Post-Vacation Update

We are back, we just spent 10 days in sunny and thankfully not hot Florida visiting Michele's family and doing all sorts of touristy things.

Our trip didn't get off to a great start unfortunately... As we were getting out of our car at O'Hare at 6 AM last Thursday, Bella tripped over a curb on the way into the airport and bit her lip pretty badly. So we weren't even at our gate to take our plane, and our poor girl got her first bad bruise and cut. Good times.

Luckily, that was the only bad thing that happened from there on out. Once our plane got off the ground, we made excellent time down to Miami. We even got there before the expected arrival time, so sadly I'll never know how the masterpiece "The Express" ends. Crap.

We took it easy at first to let Bella heal up, but ended up hitting the Miami zoo early on in the trip. Bella enjoyed it alot since we got a 4 person bike that Michele's parents and us powered while Bella navigated the park. We got to feed some giraffes ourselves, although Bella was too scared to do it herself.

We thankfully were able to have a couple of date nights out thanks to Grandma and Grandpa G. Bella made it extremely easy on them too, since she passed out while watching movies with them two of the nights. We did get out to see Watchmen on Friday night, I thought they did a fantastic job of translating it to the big screen, which I thought would be impossible. Don't know how much people who weren't fans of the comic would love it though.

We also got out to see Girl Talk play a small club in Fort Lauderdale to make up for the big festival that got canceled that weekend. It was good to see the show there, since the place I saw him at in Chicago held almost 2,000 people, and this place probably held 500. The band Deerhunter opened the show, they were very good, but I swear they were playing at My Bloody Valentine volume levels in a club that tiny. Of course I forgot our earplugs, so that was a painful but enjoyable set. Girl Talk did another fun, crazy set, but it just wasn't as good as the Chicago show in November for some reason I can't put my finger on. It might have been being close enough to see the 17 year olds wiping the sweat off of Gregg Gillis and wiping all over themselves and licking it.

The weather was absolutely perfect the whole time we were there, barely above 80 and sunny the entire time. We hit the beach a few times as a result, especially the beach Bella loves since it has a playground on the beach.

We took advantage of one more date night to finally get out to see Slumdog Millionaire. We're only about 5 months or so behind when I wanted to see that, so we finally knocked that one off of our list. It's pretty redundant to say it's an excellent movie as you've probably heard by now, we just took a while to get a chance to see it.

The last part of our Fort Lauderdale/Miami portion of our trip was another visit to the Miami Seaquarium. We really like that place alot, they have a very good sea lion show that Bella really loves, and they have a cool show with an Orca whale swimming in the same pool with a pair of dolphins that is really great too. Bella loved it all once again, so that was time well spent.

More to follow with our adventure up to Orlando, and Bella's first trip to Disney World...