The Honeymoon

Ok, ok. Here is the long awaited honeymoon post. At the beginning of January, right after the fun-filled family holidays, Brian and I headed to Florida for a warm, exotic, magical honeymoon. This is what we got: Record breaking cold temperatures
Wind and Frost
Nightly newscasts full of shocked meteorologists
But....short lines at Disney World
As my father-in-law Joel said, "Al Gore should go to Florida and discover an inconvenient truth he forgot to mention." It was fun just the same though.

Disney World
Disney World was so fun. We spent three days there hopping from one park to the next. We went on all the rides and never waited for more than about 45 minutes. Some we just walked right on!

We even went on Splash Mountain and sat in the very front. As you can see, I was more concerned about protecting myself from the water than I was about looking cool for the picture.






In line for Pirates of the Carribbean! We rode it twice and the second time there was absolutely no line at all!

Epcot
Epcot was one of our favorite places at Disney World. We went there each night for dinner in a different country. The Viking ride in Norway was also pretty fun, and Brian even got to dress up as Eric the Red. If he grew out his red curly hair and his bright red beard he would be a dead ringer. My blonde locks fit in pretty well too!

Animal Kingdom
Animal Kingdom was one of my favorite parts. The animals were neat, and I just liked the atmosphere of the park. The new Everest ride, which is reminiscent of the Matterhorn in Disneyland was really fun. Out of all the rides it might have been my second favorite after Splash Mountain.

This is a picture in front of the"Tree of Life." I'm glad to say we finally found it! The man who took this picture for us is from Ogden, Brian's hometown. We got talking and it turned out that he had also lived in Coalville and had been to the Oakley rodeo! What a small world. Then again, the Oakley rodeo is pretty famous.

St. Augustine
We drove up north to a town called St. Augustine. This is supposedly the oldest city in America, established by the Spanish in the 1500s. It was extremely cold, but a very interesting place to be. We stopped at a fruit stand on the side of the road on the way up and bought some of the best oranges I have ever had. They also had delicious fresh walnuts.

This is inside the oldest house in America. It was an interesting museum and we got the whole history of the house, which was first built by Spanish settlers, then eventually used by British military, and then American citizens.
This old coastal fortress was really neat. You don't see a lot of these kinds of old structures in the United States. It made it feel more exotic.

Brian ran aground in his little boat. Without oars, that is no surprise.


This is the St. Augustine lighthouse. We climbed all 200 and something stairs to the very top where we had a spectacular, yet chilly, view of the port and surrounding city.


The Beach
Despite the cold, we decided to go to the beach anyway, even if we couldn't swim or even sun ourselves on the beach. This was the coldest part of the trip and we only stayed out for about fifteen minutes, but we still had fun. We gathered some beautiful sea shells. On a regular day the beach would have been picked clean. There was only one other person on the beach and he was flying a kite. It was beautiful, if freezing.


Brian poses for the beach picture.

Wekiwa Springs
Brian and I decided that this was one of our favorite parts of the trip. I had looked up state parks close to Orlanda before we came and found this little park. We weren't sure what to expect but we figured it would be a cheap activity--it ended up being so fun. The park would be really fun in the summer. They have a large natural spring where you can swim. The water is 72 degrees year round, but it was just too cold to go swimming for us. The spring has fish and birds surrounding it and is really large. I wish we could have gone. However, the most exciting part was canoeing down the Wekiva River. For fifteen dollars you could rent a canoe and they shoved you off onto the river with no supervision.

Here I am starting off on our river adventure.

The river was full of huge fish, although you could only see them in the shallow parts.

Turtles also appeared in abundance. We saw a lot of logs like this--lined with turtles basking in the sun.

This was definitely the most exciting part of our river excursion. A mother alligator with two babies on her back was relaxing in the shallow water at the edge of the river. We got a little close for comfort as Brian stopped steering to get a good picture. See that log right in front of the alligator? The front of our canoe (which I was sitting in) ran right into that log. The alligator started hissing at us (yes, they do hiss) and I started yelling at Brian to steer us out of there. I didn't think getting attacked by an angry mother alligator would end our trip well.


All in all it was a wonderful trip--the perfect break from school and job hunting and so forth. Even the cold did not get us down. Brian had to buy a sweater to keep himself warm, and this was the cheapest one we could find. Brian wore it like a man.