Last Thursday, May 18, the three of us (including David) loaded into our car and we drove up to Atlanta. We made a lunch stop at Cracker Barrel on the way, then on to the airport after parking the car. David had to get his own tickets much later than when we got ours, so he was on different flights. Fortunately, his flight departing Atlanta was only about 10 minutes different than ours.

Once we arrived in Seattle (at nearly the same time), we picked up our checked bag and headed down to get our rental car. We drove on to Violet’s school, where they were having an art walk. We got to see her art hanging in the school halls. After the art walk was over, we headed over to Cole and Elizabeth’s house to drop David off. We headed on out so that bedtimes could be administered on a near normal basis. We stayed at Val’s sister Annie’s apartment nearby. She moved out here a couple months ago to take a contract nursing position.

On Friday morning, we drove over to Elizabeth’s house for breakfast with she and the girls. Violet was getting ready for school. We stood outside at the bus stop with her to watch her off (the bus stops at their driveway). After she left, we loaded Elizabeth, David and Scarlet in the car and headed towards Tacoma. Scarlet’s preschool class had a field trip to the childrens’ museum there.

We stopped for a quick lunch at Chick-Fil-A, then headed over to park so we could catch the commuter trolley up to the museum (Scarlet requested riding on the “train”).

Scarlet had a fun time at the museum. We had all been there before, so we were familiar with everything there. After the field trip was over, we rode the train back to the car and headed back to the house.

We dropped Elizabeth at the house to get her car and met her over at Violet’s school (we needed her car as well since it had Violet’s car seat in it). We met her teacher and talked for a few minutes before heading back over to the house.

We were originally going to keep the girls so that Elizabeth and Cole could have an evening out by themselves, but the girls wanted them to join us for dinner, so all of us headed over to Famous Daves for dinner. After dinner, we split back up and we headed back to Annie’s apartment for the evening. She had to work all day, but was home when we got there.

On Saturday, we got up really early and headed over to Cole and Elizabeth’s. Cole, Malcolm, David and Violet headed out at 5:30am to go shrimping. Val, Elizabeth and Scarlet spent the day out shopping and having fun.

The shrimp season where they were going is only active for four days in a two week period. This day was the last day for the year. Malcolm and David had purchased licenses in case the haul was big (you can bring back 80 shrimp per licensed person, and children can bring back 80 as well). Cole had pretty good luck the three previous trips, so we had our fingers crossed.

The official time to be able to drop the shrimp pots was 9:00 AM, so once in place, you sit and wait until 9:00. Cole has four shrimp pots (big wire cages) that he can drop into the water. Each has 400 feet of rope, but we were fishing in about 250 feet of water.

After the pots are in the water about an hour (each pot has a buoy marking its location), you run back around in the boat and pull them up to get the shrimp out of them. The first pot pulled yielded about 13 shrimp, but most of them had much less. Many of the shrimpers mentioned that their haul was much lower that day then the previous couple of weeks.

The total haul for the day was 85 shrimp. We attributed 80 of them to Violet and 5 to Cole. Malcolm and David didn’t technically catch any. It was a fun and interesting trip, regardless.

On Sunday, we all met at church (including Annie, since she was off work), then off to Trackside Pizza for lunch. Malcolm and Elizabeth cooked stirfry for dinner (one of Malcolm’s specialties).

On Monday morning, we headed to the house and had breakfast with the girls. We watched Violet get on the school bus. After that, Malcolm and Elizabeth went to the AT&T store to get her failing phone replaced. David, Annie, Val and Scarlet met up with them at the Puyallup library parking lot to shuffle around people. From there, David and Elizabeth went out to have a brother/sister lunch. The rest of us headed to McDonalds (per Scarlet’s request) for lunch and some play time.

We ate dinner at Elizabeth’s house on Monday evening and just visited for a while. David packed up his stuff and headed to Annie’s apartment with us since we all had very early flights on Tuesday morning. We said our goodbyes then.

On Tuesday, David’s flight left about an hour before ours. We dropped him at the airport and Malcolm went to take back the rental car. After riding the shuttle bus back, he met up with Val and we headed to our flight. We met David back at the Atlanta airport, picked up our bag and ate a late lunch (it was around 4:00 eastern time) before driving back to Wetumpka and the trailer.

David spent the night with us Tuesday night, then headed back home to Panama City on Wednesday. After a bit of discussion, we decided to keep Callie with us instead of sending her back with David and his new kitten. We thought she might like the quieter life lazing around the RV instead of being chased around by a kitten and a dog.