We traveled to Orange Beach, Alabama last week for a family vacation. We hadn’t all been on one in over 7 years! There really isn’t a large airport close to the Gulf Shores area and since we were traveling with a toddler, all 8 of us decided to just road trip it! Just think National Lampoons lol. We stayed in a condo we found on VRBO in the Phoenix V complex. The condo was fantastic, right on the beach, complete with indoor and outdoor pools and a splash pad. We booked this one because of the splash pad, I knew realistically Koen wouldn’t last all day at the beach so the splash pad was a great option to have. We were actually a little worried about her hating the beach, she is not the biggest fan of being dirty, but thankfully she loved it!
We wanted to break it up so it wasn’t too exhausting and giving us a better chance that Koen didn’t get too grouchy, so our first stop was of course a casino!
We stayed the first night in Lake Charles, our hotel shuttle took us to The Golden Nugget where we gambled the night away, one of my favorite things to do!
When you’re traveling with a large group as well as a toddler you make lots of stops add that into a ton of traffic and a rogue GPS, we finally got to the condo about 7pm Sunday, just in time to catch this gorgeous sunset.
We unpacked quickly and went to Walmart to get supplies for the week. This ended up taking FOREVER, most of Orange Beach had the same idea and it was a mad house! I definitely recommend maybe going in the morning? They had every checkout open and there was at least 7-8 people in every line, all with supplies for the week, it took forever. We stayed pretty chill that night, ordered in pizza and got ready to hit the beach the next day!
We got up and cooked breakfast and got ready to go down to the beach. This is where the condo lost some points and was really the only negative of the whole trip. We waited for an elevator for probably close to 30 mins. Every elevator would have maid carts and workers in them. Apparently they didn’t have a service elevator and that was super frustrating. We finally did get down to the beach and we had a wonderful time!
That evening we hit some surf shops and then Honey & Hootie agreed to put Koen down to bed so Lenton, Hunter, Maggie and I could go get dinner. We ate at Flip Daddy’s, it was a super cute burger place and was delicious! I mean you just can’t beat a burger with Mac and Cheese on it!
The next day we hit the beach again first thing, thankfully the elevators weren’t an issue again until we were checking out the last day. After the beach we got in the pool for a bit and then got ready and went to Tacky Jacks for dinner. The wait was about 45 mins but in this area the waits were crazy long for dinner so it wasn’t too bad considering. They had a shop and it was right on the water so Koen was pretty entertained. Our consensus was pretty 50/50, the people that liked their food, really like their food, but there were several who didn’t too. I got the Tacky Shrimp, their house specialty and it was amazing, spicy grilled shrimp on a bed of angel hair pasta, delicious!
Wednesday we went parasailing, it was super fun! Lenton sat this one out, lol, he said there was no way in hell he was getting that high! We went to breakfast afterwards and then napped the day away. I’m not a napper and I’m really not a napper on vacation but even I was tired enough to sleep for a bit! That night we went to The Wharf, it’s a super neat place filled with shopping, food and activities. We went to dinner at The Intracoastal, after sitting down (in a basically empty restaurant) we made the mistake of looking at reviews and seeing that they were all pretty much terrible. Well, don’t believe everything you read because it was our best meal we had, and for sure the best cheese sticks any of us had ever had! We shopped around for a little while, got Dippin’ Dots and finally rode the ferris wheel, it was such a fun evening! I highly recommend checking this place out if you’re in the area!
I put Koen down for bed the last time as a 1 year old, talk about water works!
Thursday was Koen’s 2nd birthday, so I got up and made her favorite breakfast of pancakes for everyone! Then we went down to the beach for the final time. We stayed there a good while. Every day she got a little more comfortable with the waves and she wanted us to hold her out in the water most of this day instead of just sitting in the sand. We went back to Flip Daddy’s for dinner, we wanted to go to LuLu’s which is Jimmy Buffet’s sister’s restaurant, but there was almost a 4 hour wait!!!! After dinner, we headed to Gulf Shores for milkshakes at The Yard Milkshake Bar. We got there and it was just wall to wall people, it was crazy! We got in line and finally worked our way up to the front to put our order in where we were told it would be a 45 minute wait, for a dang milkshake!! It was every minute of that wait but they were really cool once we got them! Maggie got a mermaid one that came complete with a candy mermaid tail, I got a Unicorn one that had a chocolate covered unicorn horn and Hunter got a cookie dough one. They were delicious and we had fun eating such a masterpiece!
Before we went to dinner we went down to the beach for a quick photo shoot, it was a pain to get everyone ready and down there but I’m so glad we did it! Also a huge thank you to Maggie for taking her crash course in photography very seriously and capturing my new favorite images of us!
On the way back we stayed in Kinder and did some more gambling, we all said what a fun time we had at this casino, tons and tons of slot machines and lower minimum bets on the table games the guys were playing. It was a blast! Our hotel also had a 24 hour shuttle, so we finally headed back to the hotel a little after 3!
The final day was filled with lots of stops, Koen was pretty much done being in the car but we did finally make it home! We had a great vacation overall and we all have said we would definitley go back to the Orange Beach/Gulf Shores area again.
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