Living, Laughing, and Loving Life: Florida Vacation

In June, we traveled to Florida to spend a week at the parks and the beach. We have some great friends - Chip and Heather Whitehead and their son, Carter, who graciously invited us to share their timeshare with them.

We decided to drive - I know, crazy for a family who has free airine travel. We stopped along the way to see James' grandmother in Arkansas and his sister and her family in Alabama.

We started our fun in the sun in Orlando at Sea World - which was a walk across the parking lot from our hotel. Very nice.

Here is the whole gang at Sea World.

There was so much to see and made a full day of it. We even did the backstage tour and got to see lots of animals that are not necessarily "on display" all the time. This little penguin was one that we got to pet.

The animals were amazing and just another reminder of the creativity of our great God.

Here we are ready to tackle Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure!

Universal Studios is set up like street scenes and many of them are from popular movies. For you Back to the Future fans - this is the Delorian used in the movies. The boys have just seen these movies recently, so this was a highlight for sure.

Islands of Adventure has lots of different areas, but I think the favorite was the comic strip area. The boys got to see and get pictures with SpiderMan, Wolverine, Captain America, Storm and others. What a thrill! There was also a new area this year, Harry Potter. Even though we are not really Harry Potter fans, this area is amazingly well done and we got to have a "sneak peak" at the area, since it wasn't scheduled to open for another week.

After our time in Orlando, we travelled to the east coast of Florida to Vero Beach. We did not have any plans for these days, so we just hung out at the beach all day. This is the view from our room! Amazing, huh?

We did not know it before we got there, but Vero Beach is one of the largest nesting grounds for Sea Turtles in the world. There were several spotted during the day when we were swimming, but there were also lots of sea turtle nests up and down the beach.