travel

Family vacation in Naples

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It’s summer, and that means summer vacation! We just spent the last week with my immediate family in beautiful Naples, FL.

Everyone started flying in on Tuesday and we drove down from the Tampa Bay Area to Naples that evening. My brother had procured a four bedroom vacation home on a golf course (a perk of his company) where we were all staying together. We spent the first day relaxing around the house, bike riding, barbecuing, swimming in the pool, and we also got to meet my new niece for the first time.

We didn’t spend the entire vacation in the house (although we could have!). We spent one morning at Barefoot Beach, played Safari Mini Golf in Bonita Springs, had dinner at Cafe Luna in downtown Naples and checked out Thursdays on Third, went shopping for souvenirs at Tin City, drove to Miami for a day, and even saw dolphins at the Naples Pier (although sunset was a bust).

Overall, it was a nice, relaxing vacation week with family … and we’re going to see everyone again up in Ohio in two weeks.

We won’t be staying at Holiday Villas anymore!

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Yesterday evening, before leaving for LEGOLAND Florida, we  made “hotel” reservations at Holiday Villas in Kissimmee, a place we’ve stayed at before when travelling with a large group to the Orlando area. We got a 4-bedroom/3-bathroom villa for the 8 of us for a very good price. We got a confirmation e-mail and our credit card was charged accordingly for the reservation. Can you guess where this is going?

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Miniature mania at LEGOLAND Florida

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We had friends from Ohio visiting after Christmas who wanted to hit some of the Orlando theme parks during their stay. Their primary target was Disney World, but having younger children they also wanted to scope out LEGOLAND. We had always meant to go check it out, and I had recently received a flyer in the mail about the new Star Wars Miniland grand opening, so we were (I was) more than happy to spend a day at the (relatively) new theme park.

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Disney Cruise: back home (and recap)

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No sleeping in today! We woke up early (6:30am) to find the ship already docked back in Port Canaveral. Since we were using the Express Walk-Off service we decided to skip breakfast on the ship and just debark and get through customs. In hindsight, we should have not been in such a rush to leave, but being one of the first families to debark meant no lines at all. In fact, by 7:15am we were through customs and 15 minutes later we were in the car and on the road home.

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