Day One - Virginia Beach Adventure

Traveling with children is difficult at best. Traveling with children with significant special needs is a Herculean task. I feel like I was instructed to pack up one third of my house, fit it all into the family MINIvan, and arrive at our destination with happy, smiling faces. Oh, and in the process – don’t forget anything important. Well we didn’t and we did – we didn’t arrive with happy, smiling faces and we did forget some important things.

Then throw into that stressful situation a deafblind child who understandably gets a little anxious in strange places, and you can count of the first day of any such trip to be more than just a little stressful.

We left home yesterday morning for our trip to Virginia Beach. I am part of a conference planning committee which is hosting a conference called Pathways to Possibilities. The conference is targeting professionals a family members who support children with significant disabilities, and in particular, deafblindness. The conference doesn’t officially start until Tuesday evening, but we came to the beach a couple of days early for a vacation, the only vacation we will get this year.

So assuming I can find Internet access somewhere (and my hotel room is unfortunately not one of those places), I will still try to post every day this week. In the meantime, we are going to try a dolphin watching trip today if we can get Ashley onto the boat. Last year, she loved just such a trip once we got her on the boat – and that required the strong arms of the boat captain hoisting her aboard while she screamed like a wounded coyote.

My only other mission today is to find shrimp – lots and lots of steamed, spiced shrimp!