Our Little Trip: long story, but worth the read

On Sunday we packed up the car and then headed to church. We decided to go to the early Praise and Worship service and then leave before Sunday School. We went home, changed clothes and were on route to our lunch destination an hour away. (It was one of my childhood favorites, C.aptan D's in case you're wondering.) After lunch we went to S.outh of the Border for a little leg-stretching before The Muffin's nap.
After a couple of hours driving, we were in M.yrtle Beach. The temperature was near 80 degrees. We opened the sunroof and enjoyed the sunshine. Our first stop was the T.anger outlets because Mommy need a couple of new maternity shirts! The M.otherhood outlet was a disappointment, so we decided to checkout the C.arter's outlet for any exciting bargains. I bought an adorable sleepsack ($5.99) for the Baby-to-be. It has rubber duckies on it! Of course, nearly everything in the store was gender specific and I really don't want to dress our baby boy or girl in yellow or green for the first six months, so that was fine. We have quite a few neutral outfits for the first few months so I refrained from buying anything else.
Since the weather was so nice, Big Daddy had the great idea of checking into our hotel, freshening up for dinner and then going for a walk on the beach. Much to my dismay, our room was on the top floor. My first instinct was to ask for a room on a floor other than the 16th, but I didn't. (this factors in a little later) We quickly learned that our sweet little girl doesn't like the elevator, so the ride up and down from the top was loads of fun! Muff understood that it was too cool to play in the ocean, but her clumsiness got the best of her and she sort of fell on her bottom and into the water. I refused to ride the elevator back up to our room, so I changed her clothes in the car and we took her to ride the old rides at the P.avilion Nostalgia Park. She would have been happy to stay there all night, but it was time to eat...again...our dinner destination was T-B.onz. We had dinner and then went back to the room to get ready for a swim and a little ride in the lazy river...Muff was in heaven! Things went well until Muff got sleepy and decided that it was time to go home because she "misses her house" and "misses her bed" and "misses her toys". We all went to bed at 9:00.
Monday morning we were up early. We had breakfast at the hotel and rode around town a little before R.ipley's Aquarium opened. We paid our (way-too-much) admission and went under the sea. The Muffin enjoyed looking at everything except for the pirate exibit. She was so scared! Three rides on the "elevator belt" through the shark tunnel and she had forgotten about those mean pirates. When we left the aquarium a couple of hours later it was pouring down rain. We headed to L.ogan's R.oadhouse for lunch because we like to eat and it was about that time. I'm not sure what we did after that, but I do remember going back to our room for a gorious nap! We woke up from our nap to see beautiful sunshine! We decided to hit M.otherhood at the mall where I picked up two cute new shirts. Then, we walked around B.roadway at the Beach for a long time and had dinner. (The place we ate is NOT worth mentioning.) We decided to pick up a sweet treat at D.unkin Doughnuts and then go back for more swimming. We stayed up "late" and turned in for the night around 10:30. I woke up around 1:00 to use the bathrrom and then fell back asleep. And this is where the we are THAT family moment comes in!
Around 1:30 the fire alarm went off. In case you've never heard the fire alarm in a hotel room it's a "WOOOP, WOOP" followed by a voice saying that "an emergency has been detected and the hotel must be evacuated". There's also a flashing strobe light that goes off. (We experienced this last summer at a different MB hotel) I immediately put my body over The Muff and Big Daddy looked outside to see if he saw fire or could smell smoke. We decided to evacuate even thoug the alarm stopped making noise. The lights were still flashing and one of our family mottos is "safety first". I was wearing my favorite blue plaid, cotton, men's pajama set with an orange Honey Smacks shirt underneath and white socks. To this lovely ensemble I added my brown Mary Jane's. Big Daddy was (luckily) wearing plaid pajama pants and after three trips around our suite managed to find his glasses and after me telling him many times, he also put on a shirt and flip flops. The Muff was the beauty queen of our family in her kitty cat pajamas. I picked her up, along with the beloved Slumbers (bear) and wrapped her in her favorite yellow blanket. Our room was right beside of the emergency exit, a.k.a stairs. I walked out and saw that the young couple next door were going to the elevator. I went to the stairs only to realize that in the ten feet I'd walked, I'd lost my Big Daddy. I tried to open the door and then he came out of our room with my brown hobo bag and his jacket on. We quickly, efficiently and quietly walked down from the 16th floor. I was carrying Muff and Big Daddy had our treasures. We reached the end of the stairs and Big Daddy opened the door. We were behind a waterfall and a ton of bushes. We made our way out of the jungle and onto the sidewalk...alone. I was starting to feel silly when we were the only one's in the stairwell, but this was ridiculous. A few seconds later about 15 people showed up and then we heard the sirens. I told Big Daddy to get our car and he came back a few minutes later to say that security said it was a false alarm. Muff had managed to sleep through everything, but I saw her eyes open when the fire engine drove by so I explained what was happening. After about 10 minutes out on the sidewalk, we moved p to the hotel lobby. We waited around 20 minutes for the firemen to reset the alarm and let us go back to our room. Evidently, it is the policy of most hotels to silence the fire alarm asap when there is no smoke detected. In this case it was a dryer that was overheating, according to Firefighter Collins. He unplugged the dryer, chewed out the clerk at he desk for silencing the alarm when there was a heat sensor that sensed a problem and told us to have a good night. The Muffin went back to sleep right after I had her snuggled under her blankies. Big Daddy and I stayed awake and tried to go back to sleep for the next couple of hours.
At breakfast, we learned that several other people had evacuated to a different area, so there were a few more than 15 of us who tried to save ourselves. I'm sure we would have ignored the alarm if we hadn't had The Muffin with us, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
Our trip home was uneventful.