Florida Day # 4

Florida Day # 4- April 7, 2009

It was COLD today!!! Well, if you consider mid 60's cold!! The wind was really blowing though, so we wore sweatshirts and jeans today. Halle, however, really wanted to go check out the pool, so we went down and covered up in towels so she could go swimming. Halle all alone in the massive pool...There were 100s of kids there, and she was the only one brave enough to get in the water today. The pool was heated though, so that helped.

Because it was chilly, we decided to head to St. Augustine, which was about 30 min north of us. Preston and Mrs. H drove over from Orlando to spend the afternoon with us.

Getting ready to go shopping in St. Augustine

This was the oldest wood school house in the US. It was right on the main street with all the little shops. You could take a tour of it, but we didn't.

This is the restuarant where we ate dinner. It was called The Raintree. It was really good, except the menu was filled with alot of stuff I had no clue what it was. It was just like a house, with a front door and everything.

Halle and Papa...They were buddies on this trip!

We went to Dairy Queen for dessert. We headed back to our resort and just relaxed the rest of the evening. It was an enjoyable day, but we're hoping for warmer weather tomorrow.

Florida Day # 3

Florida Day # 3- April 6, 2009

Hammock Beach Resort, Palm Coast

This is the resort we stayed at. It is by far the nicest place I have ever been. It was huge and extremely beautiful!! The pictures just don't do it justice.We spent our first morning there at the ocean! Our resort was right on the ocean, so we had our own private beach!
Stylin on the beach

Bathing Beauties

If you can see that fin in the water, that's a dolphin! We saw a 5-6 of them and we think we might have seen 2 sharks too!! They were super close to shore.

Hal and Papa playing in the waves

All dressed for dinner. We ate at Seaside Grille, which was a restaurant at the resort.

Halle got a double chocolate cake for dessert and it was like fudge. Delicious!
Here's what our apartment looked like

The girl's bathroom

Halle and my room. Jess slept on the pull-out couch

Living Room
Kitchen

Kitchen/Dining Room
Our balcony

Our first day at the resort was so relaxing. We needed it after Disney! Nothing beats playing in the sand, listening to the waves, and having the sun shining on you!!

Florida Day # 2

Florida Day # 2- April 5, 2009

DISNEY WORLD!!

It was the perfect day for the park- High 80's with a little cloud cover. Halle super excited to get there! The last time she went was when she was 2 and she doesn't remember anything about it.

Dad doing what he did best- pulling out the credit card to pay!! haha!!

Cinderella's Castle
Halle on Main Street

Swiss Family Treehouse

The first ride- Pirates of the Caribbean

Standing in line at "It's A Small World" This is the view we looked at all day long. Halle and Papa led us around the park

Halle is front of Minnie's house...Their smiles kind of match!
Me and Hal

We spent the 1st half of the day at Magic Kingdom and the 2nd half at Animal Kingdom. Yes, we crammed 2 parks in one day! We really were flying around the parks, but we got to see and do a lot!!

The Tree of Life- it's got a ton of animals carved into the trunk

Halle with Terk

We went on the African Safari!!! AWESOME!!! We saw so many animals!!

I won't bore you with tons of pics of animals, but here are a few:

All the animals were just in open land, no fences dividing off the animals.

Alligators

Headless giraffe...Haha!

Elephant

Lion yawning, even though it's cooler to say he was roaring!!

Gorilla

Mickey Mouse
There was a Rainforest Cafe at Animal Kingdom, so we ate dinner there. It was nice to sit down for a few minutes after running all over the parks all day.

Halle and I went on one last ride before leaving Animal Kingdom. It was this crazy rollercoaster!!We headed back to Magic Kingdom for another hour or so to do a little shopping. We left the park at 9 pm and had 1.5 hr drive to our resort in Palm Coast. We got in to the resort about 11 pm and Halle didn't get to bed until about 1 am.

We had an extremely busy day! It was tons of fun and we really wished Brad and Parker would have been there with us. We all slept really hard and looked forward to relaxing on the beach tomorrow.

Florida Day #1

Florida Trip: Day #1- April 4, 2009

I hauled my laptop with me to Florida and my intention was to blog about our vacation every night so I wouldn't have a bunch to do when I got home. Well, the building where we stayed for the majority of the week did NOT have Wi-Fi or even a cable for me to plug in the computer, so I had no way of getting online, unless I wanted to drive up to Starbucks every morning. (I chose to go to the beach instead)

So, here's our vacation.

Halle all ready to head to the airport

It was pretty cool the morning we left MI. We were all ready for warm weather!
Our first flight was to Cleveland, OH. It was a small plane!! It only held 30-40 people.

Are we there yet?
Waiting in the Cleveland airport. We had just enough time to grab some lunch before boarding the next plane. We made it to FLORIDA!!! In front of an aquarium at the airport in Tampa. We were waiting for the rental car. I forgot to take a picture of it, but the rental place gave us this small SUV that only held 2-3 suitcases. We had 6 large suitcases and 5 people!!! So, we ended up waiting for about 1/2 hr for them to bring us a decent sized SUV. They gave dad 20% off for the mishap!
We made it to Orlando, got cleaned up, and headed out to the town of Celebration. It's a nice, new town with homes, shops, restaurants, etc. It was beautiful out!

We ate at the Town Tavern. We got to eat outside. This was the buzzer that notified us when our table was ready.

We met up with Preston (Jess's boyfriend) and his mom for dinner. I obviously missed the memo that we were supposed to wear pink and white!!It was a great first day! It was so warm and we were in shorts! That's all that mattered!! We got dessert at Kilwin's and walked around the town before heading back to our hotel for some sleep. We've got a big day tomorrow- Disney World!!