Beauty in Opposites

I love looking at opposites. But I prefer sunny days over rainy days. The first set of pictures is on a beautiful sunny day and the next set is on a rainy day. All these photos are unedited!

 
And the rainy day pics.........................

Florida 2013 Part 6

You are probably wondering when these Florida posts are going to end! :-) (I mean, 6 parts! Come on already!) Well, I have news for you! This is the last one! Aren't you excited to read about my conclusion to our vacation???

Well, on Friday, April 12, our last day in the Keys, we packed up and drove to Leigh Ann's Coffee House for breakfast. Kara and I split a cheese danish and a cinnamon roll that had pastry dough instead of regular dough.

 For those of you that don't know, a cheese danish is filled with cream cheese whipped with powdered sugar. Not some sort of savory cheese.:-) Both of our breakfast items were delicious! And yes, that is my ever present journal, trying to catch up on all the latest events. :-)

 After breakfast, we drove to a "few" gift shops. Corinna got her souvenir at one. She got a fuzzy pink stuffed animal starfish with colorful swirls on it. It also has big eyes and a mouth. She calls it her "sauw-fish." It sounds kind of like "selfish", but it's pretty cute. At another gift shop, Darin got a small dolphin snow globe. After looking at several gift shops for Kara, (without success), we drove to Sparky's for lunch. We had been there on our previous vacation to Florida three years earlier. Kara and I split a small pizza. It was a 10 inch thin crust pizza with shrimp, bacon, fresh tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese. Mmmmmm. It was good! The shrimp were flavorful and juicy, the bacon was crispy, and the mozzarella was oozing off the pizza, not to mention the nice addition of fresh tomatoes! That was a very good pizza! After lunch, Kara bought a Sparky's shirt for her souvenir with the money that was given to her by our grandpa and grandma. We had finally found Kara a souvenir! Victory!! :-) After lunch, we drove back to Fort Lauderdale, where we would be staying for the night.

 Mommy and Titus at Sparky's with hundreds of dollar bills behind them

Driving on the 7 mile bridge

Look at the water!

As a surprise, we stopped at Robert Is Here in the afternoon. It is a smoothie and fresh produce "stand" that we had gone to three years earlier. It was nice to get out of the suburban for a while and the cool drinks were refreshing. But we all agreed: they needed a BlendTec! :-)

And yes! That is all! That concludes our Florida vacation! We arrived home on Monday, April 15 without any disasters or accidents. :-)

Florida 2013 Part 5

After our wreckless (well not exactly wreckLESS) supper at The Wreck, we slept at a Holiday Inn and had breakfast there in the morning. Their bagels were actually not too bad! Another odd thing about their breakfast: they had a tip jar! Daddy said that he had never seen one of those at a hotel before. After breakfast, we drove to Bahia Honda State Park. We were there early enough to claim one of the shelters for the day. We swam for the whole morning and "snorkeled" in the afternoon. We didn't actually have snorkel gear, but Mommy and Daddy had bought us goggles, so we used those. And they worked pretty well!

We were able to get this picture before a park ranger told us we weren't supposed to be climbing on the trees.

Brothers!

Having a fun time swimming together

This is a Queen Conch. If you look close enough, you can see it sitting inside there. When I found it in the water, I couldn't believe it!

Kara found a small starfish under a rock. Under water! It was pretty cool! It even stuck to our hands when we held it.

 Darin and Kara found a sea urchin while snorkeling as well. It was pretty sharp!

 I found a closed shell underwater and decided to bring it up and try to open it, since it felt pretty heavy. We opened it and found an octopus! Or maybe a squid. But we were all pretty surprised!

 We put the octopus/squid in a bucket with water and some sand. Inside its shell were some small clearish elongated things that we guessed to be larvae. When we put it in the bucket, it started darting around and swimming. Then it squirted out some black stuff. It was pretty cool!

After we packed up, we showered and left the beach. Then we drove to Keys Fisheries for supper. It was right on the water and all the fish was fresh. Supper was a lot better than the night before! 

We all got pretty burnt in the sun at the beach.

THIS is our supper. The salad in the left foreground is Daddy's and the dish at the back is Mommy's. Daddy had a chicken salad and Mommy had some sort of lemon flavored fish. The two dishes of Lobster Mac 'n' Cheese are Darin and Natalie's and Kara's and mine.

After supper we went to Sweet Savannah's for ice cream. On the wall outside the shop was a large cupcake with light pink frosting and sparkly sprinkles.  So, OF COURSE Kara HAD to have her picture taken next to it! :-)