Tag Archives: Vacation

My 2011 Summer Vacation Review

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Summer Vacation Review Part 1

First we stayed in Hilton Grand Vacation Suites at SeaWorld, and while it was an older hotel, it was still pretty nice.  What was really great though was that across the street was the SeaWorld parking lot!  Talk about close to the action!

SeaWorld wasn’t exciting for me, but I grew up with it…  But my kids loved it, and my daughter said it was the best vacation ever for her (she loved dolphins and orcas).

Next we went to Discovery Cove with was just a little further down the street from our hotel too!  We loved being so close to the action and even at a good price too since the hotel was only about $130 a night!

Discovery Cove was a good resort and fun.  They put some time into making it look cool, and the kids loved it.  It’s the dolphin ride that they will both remember though.  I’m glad I have it on film!

Summer Vacation Review Part 2

The Captiva Island (a sister island to Sanibel Island) part of our vacation we very interesting and went at a much slower pace, and by slower…  I mean really slow!

The island was beautiful and the sunset was awesome, but restaurants close on Sunday!?!  Yep, that’s right, the restaurants are closed on Sunday!  We had to drive to Sanibel Island to find an open restaurant.  During the weekdays, the restaurants and bars close after 11:00pm!  This is a far cry from Myrtle Beach!

My son didn’t get stung by any jellyfish this year, but he didn’t go very deep into the ocean either though.

The highlight of the vacation for me was just hanging out with friends and family, chilling by the pool and watching the sunset go down!

My vacation is coming to a conclusion, soon I’ll be back to my normal middle class lifestyle.

But it was a great time all around!

MR

 

I Have Too Many Vacation Days, So I’m Taking A Blogging Vacation

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Oh No, I’m Losing Vacation Hours, Aughhhh!

I have too many vacation days accumulated!  I bet you’re thinking, “What is his problem?  Too many vacation days???”

Unfortunately, were I work once we accumulate over 200 hours, we don’t accumulate any more vacation hours.  So additional hours accumulated would be lost!  That’s like throwing away money, and I’m way, WAY to frugal to throw away money!

So I decided that instead of juggling days off, taking a day or two every other week, I would take two full weeks all at once.  That will definitely tide me over until the end of the year!

Taking A Blogging Vacation

Yep, that’s right!  I’m going to take my old black laptop and blog while I’m on vacation, at least when I can.  Oh sure, the family doesn’t realize this yet, but if I’m quick about it, I should be able to do my blogging during the down times between our adventures that we will be having on vacation.

I’m going to be taking advantage of my son’s camera feature on his iPod touch, I hope he doesn’t mind (lol, like he has a choice)!

I’m sure in some ways I’ll play the role of a journalist checking out a new unexplored territory!  A win for me will be the fact that I now have an excuse to take lots of pictures!

Bringing Out My Inner Tech Nerd!

I’m going to be taking a few tech books I borrowed from the library and even reading some books online at the safaribooksonline website!

Hopefully, I’ll improve my blog site a bit more than I have in the past.  We’ll see…

Cheers,

MR

Disney World Seen From The Eyes Of A Child

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Disney Castle

 
Surprisingly, I’ve been missing Disney World a lot lately! 

It’s surprising to me because it was expensive for us to go since we don’t live close to Florida, and I hated paying the $4,000 to $5,000 for the trip.

So I decided to ask my daughter (she’s 6 mind you), if she missed Disney.  She shrugged her shoulders, which means not really.  Thinking that she must not have understood, I asked her which vacation she preferred better, the one at Hilton Head, that we when to this past summer or Disney World.  I posed this question to her believing she would say Disney World instantly.  She didn’t!  My daughter (also called pumpkin, princess, sweetie, sweetie-pie, etc)  said she liked both vacations about the same!!!  This little discovery was an amazing answer to me!  I was a bit shocked, I thought Disney would be the winner, hands down.

My 6-year-old is very smart (she tests at an ending 3rd grade reading level, not bad for a beginning 1st grader), and already judges things much like an adult would, so I was thrown for a loop! 

That’s when it hit me!  She doesn’t have the same base background that I do with Disney!  As a very young child, I use to get excited every Sunday night to watch the latest Disney special on TV (or were they reruns by then).  I’ve seen all the classics, I know almost all of the characters (both older and newer ones).  But to my daughter and son, Mickey at Disney World is just some person dressed in a costume.  I don’t think they felt the magic that my wife and I did.

So, while the value of my investment in the Disney World experience may increase for my kids as time folds (nostalgia), currently Disney is a bit of a disappointment for me at the moment, at least for generating excitement from my daughter.  This may change with time (nostalgia kicking in again).

I was sick the entire time I was down there (flu), and yet I still wish I could go back again!  Could it be that my daughter is too smart to enjoy that magic of Disney?  If so, that makes me a bit sad!

We’ll have to go again sometime, perhaps I can embellish the experience somehow!  For me, now that a bit of time has passed, the money spent on the vacation seemed well worth it!

Do you find that sometimes kids enjoy a cheaper vacation more so than an expensive one? 

-MR

Hilton Head Bound… In August

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This will be the third year that my entire family will go down to hilton head again.

Ironically, my son (while asking about Hawaii too) said that he wanted to go down to Hilton Head with the family again.  I have to admit, I’m looking forward to it myself this year too (see my post from this past winter).

We will probably go kayaking (hopefully) with the dolphins again this year, rent bikes to go on the various trails, and of course… hit the beach.  Now that I’m pretty comfortable with the location and have a feel for the location, I’ll probably read a little more and try to do stuff that I haven’t done the previous two years.

My only regret will probably be that fact that we didn’t  book a vacation on one of the plantations. The main reason that I would like to stay on a plantation is because my 6 year old is going to be riding a bike by herself.  The house that we are staying at is close to the main road into the island, and while the traffic on the road that the house is on isn’t too busy for an adult it’s still pretty busy for a 6 year old.  I might break down and rent another tag-a-long bike attachment.  That way, she would be more safe than ride a bike by herself…  I’m sure she’ll protest, but safety first!

This time around, I’ll also be taking my golf clubs, and perhaps even my son’s clubs  🙂

Unfortunately, we are not schedule to go down until August though, so we’re in for a long wait.

If you ever go down to Hilton Head, consider kayaking with the dolphins…  It was a much better experience than I thought it would be.

-MR