Trips, Pics, and Tales

I haven't forgotten about my blog, and I hope my followers haven't forgotten about me!  December is an incredibly hectic month for me, as I'm sure it is for everyone.  I was a bit shocked when I saw my last entry was almost a month ago!  I will certainly get back to posting about some of my previous travel adventures with some of the photos from those trips....but here's whats on tap for 2010.... I'm currently trying to figure out where Keith and I can head out to for a couples trip in March.  Nothing too exotic, like our Belize trip was.  This is going to be a Mexico trip.  This is a trip for him.  This is a relax at the beach, drink in hand, sleep at the pool and read a lot of books type of vacation.  Maybe we'll toss in a few excursions, go snorkeling or see a ruin.  But this is a get away from it all type of trip.  The big decision here is which resort to go to.  We'll pick an all-inclusive resort where there are no concerns f...

It wouldn't be a week at the beach without a trip or two to the boardwalk.  The Wildwood Boardwalk that is!  For those of you familiar with the Jersey beaches, you may be familiar with this boardwalk, but for everyone else it's about two and a half miles long, and filled with games, and piers of rides, all kinds of food, and it has the widest beach ever!  We usually don't go to the beach here - but for sure we make it to the rides!  Oh, and there are a few different water parks as well that we usually try to get to! Walking the boards on the boardwalk...the sights and the smells - it's everything summer should be!

Not every trip has to be far away, or on an airplane.  We don't always have to go to exotic destinations for a vacation to be special or for it to be unique.  Some of my most memorable vacation memories growing up were family vacations to the beach.  Now we have continued that tradition with our children...we love to go to the beach, almost every year.  Even if it's just for a weekend....but most times, a weekend isn't enough - we try to go for a week at a time.  There's something about the beaches in New Jersey and also in Delaware.  No, the water isn't that crystal blue you see in the Carribean or even the beautiful beaches of South Florida.  But the waves are FUN!  The crashing of the ocean as you sit on your deck...The kids riding their boogie boards in the rough surf.  In recent years, Sea Isle City, NJ has been the beach town of choice for us.   It's a great family beach.  There is enough to keep the kids busy, enough ...

At Atlantis one of the most popular activites is the Dolphin Encounter.  Our kids were so excited to get up close and personal with one of their favorite marine animals.  We decided to go ahead and do the Dolphin Encounter where you get to feed, pet, hug and get a kiss from the dophins.  I know there can be very mixed feelings about this kind of program, however the program we did was very educational and the dolphins were not kept in small pens.  They were in a large lagoon and only brought into a smaller area for the purpose of interaction.  I have always felt that this type of program can bring awareness to children and adults the beauty of marine life that they would not necessarily get otherwise.  Dolphins are amazing animals and one of my children's favorites in part due to this close encounter. We had a great boat ride to the lagoon and after arriving had an educational program about the dolphins.  And then we learned about th...

Atlantis has so many unique aquariums.  And some of them are floor to ceiling!  They are inside the buildings and outside on the pathways.  There are some that you walk through as if you are walking through caves.  These had some of the sharks and sting rays in them.  These were some of the most fascinating aquariums, especially for the kids! In some of these aquariums, it was as if we were standing right there with the fish! Around every corner was a new adventure, a new discovery.....it was great!

Atlantis is more than just a resort, more than just a hotel.  It's an aquarium around every turn.  Everywhere you go, wherever you look there are fish to be seen!  Every night after dinner we'd walk through the Dig.  This is a beautiful underwater habitat that takes you through a journey that represents the lost world of Atlantis.  The aquariums are beautiful.  Our kids could spend hours just watching all of the fish.    Just floor to ceiling glass with all different kinds of fish swimming.  Different pathways, different caverns...it was set up just like a lost city.....the city of Atlantis!

In 2005 we took our kids on their first big, out of the country vacation.  We surprised them with a trip to Atlantis in the Bahamas.  They were just four and six years old at the time and this was quite an adventure! Once again, a long, holiday weekend called out to me to start looking for a travel journey so the planning began for Labor Day weekend.  It was my son's first week of First Grade and he'd have to miss one day of the first week of school, but certainly a trip to the Bahamas was more exciting and more educational than the first couple of days of school!  We went for five days and it was amazing. We stayed at the Harborside Resort, which are the time share condos that are part of the Atlantis property.  At the time that we stayed there the prices to stay in the condos were less expensive than staying on the actual Atlantis property, yet we were able to use all of the perks of the Atlantis resort!  However instead of just a small hotel room, ...

Just a quick getaway. Sometimes that’s what we need isn’t it? As a person who loves to travel, a four day weekend screams to me "plan a trip!"  Some people look at a long weekend as a time to catch up on things around the house, or maybe a time to just hang out at home and relax. Not me. The first thing I do is start checking airfares and bouncing from one website to the next to see where we can go and how many days more than those four days Keith can take off from work. Fourth of July, 2008 we did just that. A spontaneous trip to Jamaica. We’d been there once before and it was ok. We really didn’t do much or see much and our hotel at that time was just ok. But this time I’d become a travel junkie. And the internet had become available to obsessively plan trips! I could check out every hotel on the island if I wanted to! Jamaica became our choice because of the short, no connection flight as well as great prices for the holiday weekend. We wanted to stay at an all incl...

The end of a vacation is always bittersweet. The end of this vacation to Belize was particularly hard for me. I’d really enjoyed Belize. Even more than I’d thought I would. I enjoy travelling, I love vacations, but this one was perfect! From beginning to end.  I knew in the planning stage that Belize had everything we were looking for in a great vacation – it had the ruins, it had the beach, it had the snorkeling. We could relax or we could go on great excursions. We did it all, and yet we were totally relaxed. It was perfect to start our vacation in San Ignacaio and end in Ambergris Caye.   But for the actual vacation to meet our expectations - now how often does that happen?  This one did! Not only did we get to do some spectacular things, like going to Tikal and the ATM cave. We got to see amazing reefs while snorkeling and I got to scuba for the first time. We met wonderful people and stayed at chaming lodges. We ate great food and had perfect weathe...

Our last night…part of our package at Portofino in Belize included a Sunset Cruise, but it had been cancelled twice now. Once because there was no sign of a sunset happening. It had rained and when it cleared up it was cloudy. And the second time there weren’t enough people to schedule the trip. Tonight they’d take us one way or another. So, it was cloudy and apparently only one other couple was booked for the cruise. Excellent! Every excursion we went on was either just Keith and I, or with only one other couple. This was one of the benefits of travelling during low season! We went back into town on the water taxi and found out our sunset cruise would be on a beautiful catamaran! Nice! There was no sunset to speak of, it was a cloudy night, but it was still a great evening out on the sea. One of the guides told us all about the history of Ambergris Caye and Belize on the way out. We had some rum punch, listened to music and just hung out and relaxed. We sailed out to Hol Ch...

Snorkeling had been great…but all it was doing was making me want more! Ecologic Divers offers a course called Discover Scuba Diving or DSD for short. Today would be the day. We were going to go all in. Of all the trips we’d taken to the Caribbean and to Mexico we’d never tried to scuba, but something about Belize and the reefs here was just screaming to me! It was time to SCUBA! DSD is a mini course in Scuba diving. It’s not a certification course, but it would count towards certification. And you can use that course for up to two weeks of diving I believe. So, back to the dive shop and I was relieved that Charlie was once again our instructor. By this, our third trip with him, I was quite comfortable with him and felt we knew each other fairly well. We filled out a bunch of paperwork and watched a training video. We got our equipment and spent a good amount of time learning all about it, how to use the equipment, how to put it on, what the gauges meant - it was a thorough les...

Ambergris Caye…it’s an interesting place to be! As I mentioned in some previous posts, we chose a resort to the north of the town of San Pedro. Portofino is only accessible by water taxi and it’s about a fifteen minute boat ride to get there. But when you get into the heart of the island the pace of life picks up. It’s still a sleepy island town by all means. But there’s much more hustle and bustle! The first thing we noticed was the primary means of transportation are golf carts. There’s a few taxi vans, but most people are driving golf carts. This is certainly unique! There’s a certain charm about this for sure. Our main reasons for going into town were to get to the dive shops, but that only brought us to the docks…to eat lunch and dinner once or twice and the obligatory souvenir shopping. We didn’t get a chance to really see any of the other hotels in the area. In my obsessive research before the trip, there were quite a few that looked nice, but now that I was there I...