The End of Our Florida Trip

The Wednesday before we left, we went to Daytona Beach. My dad had to work, but the rest of us were all able to go. It was a beautiful day at the beach. The waves were fun, too bad the boogie boards didn't always cooperate.

The ladies laid out when the guys played our latest obsession, the bean bag toss game called Cornhole. It's a fun game where you have two boards about 25 feet apart from each other. Each team has 4 beanbags and you try and throw the bean bags into the hole. Sounds easy, totally isn't. Although, my brother has seemed to master it. I can't even tell you how many games they played together. Josh was determined to beat Mikey at least once.

The Bartlett ladies love their sun. So much that we never learn our lesson and put on sunscreen. The youngest Bartlett lady put sunscreen on her body, but forgot her face. I did the exact opposite. I put it on my face and wore a hat and let the rest roast. When we got home later that day, we realized how much sun we all actually got. My body was beat red, thank you cubicle job, Tara's face was really red, and my mother was red everywhere. We didn't care though, well, we did a little because it hurt. We knew that is a couple days, it would be a nice tan. Of course it was a nice tan, until we all began to peel. I love when I feel though, I know sounds sick. I like peeling the skin. I know there are others out there that love it too!

The next day, Josh and I went to Disney Quest. It's Disney's version of an arcade. There are tons of arcade games, but then there is also virtual reality games. One fun game was paddling through the jungle. You really paddle your way through. You go in this inflatable raft and the "water" inflates around that. It moves you all over the place like water does and you have to paddle your way around the river. If you don't paddle, you don't move. We also did a virtual roller coaster. That's right, JOSH did a roller coaster!! We got to build it ourselves. The man told us we put 2 flips in it too! Josh even enjoyed it. I was so happy that he did it. Our favorite game was the Pirates of the Caribbean. You go on a pirate ship with cannons and shoot the other pirate ships to collect their booty. It's in 3-D and it's intense. Josh and I were all alone on out ship. We put it on auto pilot and went straight to the cannons. We had three each and went to town on those pirate ships. We collected a bunch of booty. ;) We were named Kings of the Caribbean. It was the second highest level, which we thought was pretty good considering there was only 2 of us and you can have up to 7 people per ship. Josh would be mad if I didn't mention the virtual reality game that let us fight our enemies with light sabers. Oh yeah, we fought off comic book villains with our amazing light sabers. It was a lot of fun. You work as a team to fight them all off and get points. Ask Josh who got the most points. (BTW.....it was me!)

After we finished running around the arcade, we decided that we would have a nice dinner to celebrate our anniversary since we didn't do that yet. We asked my brother Mikey if we could visit him at the restaurant he works at, Emerils. That's right, Emeril Lagasse's restaurant. The food was AMAZING!!! The service was AMAZING!!! We started with an amuse bouche. It was salmon with a great vinegar. Then, we had escargot for our appetizer, yummy. Our dinners were fantastic. I had Chilean sea bass that was to die for!!! If you go there, get that!! For dessert, we ordered chocolate souffle, it was good, but then my brother surprised us with banana cream pie.......it was out of this WORLD!!! I have never tasted such a great dessert. Josh and I immediately stopped wanting the souffle and devoured the pie. Then, it was time for the bill. My family always plays, guess the check, we make everything a game. Josh and I knew that we went all out for this meal and we really wanted to do that. I guessed around $120, Josh guessed high 90s. We opened the check and there was nothing there. We were so puzzled, the I just realized that my brother paid for us! I started to cry. I couldn't hold it back, kind of like right now, I can't write about it without getting teary eyed. We told him he needed to charge us for something because we only had a card and we wanted to leave a tip. BTW, at Emerils, every table had 3 servers. Like I said, amazing service! So, Mikey took our card and handed back out new check. It was for 1 cent. He is so adorable. It was so thoughtful of him to do that for us. It really meant a lot to us, especially me. It's really a sweet thing to see your siblings growing up. I just wished they all lived closer so I could see it more often.

So now, it's our last day in Florida. We slept in and had all our bags packed. We decided that it wouldn't be a Bartlett Florida vacation without going to Universal Studios, so we went. It was fun. We got to do all the rides we wanted to and we were only there for about 5 hours. It's great when you go to the parks when people are still in school. While we were there, we also got to see the shuttle take off into space. It looked like a fireball in the sky! It was cool. Then, we at at my favorite place, Circus McGurcus in Seuss Landing at Universal. We knew it was time time go after that. We had to drive to the airport to make our plane.

It was FANTASTIC trip!! We had such a blast. It was fun to be a tourist in Florida. We normally aren't like that. I love my family and I was so happy to spend so much time with all of them. They mean the world to me. It was great to be able to really say I love you in person to them instead of on the phone.

Miss you guys already!!!