Grand Finale Vacation

I have had Florida withdrawals since we moved.   I miss the beautiful foliage, sunsets, beaches and all the fun there was for me to experience while living there. It seems like my life in Florida was a separate life that I lived.  I think I was in vacation mode.  Now that I am back in the west, I feel like I am in real life again, continuing where I left off before we moved to Florida. 

I still had a few things left on my bucket list near the end of the school year that I wanted to do before we moved away.  I saved most of them for after graduation when my parents came out to help us get ready to move. This trip was my grand finale where all the Florida fun came to an end. sniff sniff

We spent the morning at the beach the first day after they arrived.  My mom, Ang, and I had fun swimming in the ocean until we got tired and realized we couldn't touch for a long time when we tried to come back to the beach. We are the tiny specks way out there in the ocean in the following picture.

In the meantime, my dad was having fun doing some metal detecting.

 

Lucy was loving life until she came running out to the water and fell on her face. She got a mouthful of sand and grit in her eyes.

 

Luckily it didn't faze Lucy too much. She had bigger priorities to take care of like making sure she got enough digging time in...

 

...and making sure she found a perfect seat for her muddy bottom afterwards. Poor Ang.  

 I really wanted to get a family beach picture before we moved so my parents offered to take them that night since it was still great weather. I love how this next one turned out.  What great photographers we had!  

Mark also took some sweet ones of Lucy.

We took some of them for fun too. I thought the colors they chose turned out great, especially since they hadn't even planned for a picture.

We got an extra bonus after pictures since we got to see one our last Florida sunsets.

The next day we drove to Orlando to go to Disney World.  We were pretty excited to get there as you can tell.

 

Here we are to start the excitement at Ebcot.

 

 

We also made a stop at Silver Springs in northern Florida. I was super excited because I really wanted to see the Florida springs and it was supposed to have rides, a petting zoo, glass bottom boats, and animal exhibits. Silver Springs wasn't as great as I had pictured, but it was still fun. 

 

I loved the color of the springs.  The water was mostly clear with parts that were turqoise colored. It was fun to see pretty water that looked different than the beach. 

The main attraction was a glass bottom boat that went through the springs. We saw fish, turtles, an old sunken indian canoe, and a few movie relics on the ocean floor.

 

 

Next we went over to the "rides" which included one broken one and a carousel without any music.  My dad wasn't too impressed. 

  

Ang was loving it though. 

 

Then came the most amazing attraction.....we saw a giraffe that peed for ten whole minutes at the petting zoo!  We walked away and then came back and it was still going strong.

After the petting zoo we waited for a bear show to start.  I was so intrigued to know what the bears were going to do in the show until I realized I was way too excited.  A worker came out to the crowd and asked if anyone had any questions about the bears.  That was it--that was the bear show. Pretty lame.

Next we headed to the alligator feeding. Luckily that wasn't as lame.  Just seeing the teeth on these gators was enough entertainment..

We were part of the lucky group for the next glass bottom boat ride.  Our tour was the last one of the day since there was lightning afterwards. 

For the rest of the time we walked through the animal exhibits.

Lucy was enthralled by the otters.  They were doing circles in their tank and would pop up and look at us everytime they came by.  She wanted a front row seat to see these guys perform.

While we were walking around we kept commenting on how nice it was that we had the park to ourselves. It wasn't crowded at all. Soon after, a gift shop worker told us the park had closed because of the lightening.  She wasn't even sure if there were still other workers in the park. It was pretty funny that all of us had missed that announcement and were so oblivous to the news. By the time we got out to the parking lot, there was only one car left.  It was ours.

For our last day of fun, we took a tour at the Fruit and Spice Park.  They had all kinds of exotic fruit and spices to see and try.  I was amazed that there were so many kinds of fruit and spices that existed and I had never even heard of them.  My favorite was tasting a leaf that was chocolate mint.  I definitely didn't know my favorite sweet combination existed in the form of a plant.

We rode the tour on a golf cart... 

through groves like these.

The fruit tasted as good as this looks.  It was so juicy and sweet! The best part about tasting the fruit was that the tour guide was not shy about giving samples.  It just kept coming and coming.

At the end of the tour, we saw a couple of more interesting things.  We saw a tall plant that looked just like a shower head...

...and a pond of lily pads.

 We headed for fresh fruit shakes at Robert is Here after the tour.  I had a key lime shake--loved it.

Grandpa let Lucy have a taste of his shake. I should have warned him before it was too late.  Once she started, there was no stopping her from finishing it.  She drank so much of his that he ended up having to buy another one.  

That night we had dinner on the shore in the keys. 

While we were looking off the dock, we saw a shark swim by!

We got perfect front row seats for the sunset afterwards.

There you have it--the grand finale of our Florida vacations.