manager, spent the last couple of years working in the construction business with Spoonseller & McGary. This gave her the confidence and experience to tackle most of the refresh and structural changes herself. “We didn’t want anything tremendous or outrageous. The idea was to complement the existing décor and stay true to building. We’ve been in business for twenty years because people are comfortable here and I definitely didn’t want to change that,” she says. the renovated bar Colleen overhauled the paint scheme, completely tore out the ceiling in the main dining room, addressed air conditioning issues, replaced the track lighting and fans, and redid the bar so that it looks like they are “selling alcohol rather than glassware.” You can see Colleen’s more artistic side with the new handmade wallpaper she created for the bathrooms and as accents in the main dining room. Finally, she reupholstered the bar stools and banquet. [I feel like I should point out that the badass bar tops, counter tops in the bathrooms, and several of the paper installations were also made by Colleen over the years.] Now, about that new happy hour menu. Launched in June, it’s technically called Pau Hana, which is Hawaiian for “quit workin’ and treat yo’ self.” Each week, the menu features two new dishes and a special cocktail. The Pau Hana menu is available at the bar Monday-Friday, from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m. So, what kind of food are we talkin’ about? “Things that have been rattling around in my head for ages that didn’t feel like the right fit for Tsunami,” explains Ben. Pau Hana has given him an opportunity to go further out on a limb, beyond what he’s been doing, and more towards the food he loves to eat. spam musabi Ben says he’s been getting homesick for Hawaii, where he lived from ’91-’94. As a result, Pau Hana has featured items like rice vermicelli bowls with shrimp and spicy coconut sauce, spam musubi, shrimp toast, and tuna poke. scallop ceviche Creating two new dishes each week and getting feedback from customers has been a good sounding board. “It’s basically menu testing for our new concept,” says Ben. New concept? Tell us more… Colleen explains, “Pau Hana is bridging the gap between what we are now and what we will be in a few months. It’s highlighting the food Ben will serve in tbe new space.” She envisions seating for small groups, a loft with a larger table, and a four seat sake bar. “Definitely no white tablecloths,” she says. The new space has a name, but it’s a secret for now. Ben says it will be about the vibe and variety and the fact that it’s spontaneous and seasonal and can change with his whims. “It’s the difference between giving people what they want versus what I want. I need to get back to a place of creativity and challenge people’s palates with more vibrant flavors.” shrimp toast Ben wants to see tables of people sharing food “like in every other culture in the world.” He wants his customers to taste the full spectrum of flavor at every meal. “Ideally we hit all the points on the palate and people leave without being too full or feeling like they spent too much.” Sounds good to me! The happy hour small plates are in the $6 – $8 range and the daily cocktail is $8, plus they offer wines by the glass for $6 and beer for $5. Tsunami is open for dinner Monday through Thursday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. and from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. They offer the Pau Hana Happy Hour menu from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Go There: Tsunami 928 S. Cooper Memphis, Tennessee 38104 tsunamimemphis.com About The Author Stacey Greenberg is a freelance writer who lives in Cooper Young with her two teenaged sons. She’s a contributor to Thrillist.com, Edible Memphis, I Love Memphis, and Memphis Travel. She’s also the author of the award winning blog, Dining with Monkeys (diningwithmonkeys.com). A lifelong Memphian, she loves the fact that she’s never met a stranger here. Are you a home owner in Memphis, with a broken garage door? Call ASAP garage door today at 901-461-0385 or checkout http://ift.tt/1B5z3Pc

http://ilovememphisblog.com/2017/09/tsunami-news-update-pau-hana-happy-hour-new-restaurant-on-the-way/

[endlessarchite]

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to south Florida.

Where We Went: Why Fort Lauderdale?

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We bought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that they’d have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully, Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free (but not booster seats, surprisingly, so we stuffed it into our checked duffel bag). We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, carseats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kid menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

One of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet published first on https://bakerskitchenslimited.tumblr.com/

[truereviewpage]

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet

Since our daughter started elementary school a few years ago, spring break has become an increasingly precious opportunity to get away, clock some quality family time, and soak in some long-overdue warm weather. Last year’s spring break vacation to Cape Canaveral, Florida checked all of the right boxes and we were tempted to just repeat that trip again this year. But we pushed ourselves to see if we could make this year’s getaway even better and explore a new part of Florida while we were at it – and we are SO GLAD WE DID. So for anyone else looking for a great family vacation spot or, like us, if you’re just ready to start dreaming about next year’s spring break – here’s a quick recap of our family’s trip to South Florida.

Where We Went

Our #1 priority for the trip was “guaranteed beach weather,” and going to South Florida was the most convenient destination that could guarantee us hot temperatures in early April. We love a good road trip, but we wasted four days driving to Florida and back last year… so we decided to give flying a go this year (a first for us with both kids + the dog). A couple of airlines fly direct to Fort Lauderdale from our airport here in Richmond, VA, and we remembered Fort Lauderdale very fondly from our first book tour, so we figured anything within a 30-minute drive of that airport would be perfect. We actually ended up in a small area north of Fort Lauderdale called Pompano Beach and spent most of our time in nearby towns like Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, Lighthouse Point (seen below), and Deerfield Beach, so we never actually stepped foot in Fort Lauderdale proper.

We haven’t flown as a family since our 2012 trip to Hawaii when our daughter was nearly 2 years old. Our hellish red-eye flight back to Virginia (there was lots of crying and zero sleeping) planted a deep-seeded fear of flying with children for several years, but now that she’s almost 8 and our son is 4, it felt like a 2-hour direct flight to Florida would be an easy way to dip our toes back into the family flight waters.

The flight went even better than expected. We flew Spirit Airlines (we’re infamously cheap travelers) and even though they nickel-and-dime you for everything from carry-on bags to in-flight water, it ended up being noticeably less expensive than our next best option, JetBlue. We were even able to bring Burger (our chihuahua) with us without any trouble. He flew to Alaska for our honeymoon, so he has proven himself to be a travel champ (yes, we brought our dog on our honeymoon, and yes we know how that sounds). See him there chilling at Sherry’s feet while she sports what she calls her “nervous travel face”?

A rental car was also a must on our list, so we got a minivan to ensure we’d have enough room for luggage, car seats, and beach gear. We brought car seats with us (we weren’t guaranteed that the rental place would have them since we were arriving really late at night) and thankfully Spirit will check car seats and strollers for free. We talked a little bit more about juggling the dog, the dog crate, car seats, bags, and kids at an airport in podcast episode #92 if you’re curious how that went…

Where We Stayed: A Private Rental

Last year’s trip taught us the wonders of renting a house for spring break. Even though we could all pile into a hotel room, we’ve never regretted at least considering the option of not sharing walls with other vacationers (especially when we’ve got kids and a dog with us). Heck, sometimes a beach rental for the week actually breaks down to being cheaper than a hotel when you do the math to figure out the per-night cost. Last year our rental in Cape Canaveral was 1 of 3 units in a building, so we did have people above us and we all shared a communal pool. It ended up not being a problem (the other renters didn’t use the pool very much, so we had it mostly to ourselves) but this year we looked around online for a detached home with its own pool that was still within our budget, and thankfully we found this one.

We searched across Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway for pet-friendly rentals with a pool located within 30 minutes of the Fort Lauderdale airport. We found this gem in Pompano Beach on HomeAway and we could not recommend it more highly. It. Was. Awesome. Not only did the kids love having the entire pool to splash around in, but Burger LOVED having free reign of the yard (last year he had to share a fenced area with another dog, and let’s just say they quickly became frenemies).

The interior furnishings are pretty much what you’d expect from a vacation rental (nothing that felt fancy or precious – which is AWESOME when you’re traveling with kids) and the beach wasn’t really within easy walking distance like the listing says, but the pool was PERFECT and the house and neighborhood were pleasantly very quiet and private. It just took us a few minutes to drive down to the beach and we always found parking (which was nice and cheap), so we really ended up loving everything about it.

The house was located in a small residential neighborhood on Terra Mar Island, a little island in the Intracoastal Waterway. This little bit of separation from the main thoroughfare helped it feel like a secluded and charming suburb – unlike all of the high-rise hotels and condos along the oceanfront. It felt nestled, private, and un-trafficed… even though it was close to everything.

The house itself was surrounded by tall thick foliage on all sides – making it feel like you had the whole island to yourself. We skipped the beach entirely for a couple of days because we were having so much fun just hanging out by the pool. And yes, Sherry has never been more convinced that we need a pool at our own house than after this vacation. #helpme

For any other families who might rent this place: they warned me ahead of time that they didn’t provide beach or pool toys (just chairs, towels, and a beach cart). We certainly weren’t going to bring buckets and shovels on the plane, so we planned to buy them at a dollar store once we got down there… but a previous renter had left a couple for us – along with a pool float and ball. We also picked up some beach toys and pool noodles at the CVS just down the street, all of which we left for future renters – so here’s hoping the cycle continues.

What We Did: Beach, Pool, And Eat

We are very chill vacationers and this spot was perfect for that. I know some families love to cram in tons of new activities and sightseeing on vacations, but our goal for this trip was just to unwind and be together, so we consciously avoided the pull to overschedule ourselves. Our kids love spending hours playing in the sand and making up games at the pool, so that’s pretty much all we did – breaking to eat lunch or dinner as needed (we had all of our breakfasts at the house, which was a nice way to save a little money).

The beach we drove to was at Lauderdale-By-The-Sea because it was close (about 5 minutes away) and super charming (see below!). Parking was extremely easy and affordable, and there were some restaurants and shops we could walk to from the beach. The beach always had people on it, but by no stretch would I call it crowded. We always got a spot that felt like it was ours and the kids could build in the sand and run in and out of the water without worrying they were splashing sand on other people and stuff like that. The water was the perfect temperature and “temperament” for us all to play in (read: not too rough, but enough waves to keep things interesting).

I’m sorry not to have more exciting recommendations for what to do, but our typical spring break agenda is usually: beach, pool, eat, nap, repeat. We did venture down to the Hollywood Beach Boardwalk one day because it promised some new scenery, but a thunderstorm rolled in right as we arrived so we were rained out of actually enjoying it. The good news is  that by the time we drove home, it was done raining and the kids jumped right back into… you guessed it… the pool.

Where We Ate: Good Food With Good Views

I mentioned that we ate breakfast at home each morning, but we ate out for pretty much every other meal. You guys gave us some FANTASTIC recommendations on Instagram, which we now want to pay forward to anyone else who might be reading this and planning a trip, so thank you for helping to make our trip better than Yelp ever could have. Our first dinner was at a place in Pompano Beach called Beach House because, well, how could we not?

There was a little bit of a wait on a Tuesday night, but we just hung out on the beach until our table was ready. Whoever designed the restaurant outdid themselves (the woven lanterns swayed in the ocean breezes that blew through since the entire restaurant was open-air) and it was very kid friendly. We’re not really food critics, but I’ll say that we both enjoyed our meals a lot! I had ceviche and Sherry had some sort of “life-changing salad” that she couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of the trip.

The next night we tried a restaurant called Cap’s Place in nearby Lighthouse Point, which had been recommended to us because you have to take a (free) boat to get there! You park at this small dock in a town called Lighthouse Point, and this little watercraft picks you up and shuttles you about five minutes across a lake to the restaurant.

The restaurant itself has a really cool backstory: it was built on top of a beached barge and got its start nearly 100 years ago as a rum-running club and casino during the prohibition. They showed us a list of the famous people who’ve eaten there over the years, ranging from FDR to Paris Hilton, so the whole experience was quirky and super memorable. The building was dark and tough to photograph, and while the meal wasn’t our favorite of the trip, the whole boat-to-the-restaurant thing was the most fun meal-related experience we had on the entire trip. So we definitely recommend it!

We also headed back out to Lighthouse Point for another meal at a place called The Nauti Dawg Marina Cafe, which was right around the corner from Cap’s Place. The food was solid and we got to eat right along the marina, so the kids had fun watching boats come in and dock. There was a wait for this restaurant as well, but near the marina was this really colorful collection of townhouses that we walked around while we waited, keeping count of all of the lizards we could find sunbathing on people’s stoops. Our lizard-count got to over 50 (!!!) and as you can imagine, Sherry was extremely excited the entire time – as were the kids.

Our last meal was at the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar located in the Beachcomber Resort right near our rental in Pompano Beach. I feel like I should have more to say about the food at each of these places, but it honestly was mostly about the location each night. Sitting right by the water and ordering dessert for the kids was the most fun part. At this restaurant we got to eat beachside in an oversized tiki hut. This was literally the view from our table:

Honestly, a lot of the food blended together because most places had similar menus of seafood, salads, and burgers. We were just excited to find so many interesting dining experiences that were kid friendly. All of the places we mentioned above had kids menus (Beach House’s was verbal, so you had to ask the waiter to list everything) and none of them required any special dress code. We also ate more casual lunches at places like BurgerFi, Lunch Room, and Aruba Beach Cafe.

But one of our most memorable finds of the trip was this place, called… wait for it… Bean & Barnacle.

For those who have followed our blog for a while, you may remember that while Sherry was pregnant with our daughter, we referred to her as “Bean” and when she was pregnant with our son, he was dubbed “Barnacle” (by his sister, who was going through an Octonauts phase at the time). So to see that odd pairing of words emblazoned on a Florida coffee shop was such a funny surprise. We stopped in for gelato, and the interior was pretty cool too.

We’ve been home over a week now, and we’re all still mourning the fact that we’re not still in Florida on vacation. It seriously was one of the best trips we’ve taken as a family, and it makes us so eager to take another (and a lot less scared to fly with the kids). So I hope that sharing some of the details are helpful to anyone else who’s contemplating a trip there.

Speaking of which, here are some of our past vacation posts if you’re looking for more travel ideas:

Our Anniversary Trip To Puerto Rico

A Summer Vacation To Destin, Florida

Hawaii Part 1: How We Saved Money

Hawaii Part 2: What We Did 

The post Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet appeared first on Young House Love.

Our Family’s Favorite Spring Break Yet published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/