Last week Garrett and I took our first official vacation together. My parents recently bought a house in Southwest Florida and invited us to come down for a week. I’m going to be doing a full vacation recap after the holidays are over, but I wanted to share a few snippets from our trip now.
Early on Saturday morning, we headed to the airport and hopped on our plane. When we left, there were snow flurries flying around, so we were quite happy to be heading to warmer climates!
We were lucky enough to get bumped up to first class for our first flight of the day due to my peanut allergy. I have to admit that it spoiled us for the rest of our flights because we really noticed how crammed in we were afterwards, but it was nice to have it while we could.
After a long day of travel, it was so nice to finally arrive at my parents’ place and walk out to the screened in lanai with a beautifully warm pool. The water was in the high 80s the whole time we were there. We swam almost every day.
They live on a canal and it was so nice to be able to go for a swim and look out onto the water. I only wish that we’d been able to get out in the boat too and look around on the water. Next time!
My mom had the lanai all set up when we got there with fluffy new beach towels on the deck chairs and the pool uncovered, just begging us to go in for a dip.
From the lanai you can open up the glass doors and see right into the living room and kitchen area. The weather was perfectly comfortable, so we had the glass doors open the whole time.
We weren’t there very long before Garrett told me to hurry up and bring the camera into the backyard.
After we’d recovered from our jet lag (running on 3 hours of sleep!), we headed to the beach to check out the sights.
My mom and great aunt joined us for a beer at a tiki hut bar on the beach. There was live reggae music playing, lots of people dancing and I can just imagine how wild it gets there on spring break.
It took us awhile to get used to all the Christmas decorations everywhere. I’d never seen a palm tree with Christmas lights before!
One evening, my great aunt treated us to dinner out and convinced us to each have a drink, even though we’d said we were fine. Little did we know that it was 2-for-1 night at that restaurant and we ended up with two drinks each! My strawberry-peach sangrias and Garrett’s mai tais were delicious – not bad considering that we weren’t planning on having a drink at all.
This beautiful tree of poinsettias would not be able to survive in our climate, but they looked perfect here.
The whole house was full equipped from the previous owner, so it made it easy to cook our own food – including a batch of chocolate chip cookies using this old school “mix master”.
And the first thing we wanted to do was pick up Whiskey. He was so excited when he saw us, that he started to hyperventilate. Then he spent the rest of the night glued to my side. We even let him sleep in the bed with us to catch up on cuddle time.
