A Summary of My 2016 Travel Adventures

At the beginning of every new year I like to look back at the previous year and review my favorite outfits, and remember all the home, garden, and crafting projects I took on, and also all our travel adventures.  Our travel adventures is always my favorite to review because I remember such happy times.  I also think one tends to forget vacations so quickly, so it's nice to go back and look at pictures and re-live them through memories.

Here is where I traveled this year!

This year was the first time in probably over thirty years where I traveled by plane alone.  I must admit, I had a lot of anxiety about it.  So did my husband.  He said over and over again "Just come back to me!"  He was so afraid I would die in a plane crash.  I don't know why.  But, I made it to Florida safely and back, and it was a really good experience for me to do that all by myself.  I went to Florida for two weeks to see my son and daughter.  We had so much fun and crammed so much into that two week period is was ridiculous!  Here are some of the highlights of that trip:

                                       Florida Adventures

Cape Canaveral National Seashore

Cape Canaveral was one of my favorite Florida beaches.  I love the natural setting and the absence of the typical tourist stuff you see on most beaches.

The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter

Seeing the Wizarding World of Harry Potter was one of the highlights of this vacation.  I've never been much of a Harry Potter fan until I went here...now I'm a Harry Potter fan fanatic!

Disney Springs

Disney Springs is such a beautiful place to spend an evening.  

The 16th Annual Orlando Wetlands Festival

Hands down our favorite activity of this trip was the Orlando Wetlands Festival.  It was one of the happiest days of my life.  My son loved it so much he wants to " ...go back and take Dad!"  I don't know if that will ever be possible as it is only one day during the year, but who knows?  Maybe when he retires someday?

Cocoa Beach

Even though Cocoa Beach is probably my least favorite beach in Florida, it was still fun to see all the "I Dream of Jeannie" memorabilia and the cruise ships.

Mead Botanical Gardens

Mead Gardens was a bit rustic, but we sure enjoyed the pre-historic size palms!  Plus, I captured this great photo of my son.

The Albin Polasek Museume and Sculpture Gardens

This was such a beautiful and tranquil garden!

Harry P. Leu Gardens

We loved the giant bamboo in the Harry P. Leu Gardens.

Kraft Azalea Park

The magic of Kraft Azalea Park was beautiful

My children have since moved back to Illinois and even though everyone says it's nice to have them closer to home again, I am going to miss going to Florida.  I absolutely love that beautiful state!

In 2016 I only took two "big" vacations...my solo trip to Florida and our road trip out west, but we had a lot of fun weekend adventures.

In February we went to Minneapolis to see the Broadway Tour of "Newsies".  We rented a hotel room and had a wonderful romantic night.  You can read about that adventure HERE.


Easter arrived early this year, and we did our usual trek to Milwaukee to see our home church's Easter Musical.  We also visited with our lifelong friends Kirk and Shannon and enjoyed a movie in a historic theatre!  You can read all about that fun weekend HERE.

We also went to Stillwater, Minnesota in the spring to hunt for treasures for my new beauty room!

The month of May brought our biggest road trip ever:  3500 miles to Las Vegas, Nevada!  We spent three days in Vegas, but had a lot of fun on the way there and back too!

Our first stop was in Glenwood Springs, Colorado where we enjoyed hot springs for the first time in our lives.  You can read about that experience HERE.

After checking into our hotel in Fruita, Colorado for the night, we took a stroll on top of Dinosaur Hill.


But perhaps our favorite part of this trip was just the jaw-dropping scenery to get there!  Read all about our adventures of driving Scenic 1-70 West HERE.

In Vegas we enjoyed our stay at the Flamingo Hotel, shopped till we dropped, saw Celine Dion in concert, admired all the flowers and gardens,  and walked around the strip admiring all the lights.

We took a fun bus trip from Vegas to see the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon West.



On the way home from Las Vegas we stopped at Arches National Park where we hiked one of the most difficult trails of our lives, yet found this park one of the most beautiful places on earth!

And our final day of this amazing road trip was spent in Vail, Colorado;  one of the prettiest mountain towns I ever did see!  I felt I was in Europe, not America!





In July we went tent camping with the kids for five whole days!  We saw lots of waterfalls at Copper Falls State Park, Amnicon Falls State Park and Pattison State Park, The Black River National Scenic Byway,  and we visited the cities of Ashland,  Bayfield, and Hayward.



I also attending my very first Blogger Meet-Up with Karen from "She Thought She Could So She Did" in Minnehaha Park, Minnesota




In late summer my husband and I had a blast at the Minnesota State Fair and Wildwoods Wildlife Zoo!



This year we had an unusually long and warm fall, so we took advantage of it and went hiking somewhere every weekend.

We went to Hoffman Hills State Recreation Area

Wildcat Mountain

We combined a convention in St. Paul, Minnesota with a visit to Vermilion Falls Park on the way home.

On our second attempt, we successfully hiked Barn Bluff in Red Wing, Minnesota

And we visited the sweet historic town of Galena, Illinois (post coming next week!)

We don't travel as much during the winter because of winter road conditions and we also can't leave our house longer than one day or it freezes up (we heat with wood).  But we were able to visit the kids for a couple of days during Thanksgiving Week (Jackson's First Car Trip) and we made our annual trip to the Mall of America where I got lots of new goodies including my first pair of OTK boots!

As always, as I complete this post I feel extremely grateful.  Many of you know we had planned to take more vacations this year but had to cancel them due to an unplanned medical bill (thanks ObamaCare!  Looking forward to the GOP "Repealing and Replacing" it).  So instead of taking long vacations in far away places we did a lot more locally and a lot of weekend trips.  It's been not only fun, but I've discovered things in my own neck of the woods I didn't even know existed.

I'm really looking forward to 2017 and a lot more opportunities to travel.  We already planned our spring vacation and we got a ocean front room on Myrtle Beach for five days and we will also be swinging through Charleston on the way home.  We still hope to take that vacation out west to see Mt. Rushmore and maybe we will make it back to Branson and elsewhere too.... we'll see!  Here's to good health and no more medical bills!

Have a Great Day!  Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE!

A Summary of My Last Three Days in Florida

For the past few months, I have been doing a weekly travel post about my last vacation in Florida during the month of February.  I was there two full weeks, so we did a lot!  But now I leave for a nine day road trip out west on Saturday and I will be closing my blog down during that time so I can just relax and enjoy the trip.   When I return in June, I'll have new adventures to share, but in the mean time, I wanted to wrap up my last three days in Florida.

By this point in my vacation, I think we saw just about everything within an hour or two drive from my daughter's home in Winter Park.  And to tell you the truth, I was getting exhausted from all the sight seeing.  So we decided to keep my last few days in Florida more low-key.

On the first low key day, we stayed in Winter Park.  We heard wonderful things about the Tiffany Glass museum and decided to check it out.  I love Tiffany Glass and own one large piece myself that I have displayed in my sun room window of my home.  So I was excited to see more beautiful pieces in this museum.

This is the outside of the museum.  It is located in downtown Winter Park, and costs $6.00 to enter.  Photographs are only allowed in the atrium of the museum;   you are not allowed to take pictures of the art work.  So I can't show you any pictures of the gorgeous Tiffany pieces, but you can check out the photographs on their website HERE.

The museum houses the world's most comprehensive collection of the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany.  It is filled with the lamps that you and I are most familiar with, but also stained glass pieces, jewelry, pottery, and paintings.  There is also a gorgeous chapel that was reconstructed inside the museum that is not be missed.

The stained glass is beautifully lit with artificial lighting.  Seeing all this amazing glass artwork is a beautiful feast for the eyes.

The Daffodil Terrance is the only spot you are allowed to take pictures.  It is a glass enclosed gallery with a view of a garden courtyard.  There are eight eleven foot marble columns that are topped with bouquets of glass daffodils.

The terrace has a coffered ceiling composed of hundreds of stenciled wood elements and molded tiles in three bays.

The central bay features a skylight covered by six large panels of iridescent  glass panels in a pear  tree motif.

It only took a few hours to walk through this museum, so after wards we decided to venture outside and walk around downtown Winter Park a bit.  I had been there before during a previous visit, but it's so pretty, I was happy to go again.

This is a beautiful church right across the street from the museum.

Ashley needed some photographs for her new website and musical endeavor, so we also used this time for a photography shoot.

Winter Park is a photographers dream!  There are so many beautiful spots to take great pictures.

Ashley brought several changes of clothing with her to create many different looks.

The next day, I decided I wanted to do some shopping.  I know a lot of people don't like to shop when they travel, but I don't live in an area that has a lot of great stores that are available in other parts of the country, so I always do a lot of shopping when on vacation.  I do live less than two hours from the Mall of America, but we only go there about once a year.

I kept seeing a large outlet mall off the freeway near Disney World that I wanted to go to, but then we met a local at The Orlando Wetlands Festival who advised going to The Florida Mall instead.  So off we went!

I was glad she recommended this mall.  It was a very nice, large mall.  Of course, it was nothing like The Mall of America, but nothing is!  I thought it was interesting that they had a sushi bar right in the middle of the mall.

The food court had palm trees growing inside.

I bought a lot of cute clothes at this mall...most of which I haven't even shown you yet.  It was here that I found that cute midi skirt I wore for Easter.

We did stop in and check out this cute M&M shop though!  We didn't buy anything, as it's cheaper to buy M&M's at Walmart, but it was fun to look at.

My favorite part of this mall, and actually with almost everything in Florida...restaurants, bars, etc., is that it is open to the outside.  This was the view from the H&M store.  One door of the store opens to the interior of the mall, and a back door opens to this view.  The door was wide open, bringing the beautiful February weather right inside the store.  I have no idea how they prevent retail theft by doing that, but it sure was lovely.

My very last day in Florida was the most low-key of them all, as  I had to get up at three in the morning to catch my flight home.  I spent most of the day doing laundry and packing, although my daughter Ashley and I ran out to a couple of stores that were right across the street from where she lives.  I also forced myself to take a nap, because we wanted to see my son perform with his band that night.  They had a gig from 9:00 p.m. to 12:00 p.m.  Since I normally go to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m, I knew I'd have to take a nap if I was going to be able to stay awake for the event.

Jordan has had so many wonderful musical opportunities and experiences since moving to Florida.  He had his first audition the very first week he arrived and got into the band Cover Charge right away.  This is their band playing at one of their gigs.  Jordan is the drummer.

He then auditioned for another band and ended up not only playing for that band as well, but doing acoustic sets with the lead singer too.  He is busy every weekend playing somewhere and has really learned and grown a lot as a musician.  We are all so proud of him.

After a late night out hanging out in a bar (which I haven't been too since I was in my twenties) I headed home to get, oh about three hours of sleep, before my flight.  I was excited to see my husband again, but not about going back home to winter.  Thankfully, it was a rare, beautiful,  sixty plus degree day when I arrived back home.  God must have had mercy on me.  My husband was so happy to see me again.  He got the car washed before he picked me up, and was wearing cologne and looking good!  It was so funny!  Sometimes, spending time apart really makes a couple realize how much they really can't live with out each other.

Have a  Great Day!  Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE and Travel Tuesday!

Canaveral National Seashore

In my opinion, there are two types of beaches in this world:  the developed beach filled with hotels, bars, and gift shops, and the natural, untouched beaches.  Now, I enjoy aspects of both types of beaches, but if I had to choose, I would pick a natural, untouched beach over a crowded, over-developed beach any day.  The beach at Canaveral National Seashore is a natural, virtually untouched beach.

Canaveral National Seashore covers 57,000 acres and is the longest stretch (24 miles) of undeveloped beach on Florida's east coast.

The Kennedy Space Center owns the land that is managed by the National Park Service and Merritt Island National  Wildlife Refuge.  Over fourteen endangered species call this park home.

There are no picnic grounds, food services, or beach showers on this beach.  Just the blue ocean, sand, and dunes.  Lifeguards are present from May 30th through September 1st.

It only costs $5.00 to visit this beach.  A far lot cheaper than paying $15.00 to park your car at Cocoa Beach, and a lot less people to compete with for a spot on the sand.

My daughter and I absolutely loved having this pristine beach all to ourselves.  It was so peaceful and relaxing.

Peaceful and relaxing that is until this little bugger showed up.  He was trying to steal something from inside Ashley's bag.  We were constantly chasing him away, but as soon as our heads were turned, he was back!  What a scheister!  We eventually zipped and closed everything up tight so we could have peace of mind.  I have no idea what he was after.

I LOVE to watch the birds on the beach.  Sandpipers are my favorite, for I like to watch the way they move.  But I also love to watch the pelicans fly in the sky...especially if there is a large flock of them flying together.  And I really love seagulls...even though so many people consider them nuisance birds.

There is so much else to do in this park other than hang out on the beach.  There are hiking trails, horseback riding, camping, and a really nice visitor center.

Since we are such bird lovers, we decided to take the Black Point Wildlife Drive next.

Black Point Wildlife Drive is a one-way scenic drive inside the park where you can view exotic birds and wild animals in their natural habitat.  You can stop your car and get out at any point in the drive for a closer look.

We saw so many beautiful birds, but we also saw lots of alligators too!

The place reminded me very much of our previous visit to the Orlando Wetlands Park......except I saw a lot more birds there than here

The road was very narrow, so it was difficult at times passing another vehicle if they were stopped.

The animals are very used to the traffic so quite often you have to wait for a little critter to cross the road....like this little guy!   He was in no hurry to get out of our way either.  But that was fine with us. We got a nice close up of him!

I have such a fondness for the Florida wetlands.  The landscape is so different from anything I have ever seen in Wisconsin.

After we finished the Black Point Wildlife Drive, we then headed to see the manatees and found another fun bird!

We did see manatees too, but the water was not as clear as it was at Blue Springs State Park which we visited back in November, so I didn't take any pictures.  If I did, all you would see is snouts peeking out of brown water.

Canaveral National Seashore is located near Titusville, Florida and is open year round.

Ashley enjoyed the natural landscape of this park so much, she went back with her husband and created this awesome music video.  Watch and be blessed!

Have a Great Day!  Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE and Travel Tuesday!