Hilton Head was a very fancy beach-side resort. We cannot expect that all of our accomodations will be as fancy and as scenic. Our 'room' (it was much bigger than just 'a room') actually overlooked the Atlantic Ocean from the third floor (they call it the second floor, but that is because the ground floor does not have any units, just underground parking, due to hurricane concerns). It was truly amazing to wake up with the view of the ocean and the sun. We actually awoke one morning and watched as the sun peeked above the ocean horizon - what a great way to see a sunrise:
David, HL, Dan, and Jim (the latter two for the second time) listened to Jody (of the Marriott resort) give her spiel on the local nature scene and the property (the resort is adjacent to the Sea Pines plantation). Hilton Head was originally five plantations, as recently as fifty years ago, before development began in the 50's. The island is still very beautiful, very new, and very classy. Lots of golf (none of us went golfing, though).
One very key attribute of the resort room is there are three TVs in each room. Since it is a two-bedroom villa, you get a TV in the master bedroom, one in the second bedroom, and one huge one (I am guessing a 35 incher) in the living room. We made a weak, but at times valiant, effort at minimizing television. Since a lot of the rest of our trip we will not have access to TV we did not make a huge deal about this, though.
Certainly, highlights included our dolphin trip, creating sand castles on the beach, and throwing a football (also on the huge, very wide, very hard-packed but beatiful beach). James and Heather Lynn also tried to dig to China - chasing one of those creatures that burrows into the sand and makes bubbles (a sea worm-thing as Pam described it).
We visited the Disney vacation resort welcome centre at Hilton Head for them to do their 'selling thing' on Pam and David. One of us was VERY tempted and tried desperately to figure out a way to 'buy in'. Since there were no available spots left at the Old Key West resort in Disney World (the real place we would like to have a guaranteed spot), and since our current Intrawest vacation club is continuing to develop a better reservation system with Disney, we were able to dodge an expensive bullet (for now). One perk of sitting through the Disney presentation was two free tickets on a 'see the Dolphins' excursion leaving from the Disney Hilton Head property (which we also got to tour). Pam and David went 'for free', and we paid for all the kids, so all six of us went together on a boat to ourself (with our pilot, of course) to do an afternoon of hunting for the dolphins. It took us a while, but we found a few of them (we think it was three) in a little inlet. We spent some time slowly 'chasing' them (they were as much playing with us as we with them). One of them even came up alongside the boat and stuck its head up sideways and stared at us for a moment. We all really thought this part of the trip was great!
Upon our return we got a chance to look at the local inhabitants:
Hey, what is that guy doing there? The kids really liked the beagle on the car roof, so it snuck onto the website.
Heather Lynn, Reba, and Daniel are addicted to books (Star Trek for HL and Reba, and Star Wars for Daniel). In fact, the word addiction does come to mind when thinking about Reba and Star Trek books .. actually, Star Trek anything. Fortunately, Hilton Head has a really great book store called Barnes and Noble. This place is extremely similar to Chapters (the latter being the Canadian version).
The resort has neat activities that we get to do as part of the package. We made sure we took part in some of these. The beach-side nature chat by Jody (mentioned above) was one of them, but we also played bingo, had wine and cheese, and dropped in to the chocolate shop visit (actually, this last one a bit by accident since David and Pam just happened to be out together to do some grocery shopping and bumped into the Marriott people at the Chocolate shop - which was next door to the grocery store). We had to take a peek and buy some of that tasty brown stuff while we were there. The chocolate shop is called the Chocolate Canopy - we definitely recommend it for those visiting the island.
One of the things that the parents are trying to emphasize is the need to practice our music. In this vein, we have brought along a guitar and a brand new keyboard. Now we need to just get everyone playing!
(This is not quite an exact representation of the new keyboard.)
Easier said than done with all that competition from TVs, a game boy, and a new Dell laptop computer (which of course is enabling us to keep in touch with everyone and keep this web-site up). Well, we will try to get that musical flavour .. just a little more discipline ...
Well, Hilton Head was really great - a wonderful place - nice food we made and had together, a special trip to see the dolphins, and a great view. Just before we packed up and left, David, Daniel, and James even got to play tennis together!