In Loving Memory...

This blog post is in loving memory of my grandparents, on my dad's side. I lost my grandfather 3 1/2 years ago in November and recently, I lost my grandmother. Both of them were sick but my grandmother has been wanting to "go home" since she became a widow 3 1/2 years ago. Although that I only got to see them every other summer, they were a lot of fun when I got to see them. My grandparents had five kids and were married for 67 years. They also had 16 grandchildren, 18 (or 22,not quite sure) great-grandchildren and a great-great granddaughter.

I love and miss both of you so much...

Fair warning: lengthly post.

For those who read my last post back in November, I wrote about how I was going to spending New Year's in sunny Florida. Let me tell you, I had a wonderful time and really didn't want to come back (seeing as it was 10 below with wind chill factor in good ol Ohio). This trip was a combination of vacation/ soccer tournament for my sister and her team. We went down a couple days early so we can have some fun before the soccer action. The first stop on our adventure was Charlotte, North Carolina where went on a haunted ghost tour (self explanatory). Although there is not many pictures from this part of the trip, I am happy to show you some of them..

 

View from our hotel in downtown Charlotte

 

                                                    My sister, Madison, and I (sorry for the bad quality)

After spending the night in downtown Charlotte, we packed up and went to sunny Florida where it was 75 degrees the first night we were there (ahhhhh, how much I miss that). We stayed at a wonderful resort that had 7 swimming pools (7 hot tubs included in that), many tennis courts, a put-put course and they had activities for the guests (sort of reminds me of my part-time volunteering job and doing activities with the residents). After getting settled, we got a goodnight's sleep because we were heading to one of Universal Studio's parks the following day. Some pictures include:

                                                   Still missing this view!

SpongeBob Squarepants, this was from a parade we saw right when we got there

Squidward

 

A selfie with SpongeBob!

 

  After a day at Universal, majority of the rest of week was the soccer tournament for my sister and her soccer team. Unfortunately, her team did not do the greatest in the tournament so they couldn't compete for a trophy. However, fortunately, we got to spend the last day in sunny Florida at Wild Florida, which is like a zoo but you can also go gator hunting in Lake Cypress.

 

That's not all the pictures from Wild  Florida. Did I fail to mention that I got the opportunity to hold alligator? Oh yeah....forgot.. here it is. Meet Fluffy. Fluffy the Alligator.

 

 

So that's Florida in a nut shell.

 

-Lexey