Gillett Party...: Destin, Florida (1st attempt to go to Jamaica )

Please don't ever plan a vacation to Jamaica; or at least don't plan to go with us.

Here’s our story: We drove to Atlanta to go on a wonderful and well-deserved trip to Jamaica for 5 days with Amie's sister's family.

On Monday, 22nd of May we all arrived at the Atlanta airport about 45 minutes before departure. (yes, our scheduled early-morning flight should have been an indicator for a bad time, but none of us paid attention to that). Traffic was REALLY, REALLLY BAD. However, our stress during the drive wasn't the millions of accidents that had stopped traffic, but whether or not the gate agents would let James fly without a birth certificate (a search the night before was in vain). However, at the gate we quickly found out that James' birth certificate was the least of our concern. We needed birth certificates for ALL the kids too--NO EXCEPTIONS. Big THANKS FOR NOTHING goes out here to Air Jamaica and Sandals Beaches Resort for letting us know that kids flying with parents don't need anything because they don’t have IDs--duh! Yes, the saying is true: no info is better than bad info. It took some time and a lot of facial expressions to get the vacation package moved to a month later.

So anyway we found ourselves packed and ready for a beach vacation with no destination. It wasn't hard to realize that we had to find something within driving distance. Six hours later we were in Destin, Florida! Ahhh this was to be one of the best family vacations we’ve ever been on!

We rented a house that had a view of the ocean and a separate bedrooms for the kids (We also took along James’ niece, Catherine to watch the kids when the adults wanted some free time—which turns out to be a fantastic way to vacation!).

The rest of the week was split between the beach, the pool, and the area restaurants. Destin has the best beaches in the nation—blue, clear water with white baby-powder sand (but don’t tell anybody else—we don’t want it to crowd up do we?). During the week, we all kept asking ourselves ‘how could Jamaica be better than Destin’? But for double the price, we felt confident Jamaica could pull through (Note: hahhahhhahhhahhahah. We were sooo naïve!)