Vacation

If you know anything about me, or my family for that matter, you know that we love Disney.  Our vacations for the last (who knows how many) years have included at least a visit to a Disney Park.  Most of those years have been trips exclusively to Disney World. 

While I would live at Disney if possible, I thought I should try to expose my kids to a different vacation destination.  I've been trying for years to get them to agree to go somewhere else or do something different but I trained them well and they only want to keep going back to Disney.

This year I finally figured out a compromise that everyone agreed on.  We took a 4 night cruise (Royal Caribbean) out of Miami and then drove to Orlando for a few days after the cruise.  This presented us with the best of both worlds.

What an amazing and fun vacation we had!

The morning after Matthew's graduation, we flew to Fort Lauderdale and took a cab to Miami.  I'm so glad we flew in a day early as our flight was delayed 2 1/2 hours and we would have missed our cruise had we been sailing the day we flew in!

Everyone loved the cruise!  The ship we sailed on was the oldest in the Royal Caribbean fleet and there was not as much to do as there is on many of the "newer" ships but we didn't seem to lack for ways to spend our time.  We had 3 ports of call.  Nassau, Coco Cay (private island) and Key West.  I won't bore you with details of each day but here are a few pictures.

In Nassau, striking a pose :-)

They had a great time playing shuffleboard

Key West

Southernmost point in the Continental United States.  Bradley wore the most obnoxious Hawaiian shirt he could find :-)

Matthew on the climbing wall on the ship

Caitlyn's turn

Bradley's turn

The second half of the vacation was at Disney World.  Sadly, I stink at taking pictures at Disney.  It's quite unexplainable but I turn into a big kid and get sucked into the magic and forget to take pictures.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

We did get to spend some time with ROTErs which is always a highlight.  We celebrated Mark's 50th birthday a couple weeks early (since I will be in Vietnam over his real birthday).  That was a dinner full of laughs and fun.

We were told to sing Happy Birthday as loud as possible.  We did our best!  Photo courtesy of Joey.

We also had the chance to meet up with even more friends the next day at The Magic Kingdom.

Photo courtesy of Grace

The weather was hot and the parks were crowded but we still had the best time!  I came home exhausted but full of great memories!  I know family vacations that include all 5 of us are going to come to an end at some point so I really cherish these times.