Orange Beach - A Vacation from a Vacation - Thanksgiving Weekend

This summer when we were looking for ways to use our hotel loyalty points and weekend trips we could take, I suggested the beach for Thanksgiving weekend.  So we booked it and then when Paul went to put it on the calendar, he said something to the effect of, "honey, do you realize how close that is to our Galapagos trip?"  I hadn't but it turned out to be a good thing.  We desperately needed some peaceful down time.

We've been to the beach many times so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this post but I did want a quick documentation of the weekend for our historical records.  I find this blog a nice place to go to see when we last visited somewhere and where we stayed.

Being Thanksgiving weekend, we thought we should celebrate Thanksgiving. So we brought the ingredients for turkey sandwiches including some pre-made relish from Publix.  Our first chance to celebrate was as we charged on the way down.

This might be a good spot to mention the car challenge we ran into leaving Birmingham.  Earlier this week we had picked up a used Model S.  About 20 minutes out of Birmingham, a BMS warning came on telling us the car may not restart.  This appeared to relate to the battery management system which is pretty important so we turned around to switch cars.  Fortunately, the car was still under warranty.

This year for the first time, we had reached Platinum Elite with Marriott.  For this trip we had booked the Fairfield Inn in Orange Beach using points and we had applied to use our Suite Night Awards (pending availability).  About a week before the trip, we received an e-mail indicating we had been upgraded to an Executive Suite with a Balcony!

Our time on the beach was spent taking it easy - walking or sitting on the beach and listening to the sounds of the waves and shorebirds.  Sunrise Saturday morning was just breathtaking!

The boardwalk to get to the beach