Our trip to Florida was wonderful! It was so nice just be with each other and not be working. Some of you may remember, we were just in Florida for the first time in April. Well, we had another set of free airline tickets and wanted to go to the warmest, tropical place in the contiguous United States. So we chose to re-visit sunny Florida. Although Florida gets an A+ for its tropical beauty, we would've been better off staying in Colorado for sun. Several days were warmer in Colorado. Locals said they never get this kind of weather in October, maybe January. One or two days broke records for the coolest days at this time of year since 1944. Don't get me wrong, there were two nice, sunny, super windy days. The nicest and warmest weather and most fun we had was for about an hour on the second to last day there. It had been raining all day long. But the sun came out at about 2pm and stayed for an hour. We went down to the beach and played in the "hurricane-like" waves during that time! It was so much fun!
Florida is so beautiful with all of it's canals and waterways. This trail was along of them and close to our hotel.
I have to admit, I was a little disappointed when we first got to our hotel. This was a very low budget trip since we had seen many of the sights the last time we were there, so I had my heart set on spending all of my time at the beach. We made sure our hotel was right next to the ocean, so I just assumed we would have an ocean view. Not the case. Our room was one of the six without a view of the ocean, and we were overlooking the ugly parking lot and loud, busy street.
The first night we were awakened by loud motorcycles revving their engines and in the morning were awakened by construction much too early. I was in the shower that evening and Chris said that he has a surprise for me. Naturally, I was thrilled! I quickly finished and he took me to our new room several doors down and on the ocean side! We were sooooooo excited!!!!
The view from our new room!
Our fifth day was nice because it was sunny, but it was a bit chilly and super windy. So we drove around checking the area out, got pumpkin pie flavoried Cold Stone ice cream to celebrate Halloween the following day, and found a beautiful free state park at the beach, where we froze eating our ice cream. But it was beautiful and we were the only ones there besides a couple of walkers.
Afterwards we went to the Loggerhead Turtle Conservatory. It was really neat! When turtles are found hurt, they bring them here. This tub was full of baby turtles that didn't make it back out to the weed line four miles out from shore. I guess as soon as they hatch the little guys pop into the ocean and instinctively start swimming for the line. These newborns didn't quite make it so they keep them until they're a little older and then drop them off at the weed line. I would have LOVED to dive at the weed line, but we didn't bring our gear.
There were two types of turtles, Loggerheads and Green turtles. They were sooooo cute! I just wanted to pack one up and take it home with me! It was so funny, they like their space. If another baby turtle invades his space, they will snap at each other.
I'm camouflaged!
Florida is just amazing! They have the coolest trees where the branches grow down and become roots.
And this ends our lovely vacation in Palm Beach Shores!
I did learn one thing about my wonderful hubby. He doesn't like the beach. It's nice to look at from a distance or drive by, but it's not fun to just sit there for more than ten minutes or walk on for more than an hour. That's one thing we majorly differ on. I could spend all day and all night there! And I think I had planned to do this on this trip. Lesson from trip: we'll wait for our next vacation until we have enough money saved up to do and see fun things or at least dive. But we just couldn't let two free plane tickets go to waste! And it was definitely wonderful to spend time together and not work!!!
