Florida...here we come!

We need sunshine and warm air quick!  The RV is a drafty place to be when temps drop into the 30's.  We left Savannah without a car in tow and headed to St. Augustine, FL for one night before continuing on to stay four nights in Melbourne, Fl.  The car is still sitting at the body shop waiting for a determination as to repairs or if it gets totaled.  

We made it to the historic city of St. Augustine (established as the oldest city in the US in the 1500's) mid-afternoon and wished we had skipped Savannah altogether and just stayed a full week here.  Our friends who we met in Savannah recommended this spot which confirms all things are meant to be as they are. Our campground was Anastasia State Park, on the beachy coastline, and was just the perfect spot to get some sun.  We biked to the beach and the kids collected sea shells. It is always so theraputic to hang out at the beach and one day was not long enough.

We drove down the coast the next morning to Melbourne where we planned to spend a few nights with our good friends Barry and Karen.  They offered us a spot on their driveway to park our house and we spent the next four days hanging out and catching up on the past three years since we all used to be neighbors at Cresta Bella apartments in Rancho Penasquitos.  Our good friend and neighbor Beverly flew out from San Diego to spend the weekend with us too. We had such a relaxing time...so much so that we extended our time together from two to four nights.  The kids fished off the dock of the private pond.  They loved feeding bread to the favorite local spiny soft-shelled turtle named Casper who came to the surface practically every time we walked on the dock. We did some kayaking too.  The kids were showered with Christmas gifts and Erica and I treasured the adult conversation and the hospitality we were shown. 

We left Monday morning and headed twenty miles up the coast to Port Canaveral to meet Erica's family at the Royal Caribbean cruise terminal.  We parked the RV to enjoy a family vacation with Erica's Mom and Dad, her brother's family and her sister's family.  Our cruise was a four night sail porting first in Nassau, Bahamas and then the cruise line's private island, Coco Cay before returning to Port Canaveral.  Erica's parents gave our families the cruise as a Christmas gift.  It proved to be a perfect way for the extended family to all come together, a near impossible task these days with crazy schedules and kids of varying ages to consider in planning a getaway of this magnitude.  It worked out to be a very fun trip despite some bad weather keeping us off land in Coco Cay.  We had some rough seas our last night but were all grateful the ship detoured the storm so we didn't have to endure anything worse.

A highlight was getting dressed up for the Captain's dinner.  All fourteen of us picked out classic outfits to wear to dinner and then to the Captain's reception afterward.  Our family chose to wear dress that was twenty's flapper inspired, one of Erica's favorite styles.  We had fun shopping thrift stores, department store discount racks and also Amazon, for the previous month, to piece together some snazzy outfits.  At the Captain's reception, it was impressive to see so many diverse nationalities working together onboard the ship.  The cruise director made a comparison that "the ship staff was representative of a United Nations of the seas" and that if all these folks could live and work so closely together to pull off such an incredible experience for all of the guests then we all should be able to do the same everyday on land.  That struck me as true.  It is crazy to me how carried away people can get politically that it becomes so socially divisive.  To love people more than the political ideals they espouse makes the best sense to me. If we went deeper in conversation than the one or two hot button issues we choose to debate on the surface we would happily find that we believe more similarly than we think.  I digress...

We spent the first day on the ship at sea.  We ate so much food and hardly burned any of the calories.  We vegged out by the pool, in our rooms and at the various activities around the ship.  One such activity was spending three hours at an art auction where we had fun bidding on some original artwork.  It will hang in our future home, which we find ourselves dreaming a lot about lately.  The kids were very well behaved on the cruise and enjoyed hanging out with their cousins Jackson, Christopher, Gracyn and Tanin.  They never ever came close to going overboard like our nightmares prior to the cruise depicted.