Sneak Peek

Here is a portion of Josh's Halloween costume.



I am trying to incorporate his Link costume from last year and maybe use parts of it to make a Viking costume. Okay, I really just wanted an excuse to knit the Viking Hat. I don't think Josh fully appreciates the EPICNESS of this hat but at least he has a new hat. :)



I still need to add another piece to this and it will take me some time so stay tuned for that!!



He will the cutest Viking ever!!

Florida Bound

Okay, only a week at home then we are off to Orlando....

This time we flew on JetBlue out of Long Beach which is a huge difference than LAX, a welcome one for sure. We had a stop in Austin and had two large groups of girls travelling with us. One group was a soccer team from SoCal and the other was a field hockey group from Austin. The flight was uneventful but when we tried to leave Austin, we were delayed for about an hour because some panel screws came loose duting the flight and had to be replaced.

So by the time we arrive in Orlando at our hotel it was around 9 pm so we were pretty tired from travelling all day. The kids & I did perk up for a bit because we got a Cube for our rental car. The kids always get a kick out of seeing one and they don't remember that we first saw a Cube in Tokyo in 2005 and it took it a couple of years before it made its way to the USA. :)




Our hotel the Caribe Royale Hotel was really nice. The pool area is great. We planned to stay for 3 nights then head over to the Parc Soleil. More on that later....






Our first day, we didn't plan on doing too much but Hector & I signed up for a timeshare presentation for the Sheraton to get a discount on Disney tickets. First off, its not referred to as a timeshare but fractional ownership (like that makes a difference).

In a nutshell, these kind of offers will give you nice perks in exchange for their 90 minute presentation so have your watch handy. They say they don't work on commission and get paid plenty just to present the information. Blah blah...

Our time went way over the 90 minutes, Hector pointed that out and she kept saying she had 15 more minutes. She went from our best friend to our mortal enemy in that span. Okay it wasn't that bad, but she definitely gave us the cold shoulder at the end. ;)

Hey, its a good thing you get paid for just presenting the info...

As a result of the almost 2 hour torture chamber, we came away with Disney tickets for 4 days plus water park and saved about $800 that we used to eat etc.

Stay tuned for the next installment...

Double Whammy

or a twofer.

August flew by in a blur mostly because we planned two separate vacations! It sound super cool and fun which it was but that was lot of travelling & planning.

First up we have a Kauai trip that the kids & I took along with my mom. It didn't start off very smooth (travel day) but soon we all found out how to work together and really had a nice relaxing time.

Waiting for our rental car.  For the record, it was a brown VW.

Actually I did find out what kind of car we had and it was this sporty sedan. It looks nice enough but the head clearance getting into the darn thing was low. I'm 5'5" and had to tweak my head/neck every time getting in. Both Tyler and I ended up whacking our heads. Plus the car had some big blind spots but it served us well in Kauai so I can't complain too much. It was stylish and we could spot it among all the other rental cars.



We had a nice, fairly spacious room overlooking the pool and ocean. The grounds are very pretty with lots of birds & chickens running around.


I loved sitting on the balcony watching the ocean and seeing the sunrise every morning.




Lots of pools to choose from...





Kauai is very lush and tropical. Not much has changed since I visited over 15+ years ago and I definitely appreciate it more now when I needed to relax/recharge desperately.



My mom seemed to enjoy herself too.



The resort was not very crowded which was a very nice problem to have. :)

We didn't do a lot of sightseeing but we did manage to see a couple of things.

Wailua Falls

Spouting Horn

Plus a beautiful beach to walk on at low tide.

Stay tuned for our August 2nd vacation.....