13 Things We Learned While on Vacation with our 4-year-old
1. When you leave home without your 4-year-old’s blankey it’s not the end of the world – if, of course, you stop at a Lexington Target and buy a new blankey (which we did).
2. Carrington would much rather watch Ninja Turtles on TV than watch real turtles and gators at the Myrtle Beach reptile zoo. Found this out the hard way.
3. Hotel room key cards can be left in swim trunks for multiple hours while you wear said trunks and play in the pool – the keys still work. I know. I did this twice. At two different hotels. In different states.
4. If it rains and floods your hotel room lobby, disabling you from checking in, as it did ours on our first night, go to Margarittaville. Actually, that sounds like good advice in any situation.
5. If you want to get the biggest calzone you’ve ever seen, go to Gatlinburg. That’s really the only thing memorable about this place.
6. Side note to No. 5 – one other memorable thing about the G-burg: punks with skateboards are everywhere. I learned I’m unafraid of them and (taking a page out of the Ramstetter book) nearly hit one when he kept skating too close to me. Yes, I’m really a 74-year-old man. Pesky kids.
7. Carrington will always – always! – order grilled cheese at a restaurant and not eat it. We fell for this approximately 32 times. We’re always like, “Well, maybe this time …”
8. Carrington wants to swim forever. Like, she wants to live in water. I think I noticed her growing gills.
9. We’ve decided we have officially seen everything the Southeast has to offer. All of it. Then someone asked us if we’d been to Charleston, and we were like, “Well, no.”
10. I will Instagram anything. No lie. I Instagrammed a dude laying tile and a video that came out all black. I called it “artsy.”
11. Lounging in the pool is not the same as bathing. This is not advice for Carrington. It is advice for me.
12. When asked to help pick up a room, Carrington cannot see a candy wrapper on the floor right in front of her. But when walking on the streets of Gatlinburg, surrounded by a throng of people, she can spot a Sponge Bob toy in the window of a store a block away. Yup. I swear this actually happened.
13. Just because people are wearing UK gear, it does not mean they are comfortable with you running up to them and screaming “Go Cats!” Crazy as it seems, they may not share the same amount of Wildcat enthusiasm as you.