Vacation: Part 2

As you may recall, I went down to Florida to take a cruise with my family and to spend some time with Landon.

After we got back from the cruise, I got to hang out with Landon for 3 days before I headed back home to the west coast.

We got back on Thursday and then decided that we wanted some more adventure.  Enter "operation Busch Gardens Tampa."  Upon realizing that NC State was playing Duke that Saturday, we decided that there would be no rest for the weary and hit the theme park on Friday instead.

I would highly recommend this park!  It was a park and a zoo in one and was so cool!  Since it was the off season, there were no lines and we were able to get on the front row of every coaster.  I took pictures of our seats until I got yelled at and my camera got confiscated.

We got to ride some pretty sweet coasters, but sadly Landon's favorite, the Sheikra, was closed for the season.

As we meandered through the park, we got to see all kinds of critters.  It was perfect, because we did not think about the combination of post-cruise-vertigo and roller coasters..... Lets just say we took it easy and paced ourselves.  But we were still excited.

There were the not-so-cool critters....

The nostalgic critters.....

The hilarious critters....

The rarely sighted and little studied critters.....

The majestic critters...

And the large critters....

But my personal favorites of the day were the kangaroos.  If I had to pick an animal to be, I'd totally be a kangaroo.  Check out how crazy these things are (sarcasm)!

But these super pretty birds were baller too (as evidenced by my ridiculously excited face).

And Landon almost got attacked by an emu during a staring contest (check out the dude behind him waiting for the bird attack).  I guess he has a love-hate bird relationship?

Other than enjoying a few wonderful date nights at our favorite Lakeland spots, watching the basketball game together (WOLFPACK IN THE HOUSE!), and going to church, we decided to go do a little zombie killing with Landon's new Sig Sauer (and a rental Smith and Weston 9mm):

All in all, it was a wonderful vacation, and I was super bummed to come back to reality.  I think that drive to the Tampa airport was the hardest one yet.  

But fortunately, I was coming back to a brief 4 days alone before Chelsea, Caroline, and Emily came to visit me, so I had something to look forward to!  More on that adventure shortly :)

ttfn

ap

Food for thought:

What does love look like to you?

Now that I am writing another paper on my thesis work, I am reminded of this feeling.

I am keeping these things for my children one day