Vacation Pictures

Here are the pics from our trip to the Sunshine State! Sorry for the tardiness, but in my defense, Blogger wasn't cooperating with posting so many pictures and wanted to rearrange them all out of order on me. *boo* *hiss*

You should be able to click on these pictures to enlarge, I think.

After missing our flight out of Detroit and being stuck at McNamara for 6 hours, the airport tarmack was a welcome sight.


This was only my 2nd vacation ever by air. It astounds me that such a large, heavy object (the plane, not me) is able to take flight but here we are leaving the ground...




Arriving in Florida we saw some strange things about the land. It was a lot different from Detroit which was just blocks of housing and streets. In Florida there were all these rivers and streams that looked like arteries and capillaries in the ground. There were also a lot of these strange formations which I still haven't figured out. Maybe I ought to ask Mel Gibson?


After landing in Jacksonville, we still had another hour's drive ahead of us to get to Des & Adele's condo. We rented a PT Cruiser (which was re-named PT Loser by the end of the week) and drove south to Palm Coast. We got there just after the sun went down but made it in time for dinner. We didn't actually get a good look at the Cinnamon Beach complex until the next day. This is the view off the back balcony. Yep... that's the ocean!

To the right off the balcony was more condos and the common areas (which you can't really see) that had 2 outdoor pools and games rooms.

To the left was one of the holes of the golf course in our gated community. This is where we watched Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley play one afternoon... from our balcony, of course.



We took two trips to the Outlet stores on the I95. It took us two trips because it took us an entire afternoon to stroll through the 85 stores on the one side, and there was a whole other outlet mall on the other side of the I95 that we wanted to see. 85 stores sounds like a lot... and it is... there was an outlet for pretty much everything imaginable.


Another place we spent a lot of the week was by the pool(s) and on the beach. Cinnamon Beach is named such because of the cinnamon coloured sand.... which isn't sand at all!

It's actually made up of various sizes of shells. There were almost full sized shells which you can pick up and collect along the beach, and then there were grades of shell-bits. The picture below is to show the size of the middle grade of shell-bits. There were smaller and bigger shells all over.

The ocean was actually not as cold as we thought. I compare it to early July at Grand Bend. There were a lot of rocks along the shore though so we didn't even try to swim there. Every morning we were able to watch the dolphins play which was very cool. We weren't able to get any pictures since they're so fast!

There was another creature that we saw a lot of during our stay. These were the Floridian Squirrels that were out and about. They weren't too shy but they weren't very friendly either. As far as I know, they don't bite. Their bigger cousin, the Alligator living in the ponds by the condos, only showed himself a couple of times and we missed it.

This one has his eye on Mike.

He definitely wanted to let Mike know who was boss of the pool deck.


The temperature droppped very suddenly on one of the days so we took a trip south to Daytona to visit the International Speedway (mostly for Mike's benefit). Here we are on Victory Lane where the winners get to spray champagne over each other.

Here we are with Mike's mom Adele next to this year's winning car (you'll have to ask him who it was b/c I have no clue!).

We took a tour of the Speedway itself. What struck me most was the sheer size of the track. The corners actually bank at 33 degrees, and apparently if you aren't going fast enough gravity takes over and well... just look at all the skid marks!

Mike did a drive simulator thing which let him drive the Daytona 500 while Des, Adele and I sat in a theatre that guided us through what a car would feel like in a race (difference was it wasn't interactive). We also caught the 3D IMAX show.


Boy this is getting long! Here are a few family photos. First, me with Des' mother Joan.

Mike with his mother and Grandmother Doris.

And the obligatory self-portrait of Mike and I by the pool.


The last picture is the only one we took of the other side of the condo, but I think it pretty much sums up the end of our trip to Florida. Thanks for making it this far!