Tracy Aviary

The kids and I met our friends at the Tracy Aviary downtown.  We had fun seeing all the birds and playing at the parks.

Hot Hot Summer

We had a very hot and VERY dry summer this year.  We hardly had any rain at all, so when it did rain it was like a holiday. The kids splashed and played in the storm.  Breanne put on her very finest rain gear :)

4th of July

We go to Sandy City for the 4th of July since Doug has to work the town days every year.  It was so hot this year, but we stayed and played.  The kids played on the bouncy houses.

The kids all got their hair spray painted.



We watched the Police and Fire demonstrations. 



Hey, I know that guy :)



To finish off the night we did fireworks with our friends and then made some smores by the fire.



Dreaded Delta

We are not huge fans of Delta, and after this vacation I don't think we will ever travel with them again unless it is our only option.  We had delayed and missed connections on our way to Puerto Rico, we figured it would be smooth sailing on our way home, WRONG.

After we got all checked in for our flight at the San Juan airport we quickly learned that our flight was once again delayed.  We tried everything we could to get on another flight, we were put on standby on various flights and tried to fly home through a different city.  We didn't have any luck, we were able to get on another flight a few hours later to New York.  Since our original flight was delayed we missed our connection once again.  Only this time it was the last flight of the night to Salt Lake.  Everyone on the flight was extremely frustrated, and sitting on the tarmac for an additional hour did not help every one's mood.  I felt bad for the flight attendants, people were taking their frustrations out on them.

After we finally got off the plane we had to stand in line for an additional hour to figure out how we were going to get home.  We had to be put in a hotel and wait until early the next morning.  By the time we traveled to and from our hotel we only got about four hours of sleep.  Thankfully my mom was able to watch our kids for an additional day or we would have been in big trouble.

We FINALLY made it home, a day late, and got to see our sweet kids.  Together with my mom they made us a welcome home sign and a candy bar poster.

St. Maarten & St. Martin

Fun Fact: St. Maarten is dually owned by the French and Dutch.  Depending what side of the island you are on changes the spelling; St. Martin is the French side and St. Maarten is the Dutch side.  We didn't have a whole lot of plans on our last port of the vacation.  Our ship docked on the Dutch side and we just walked around a little and checked out the shops looking for souvenirs for the kids.  We ended up in a Candy shop and we were talking to the owner asking him what we should see while we were on the island.  He told us to go over to the French side on the local bus and go to an authentic French pastry/bakery store called Sarafina's. 

This was great advice!  After a bus ride through the island we ended up in Marigot and walked through all the vendors until we found Sarafina's.

I was like a kid in a candy store...or an adult in a French Bakery.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I had the best dessert of my life here!  It was so hard to pick what we wanted so we ended up picking two desserts each :)

St. Martin was beautiful and we were sad to be leaving, but starting to get a little homesick for the kids.

After we got back on board Doug surprised me with a spa package.  I got to bet pampered with a massage and facial.  It was the best massage I have ever had! I was so happy and content, I never wanted it to end.

We took a couple good-bye pictures before we called it a night.

St. Kitts

We had a blast on the island of St. Kitts.  Neither one of us had ever been on a zip line before, and we figured it would be amazing to experience it over a rain forest.  We took a shuttle up to Sky Safari Zip Lining.

We geared up in all of our super fun gear.

After a little practice run they drove us up to the top of the mountain to begin our first of four zip lines.

Our first line was across 1,400 feet of rain forest from 25 stories high.  I can't even begin to describe how amazing this was.  While I was up there I just kept telling myself to soak it all and take a mental picture because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Afterwards we got to hang out and chat with a couple of locals.  One little boy let us take some candid pictures (for a few dollars) with his pet monkey, Patrick.

When we were done with our excursion we decided we wanted to go to the beach.  We took a cab ride to a beach with black sand.  It was hot outside and the black sand was super hot, you couldn't even walk on it with bare feet for more than a couple of seconds.  We rented a couple of beach chairs and snorkel gear and spent the rest of the day lounging, snorkeling with squids, and collecting sand dollars.

There was also some fun wildlife on the island.  We saw some monkeys and a mongoose, which our cab driver tried to intentionally run over when they run into the road.



St. Lucia

I have to giggle when I think about St. Lucia.  I picked a winner of a place to go to for the day.  I heard about a museum that was interactive, reenacted a hurricane, and was really hands-on.  We went to Our Planet and paid $25.00 a person to get in...to find out that it was not what we expected.  We basically ended up taking a tour of the place with three classes of first graders.  This was our actually anniversary, which made it all that more comical!  The best part about it was all the super cute little kids, they had so much energy and they thought everything was so funny.



After our 'field trip' we went back to the boat to change our clothes.  We decided to walk to the beach and hangout there until it was time to leave.

We ended up walking about four miles round trip, there was an airport in the way so we had to walk all the way around the runway through a questionable part of town to get to the beach.  

We walked along the beach and searched for seashells.  We also found a bunch of crabs crawling and jumping around on the rocks. Doug decided he was going to try to hunt down a crab, he didn't have any luck.

Once back on the boat we got dressed up for dinner to celebrate our actual anniversary.

We spent a good half an hour sitting in this window bench.   I was determined to see some dolphins, but we ran out of sunlight before I had the chance.

Ten years down, 100 more to go!