New Smyrna Beach Vacation [VLOG] pt 1: Thrift Stores, Antiquing, and More

As a kid, we rarely ever took warm vacations. I’m talking about escaping the subzero Minnesota winter and cold and rainy spring type of vacations. The first time I experienced Florida, the ocean, and Disney World I was 15 years old. I vowed to never make my kids wait so long to experience the beauty of the ocean. That was the start of our New Smyrna Beach vacation  obsession.

Once Bean was old enough to start traveling by air without us being terrified of her colicky and stubborn self driving the entire plane batty, I jumped at the chance to escape to somewhere warm. We took our first family vacation to Florida in 2014. Ever since myself and my hubby caught the travel bug, we’ve made a priority to budget and save for a yearly vacation to Florida.

Because of my job, we schedule our family vacation either during Winter Break or Spring Break. In the past, Winter Break weather in Florida has been just as nice and more satisfying to escape the cold Minnesota winter. It’s pretty fun knowing you just left subzero temps for days on the warm beach in the sun 🙂

Well, Mother Nature was not on our side one bit this year. The arctic blast that was hitting Minnesota decided it would also work it’s way all the way down to Florida. It even snowed in Florida while we were there, I’m not kidding.

You might say, as many people obnoxiously reminded me, “Well at least it wasn’t -40 degree windchill where you are!”

And to them I say,

“I did NOT spend time planning and saving a few thousand dollars to sit stranded in a beach house because it’s 50-60 degrees and raining and the ocean is angry.” 

It’s extremely frustrating when you book your vacation and housing based on spending your time on the beach, and then to have 6 out of the 8 days completely sabotaged by rain and crazy wind, not to mention high tide warnings. And might I mention, the 2 days that we had some sun were in the mid-high 50s so beach time was quite interesting. I’m not exaggerating when I say people were walking down the beach past us in ear muffs.

I don’t think those trying to make me feel better about my vacation weather truly understood what was at stake. If I wanted to spend my days indoors, I might as well have stayed in Minnesota and saved my time and money. Ugh.

ANYWAYS. Can you tell I’m still salty about all the comments? lol

As I tell everyone who has asked me how my vacation went since I’ve been home… we made the best of it. It was time away in another state.

Before I knew just how crappy the weather was going to get, I decided that I was going to document our New Smyrna Beach vacation on my YouTube channel. I pictured much more beach days and fun, sunny outings but it got a lot more interesting as the week went on.

I have so much footage that I had to divide it up by days. Without further ado, our first and second days in New Smyrna Beach, Florida featuring thrifting, crab hunting, and more…

P.S. I’m planning on producing much more video content in the upcoming months, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel to see all of our goings-on! I’m also leaning towards more video content for the future. Let me know what you think about that in the comments below!