Fort Lauderdale

Finally home…or at least staying in the state for awhile.  We’re headed to Tablerock Lake this weekend, so in this post and the next I’ll share with you what we’ve been up to the past 3 weeks. It wall started with our mother’s day flight out of St. Louis.

Week 1: beach vacation in Fort Lauderdale.

We visited a sea turtle rehabilitation and nature center that was cool.  It was really humid that day but we got to see turtles, sharks, stingrays and really big lobsters.

While on the nature walk we spotted this cool lizard!

and then surprised us when he did this!

Ty took our picture…

We also visited the Discovery Children’s museum.  It was really neat, they had tons of hands on activities and an Imax movie about butterflies.

They had an orange grove factory center that we put Ty to work on. The bike powered the conveyor belt up and over and let the oranges fall back down into trays.  Then you would take the trays to a tractor bike pulling a trailer and ride it to the orange factory and then once inside the factory the oranges would pop back out certain spots on the orange trees for you to “pick” all over again. Ty had a ball here and probably could’ve played here all day.

Hurricane simulator.  Ty was afraid to go in until he realized he could control the wind.  It was pretty crazy.

the pier

Coaxed him out to play in the waves with daddy – took some quick photos before he was ready to come back to shore.  It was pretty rough waves.

look at at that cute beach bum!!

The first night there we went and ate at the Whale’s Rib.  We looked up restaurants that had been on that show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives and just knew this place had to be delicious.  We were right and visited it again 2 days later.  They had the most amazing fried shrimp and whale fries (which are like Irish chips) and Jeremy had perfectly cooked blackened huge scallops.

self portrait.

We were there for a week. Flew home on a Saturday – threw everything in the washer and repacked to fly to Vegas 8:30 Monday morning.