Johnson's go to Florida!

Team Johnson went to Florida over the MEA Weekend - it was AWESOME!! The kids were great (well, Holly could have slept a little better at night, but oh well.) and they had a ton of fun! I am already looking forward to when we can take them on a trip like this again!

We got there on a Thursday, and hit the pool as soon as we could. The kids LOVE to swim! For dinner we tired the restaurant at the hotel by the pool. Not good. After we just relaxed a little in the hotel room and got everyone to bed at a decent time so that we could enjoy the next day to the fullest!

Typically, the next 4 days went like this: Get up slowly, go have breakfast, hit the beach during low tide to go shelling & exploring, back to the hotel to get ready to swim, in the pool around 10 am, lunch in the hotel room @ 12:30 pm, nap time for Holly, back in the pool at 3:00 pm till 6:00 pm, dinner at a local restaurant, back for relaxing in the hotel before bed time. It was GREAT!

After you look at the awesome pictures below, I'll tell ya about the trip home... ugh!

Here is the Resort that we stayed at. They have 2 buildings. We were in the one on the right.
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Stunning picture from dinner the first night. We almost vowed to stay forever....

This is the pool that we swam in daily - shallow on the right, deeper on the left.

There was one other little kiddie pool that Holly enjoyed a few time, but we didn't play there much. Here are the kids in their swimsuits - cuties!

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Holly in the lower right with a squirty blaster thing. I'm in the upper right (white swimsuit) tossing a ball up in the air for Myles to catch. He was loving it!

The kids & I. Here we are in the Gulf water. We didn't swim much or play a ton in the sand. But they thought it was awesome when the Stingrays would swim past us!

One day the hotel had a tattooing activity by the pool. Both kids were excited to get one. They lasted a couple days. Myles thought he was so tough looking!

Here is Holly getting her tattoo - a mommy & baby Dolphin. She loved it!

One evening we took a Sunset & Dolphin cruise on a boat. It was fun! Since there were only a total of 3 families on the boat, we got lots of personal attention from the captain. It was a ton of fun to have him tour us around and give us lots of detail about ocean life.

Holly brought her little stuffed animal and insisted that it looked out at the water with her. Cute!

The Captain let both kids drive the boat. They were so thrilled with this chance! Since they were the only kids on the boat, they got to do this for like 15 minutes each.

Holly taking her turn to drive the boat.

In the early mornings, the low tide gave us a great chance to go hunt for shells and see the neat sea creatures. The kids loved doing this! Here Erik is showing the kids a neat shell that had a crab in it. The kids were allowed to collect shells that didn't have a creature living in it. So we now are the proud owners of a million smelly shells....

We often found star fish that were stranded in the wet sand as the waters dropped in the low tide. So we enjoyed rescuing them by putting them back in the ocean. I've never held a live star fish so it was really cool!

Just us walking along and looking for shells or sea creatures in the wet sand.

The kids doing their own hunt.

We were told that this restaurant called Nervous Nellie's was a tasty place to go. They were right! It was so good - Erik ordered some stone crab, and I got some kind of fish that had grilled shrimp on top of it. I think we both ate every single piece of food on our plate. Holly hated her pizza, so she ate all of Erik's fries. Myles had the best tasting Lasagna I've ever had. We had a great time and would go back if given the chance!

Here we are waiting for our food at Nervous Nellie's. The weather was perfect for sitting outside. Plus there was a live band playing so we had free entertainment!

Me at Nervous Nellie's

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After eating at Nervous Nellie's we walked down a little Pier to check out the water. Got this cute picture of Erik & Myles.

Back to the pool! Again, swimming is what we did the most of. Here the kids were just being silly so I took some cute pictures (btw - Love having a water proof camera! I would recommend one!)

My silly little Holly!

This is a cool underwater picture of Myles. He thought it was neat to take a picture while being underwater.

Myles really had a great time - he made a few friends at the pool. On our last day, he played all day with 2 boys from England. They taught him how to do a flip off the side of the pool. Myles thought he was soooo cool!

Erik zooming Holly around on a little kick board. Holly had so much fun doing this that she insisted for like an hour that we do this with her.

Sigh.... here we are at the airport waiting to go home. And it is the beginning of the drama we experienced getting home!

Cool picture out the window of the plane.

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So... the story. In Florida, they delayed our flight by a few hours due to weather back here in Mpls, but we thought all was well when they allowed us to board the plane. The flight was uneventful until we got to Mpls. The whole plane knew it would be bumpy because the winds were gusting up to 50 mph. During the first attempt to land, Holly started to yell loudly to me that she had to poopy badly right now. Not a chance since we were all flying around in our seats even though we had our seat belts on! Then suddenly Myles started puking in the barf bag on the other side of me. That's when I noticed that more than a dozen passengers were also using their barf bags. Yuck. I was crying and silently praying for safety. It was the scariest thing I've ever experienced. The pilot took the plane back up to circle around again. Then began decent #2. The whole plane was freakishly quiet. We were tossed all around for another 5 minutes before the pilot took us up again.

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That's when the Captain got on the speaker and told us it was to dangerous to land and we were going to Des Moines, IA for the night. Well, I've never been so happy to be in Iowa! By the time we got to the hotel that night it was 10:30 pm. We went straight to bed. Everyone slept except me. I was to wired and worried. We were up at 5:00 am for breakfast and at the airport by 6:00 am (per the airline's directions). Then we sat on the floor for the next 3 hours. The kids were AMAZING! So well behaved. They just played nicely with their toys. We got a dozen complements by strangers about how well behaved they were! What a blessing that was because Erik & I were tired and stressed.

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We finally made it home 23.5 hours after we checked out of paradise in Florida. But it was good to be home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!