South Padre Island - Hoopes Family Vacation 2016

A week after school got out we headed for Texas!  We've all been looking forward to catching up with cousins and my family in South Padre and the trip did not disappoint - we has a FANTASTIC time!
We had an extra early flight out on Sunday so we stayed Saturday night in SLC and were off bright and early!

Traveling with kids is always an adventure :)

We arrived in San Antonio on Sunday June 5th and were meeting up with everyone in South Padre on the 6th, we drove a few hours to Corpus Christi where we spent the night.

Monday we got up and headed for San Antonio,it was fun to meet up with everyone. The kids could hardly stand the wait so after a little catching up....

 ...we headed straight to the beach!  It was so fun to have the water nice and warm and be able to swim until sunset :)

The next day we were back at the beach, and loving every minute!  It was so hot that it felt nice to spend the day just relaxing and playing in the water.

Despite our best efforts to keep everyone from being sunburned (I think I reapplied sunscreen about 4 times) we ended up with some fried children (and adults)...dang it!

Then we put the kids to bed and the adults played a funny game with dental mouth openers.

The next day everyone was pretty miserable, we couldn't be in the sun or go to the beach because of sunburns so we decided to visit a turtle sanctuary and a little place with some sea animals.

 We were hoping people would be feeling better by Thursday, but we should've known better - we had plans to go to the Schlitterban water park but no one was ready to be back in the sun.  We had our Birthday party for everyone and the kids watched a movie.

The kids were dying to get back to the beach, sunburns and all - so we took them for a swim in the evening when the sun was going down.

Then on Friday we decided to take the kids to the Childrens museum in Brownsville - it was so hot and we were happy to find something indoors to do -- the kids had a good time!

That evening we went on a dolphin sight seeing cruise and saw fireworks from the boat, it was lots of fun!

Then on Saturday Ramey & I and the 3 oldest kids went to a flea market...it was a hot HOT day but we had fun checking out all of the mexican market stuff...we drank lots of coke and horchata!

 Ramey bought a cute mexican sling bag that she wore the whole time...when we got back to the car, she was died pink from the bag, haha!

Movie night for the kids!

Sunday morning I took a nice walk on the beach, we relaxed and hung out and everyone packed up to leave, so it left just our little family to finish our last full day in South Padre.

We decided to go exploring at the very tip of the island and we found lots of treasures, made us wonder why we hadn't come sooner.  There were tons of Sand dunes and beaches packed full of huge shells, we had lots of fun gathering shells till the sun went down!

Monday morning we packed up all of our stuff and said goodbye to the 'Red Parrot' and South Padre, it was sad to leave!  We had such a good week making memories and playing our hearts out!