Girls Weekend

In September I went to Bethany Beach with a few ladies from the ward for a girls weekend. Usually this is way outside my comfort zone but I've been trying to be a bit more social these days so I continued to push aside my natural inclination to back out and on a Friday morning drove out to our friend's beach house with two other ladies. I am so glad that I went because we had such a great time together! Becca, Nicole, and I arrived around lunchtime; Sommer, Michelle, and Marley were already there, having gone up Thursday night. We all ate lunch and then headed over to the beach. Although it wasn't the hottest day, it was still wonderful to just sit on the beach, relax, and enjoy looking out at the beautiful ocean.

Our fun crew for the weekend: Marley, Nicole, Michelle, Sommer, and Becca.  And of course I'm the one taking the picture.

Some of these crazy ladies went out for a swim! Brrrr!!!

Sommer and I were content to stay sand-side - reading, eating, and even taking a little nap. It was divine! This little bird decided to keep me company for awhile.

After a tasty Mexican dinner, we came back to the townhouse and celebrated Sommer's birthday.

After dessert it was time for some fun card games and spoons.

Marley was the spoons champion...until our rematch!

All evening Marley had been talking about wanting to explore two abandoned houses that were in the neighborhood. After quite a bit of talking about it, we finally decided to take action. Around 11:00 we all changed into our "prowling the neighborhood at night" dark clothes in preparation for some thug Mormon action. We needed some good stretching before heading out on our adventure!

Oh, yeah...we're definitely thug!!!

We made quite the sight...6 Mormon moms stalking the neighborhood late at night. I'm not quite sure what Becca is doing but I think this was what she considered her sneaking pose.

The first house had police tape all around it so this was as brave as we got. We're thug but not that thug; we still wanted to be law abiding citizens.

The second house we went to only had tape around the front porch so we felt okay doing silly poses and then walking around, peeking in windows.

Honestly, it was really dark and pretty creepy.

Marley really wanted to find a way in and we thought we'd be able to get in through this back porch door but there was just so much stuff piled up inside that we were afraid someone might get hurt. So, more silly poses.

Whenever cars would drive by we would act like trees with the silly idea that if we just stood still they wouldn't notice this rather large group of ladies prowling around this abandoned house late at night. It was super dark so chances are our strategy worked.

After getting our fill of the creepy house we were about to head back in but Marley was really insistent about going back to the first house with all the police tape and getting a closer look so, bowing to peer pressure, we once again headed that way. And yes, we crossed under that tape and never looked back.
The reason there was so much police tape was because this house had had a bad fire and was probably very unstable. As we were creeping around the house someone felt something grab them; turns out it was only some vines but it caused quite a panic for a minute. Of course we then had to ham it up for the camera!

And then the car came. We were all in the back of the house, sneaking around, and someone noticed a car pull up and stop close to where we were. That started the panic - everyone took off running! Unfortunately it was while I was running that I heard poor Michelle say that she had dropped her sweatshirt and she headed back to the backyard to look for it. I didn't want to leave her to the mercy of who knows what so I ran back to her; Marley did the same. The others? Oh, they were long gone! Apparently the car had looked like it was stopping but it had turned off into one of the neighborhoods so we were safe. The sweatshirt was found and Marley, Michelle, and I spent a few more minutes exploring this ultra creepy house. You can see in this picture how burned it was.

Well, despite the late hour we weren't quite ready to head in for the night so we all piled into my car and headed to the beach. Nicole was a good sport and took the way back.

The beach is a little freaky at night...the water is so black that it could have anything swimming around in it. But it was fun to just walk along the sand, dip our feet in the water, and talk.

Marley even found some crabs!

To show how truly thug we are, we posed in front of the cop car. Too bad the cops thought we were hilarious and would have never seen us as a true menace.

By 2:00 we were all in bed. The next day we spent about two hours at the beach but were driven in by the rain. In the afternoon we went to the outlets to do a little shopping, (which is where we picked up our matching sweatshirts in the picture below) ate dinner, and then Becca, Nicole, and I headed home.

We all had such a great time and are definitely heading back in the spring for another girls weekend!