LDW 2025 – Can Tabs & A Lighthouse

{Over Labor Day Weekend, we took a mini family vacay to St. Simon’s Island. This is the post for Day 1, Saturday, 8/30/25.}
We were up bright and early Saturday morning ton finish packing the last minute things, and get the car all loaded up. The trunk was completely full, but literally half of this was basically can tabs, for our bi-annual donation to the Ronald McDonald House in Jacksonville.

Of course we stopped at the Busy Bee on our travels, and the girls fell in love with this sweet, gentle giant named Winston.

And then our first real stop of our trip was to the Ronald McDonald House in Jacksonville. We stayed here for Emerson’s open-heart surgery back in 2020, and we have a bunch of family and friends that help us collect can tabs to donate. They take them to the recycling center, and they get enough money back from can tabs alone to pay the utilities at this huge hotel-size residence. This was certainly our biggest donation to date – we estimate it was about 40 gallons worth of can tabs! So thank you to all of our friends and family who helped us with this!

They let us take a little tour around the house again, and even let us look in at one of the rooms. Emmie was re-creating one of her photos from back then, when she was holding a little stuffed heart plushie on the bed, the morning of her surgery.

The ladies in the front office still remember Emerson, and the ones that weren’t there back then have seen her in photos and feel like they know her. It’s very sweet! And they let both girls pick a little prize from the bucket they have up front, on our way out.

We lucked out finding a free table at Metro Diner, for some delicious lunch in Jax, before we went on our way a little further north…

This was Emerson’s breakfast kids meal plate, and my girls cleaned her plate.

We headed up to St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, and got started exploring the area. We hit up a used book store at their local library, walked through their downtown market, and the visited the lighthouse and the rocky shore.

The girls played on a playground for a while, but there was a crazy amount of love bugs invading the area, so they didn’t last long. We headed off to check into our little home for the weekend, at Epworth by the Sea, and were pleasantly surprised with the small, quiet, updated motor court style room we stayed in.

We went back out to a little bar & grill type place for dinner, and ended up smack in the middle of everyone watching and celebrating the UGA football game. The food was decent, but it was super loud, and both girls (and myself) were overwhelmed with all the noise and the lack of a/c at the mostly outdoor restaurant.

It was kinda late by the time we made it back to the motel, but we let the girls stay up even later, and we watched a little bit of the Disney Channel. Addison was very unhappy and confused about the commercials though, and was like, “Daddy, this keeps happening!” And one time Emerson asked us to pause the movie for a bathroom break, but we had to explain, “Nope, you gotta wait for one of those commercials we were just describing to come back on again!” But both girls fell asleep sweetly, using their giant Squishmallow’s as pillows.

I read for a bit, but was pretty tired myself, and was actually asleep earlier than most nights.