We’ve fallen off the wagon a bit in terms of posting pictures—a busy work schedule combined with the usual plethora of kids’ activities has gotten in the way—but we have a decent-sized batch queued up and nearly ready to go.

Over the last fifteen years or so, we seem to have accidentally fallen into a tradition in which we get together with some of our old college friends every five years: in 2004, we went to Paul and Joanna Williams’s house near Killeen, Texas, and in 2009 we all gathered at Dave and Rebecca Hyatt’s house in The Woodlands. Considering that no fewer than ten children have been born to the various families since the 2004 get-together, invading someone’s home no longer seemed like a viable option for the 2014 shindig. Instead, we decided to rent a house on a beach somewhere, so that no family’s permanent residence was at risk of being utterly destroyed. Naturally, we have pictures.

The place we decided on was called Luck o’ the Irish—charmingly, all of these beach houses seem to have cute names—in Surfside Beach, Texas. We stayed there a full week and had a fantastic time. The house was big enough to accommodate all twenty-one of us comfortably, and there were plenty of spaces for the kids to do their own things while the adults played board games and caught up.

The beach itself was wonderful—really far nicer than we had any reason to expect a beach on the Gulf of Mexico to be given our past experiences. Apparently there was a bumper crop of seaweed in Galveston this year that left some area beaches a foul, smelly mess, but by the time of our visit, the seaweed in Surfside had pretty much dried up, leaving a broad, coarse band between the house and the ocean that was little more than a mild nuisance.

We did see a couple jellyfish drifting around one day, and there was a fierce current that would carry you halfway to Houston if you weren’t diligent, but the water was warm and the surf was vigorous enough to be fun for the kids without being overtly threatening. The kids spent hours and hours swimming in the water and playing in the sand and by extension, the parents did as well: after the first couple days, I had the worst sunburn I can remember having, and I don’t burn easily. I spent the rest of the trip bundled in a swim shirt whenever I went out to the water, with sunscreen slathered on even under the shirt.

When we weren’t down at the beach, the kids were completely content to play on iPads and show off games they’d discovered to one another—if I weren’t already bullish on tablets as a platform before this trip, I certainly would be now. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much in the way of inter-child or cross-family drama. The biggest obstacle we faced was trying to stop William from climbing up the stairs to the upper level of the house. Well, that and the fact that the tap water was more or less non-potable, so we kept making quick trips into town to buy bottled water. It wasn’t until the second-to-last day that we noticed the page in the back of the house’s informational binder that warned that Surfside’s water exceeded the federal government’s maximum safe levels of arsenic. According to the warning, it’s perfectly safe for short exposures, but if we’re all dead in six months, you know what happened.

Before we went to Surfside, we stopped off at my parents’ new-ish house in Georgetown, near Austin, which Julia and Joe were very excited to see for the first time. Having spent much of the summer obsessively watching HGTV, they couldn’t stop talking about the various features of the house, though they did come to the conclusion that it was a little on the small side for us (an easy answer to arrive at, considering that it only has two bedrooms). Nevertheless, they had a great time camping out in Grandma and Grandpa’s spare room and counting golf carts on the roads within the gated community of Sun City.

We were flying out of Austin on our way home, but we had a few hours to kill between the time we had to be out of the house in Surfside and our departure. We decided to take a brief detour into Houston to visit Rice and see some of our old haunts. Thanks to a bit of lucky timing, I even managed to snap a quick picture of Joe outside the room that Joe Shidle and I shared during our senior year, twenty years ago.

They’ve done quite a bit of work on campus over the last couple decades, and naturally, as people who have a strong emotional affinity for the way things were at the time we were there, not all of it is to our liking. Most of that can likely be chalked up to ordinary, everyday antipathy toward change, but I’m genuinely saddened by some elements of the reconfiguration of Baker College, where we and most of our close friends lived. In particular, the formerly gorgeous and understated facade of the building, including the main entrance to the commons, is effectively gone, blocked from view from the inner loop by a massive new residential wing. I’m sure it seems completely natural to students who only know the Baker of today—and it’s definitely a plus if the new wing makes it unnecessary (or at least less necessary) to kick some students off campus for a year the way Joe and I were—but it’s not the way Baker looks in my dreams.

We made it back home just in time to start getting ready for school and all that entails. The kids still talk about the beach house, though, and as I was going through the photos to accompany this post, Julia mentioned that seeing them makes her feel a little bit sad, because she misses the house and her friends. By that measure, at least, the trip seems to have been a success.

Gallery: Texas 2014