Vacation to Pensacola Beach!

For a Christmas present this year, my parents took all the family to Pensacola Beach, Florida for a week long vacation.  It was amazing, the beach was the best I've been to with white sand and clear blue water.  I'd recommend it as a vacation destination to anyone looking to spend a week relaxing in the sun!

We ran down to the beach as soon as we arrived.  Here's how it greeted us!

Tar ball :(

The Gulf Coast was devastated by the BP oil spill last year.  While most of it has been cleaned up, the crews still came by every day to pick up tar balls hidden in the sand.  One worker told us that on one day last week they had removed 80 pounds of tar from the beach we were on.  A week before, eight workers had removed 3,000 pounds of tar from Pensacola Beach in one day!

Oil spill clean up workers.

Brent and I were the token vegetarians in a group of 17 people, so as you can imagine, food was a bit of a challenge.  We had planned ahead, packing our favorite snacks for the road trip and a few things to eat during the week.  For the car, we packed Stonewall's Jerquee snacks, lots of treats and goodies from Trader Joe's, and some good iced tea.  We figured we could find some form of tofu down there, but we packed our favorite soy chorizo from Trader Joe's as well.  The next few posts will be about what we ate while everyone else was enjoying giant tuna steaks, oysters, and lots and lots of meat!

All in all, it was a beautiful week.  We had a great time, but really didn't appreciate being welcomed back to our home state by a hail storm~ figures!

 I'll leave you with this: