Florida Adventure, 2011

The girls and I are home from a beautiful week in Florida; my parents have rented a place on the Gulf coast for the month of March, and we took advantage of the free room and board and enjoyed a week in the sun.
There really is nothing like that blast of hot, humid air when you step out of the airport when you go on vacation to somewhere warm from somewhere cold. Just to illustrate, we went from this:


to this:




in three hours. That? is nothing short of a freaking miracle.

The girls had never been to Florida before when they weren't at Disney World, so this was a bit of a different expericence for them....I think it was a bit of a shock for them that people actually live there, that there are schools and churches and malls, and that not everyone wears a name tag.

We went to parks and the beach, we did some shopping, and hung out by the pool a lot. When you live in Canada, the idea that you can swim outside, wear flip-flops and need sunscreen in March is incredibly heady. We never got tired of exclaiming "it's winter!" to each other, all week.

Thing 1 and Thing 2 got their first taste of the ocean; they'd never seen it before. Unfortunately is was way too cold to actually go swimming in the Gulf of Mexico; we're Canadian but we're not crazy. (I have some cousins that grew up in south Florida, near Fort Lauderdale, and they were shocked and somewhat in awe that my father would go swimming in their pool when it was only 80°F! We used to be thrilled when our pool here got up to 80.)
They spent their time collecting shells, which you don't get on beaches on the Great Lakes. (Unless you count zebra mussells, which we don't.)
Gasparilla Island was close by, and they have possibly the world's most boring lighthouse. Apparently the island is over run with iguanas, but we didn't see any.

The Mister didn't come with us; his idea of a vacation is not shopping and a book by the pool. But he did excellent work dropping us off at Detroit airport and picking us up. I think he enjoyed the week on his own...he had plenty of time on the computer and probably didn't eat a vegetable the entire time.
Toby was beyond thrilled to see us come home yesterday; I'm sure he thought we were gone for ever. ("And you left me with him???? He does NOT get up at a reasonable hour and is incredibly snarky when I have to remind him to do so, and worse, he eats the tuna himself!! What have you done to me?!?")
This morning he practically turned himself inside out when he realized that I was right there in bed where God intended me to be! He could not stop purring and head-butting and drooling all over me. It was a nice, if rather messy, welcome.

I'm back to work tomorrow; the girls have a few more days of March Break before they are back to reality. But we have the pictures to prove we were there, even if we can't wear flip-flops any more.