Florida

Last year, we went on our very first vacation (besides our honeymoon) and went to Florida for a week. We loved it so much, we decided to go back again this year! Since Josh is now speaking with the ZOE Group for their conferences, he was scheduled to be in Orlando and we went a week early to our little spot in New Smyrna Beach to relax. The house we stay in has the inter coastal waterway as its backyard so you can see the dolphins and manatees. In fact, I dribbled the hose for a manatee and it came right up to me so it could have a drink!

Chris and Vicki were also working at ZOE doing the MediaShout, so they came a few days after us and shared the house for a couple days.

This was our routine:

get up and eat Snickers Ice Cream Bars for breakfast (yes, every morning!)

spray the hose to see if a manatee or dolphin wanted to play

pack our lunch (or grab my favorite Chik-Fil-A)

sit on the beach and read books/sudoku puzzles/play in the waves for the whole afternoon

come back to the house, shower and go eat Mexican food or Bubba Gumps.

The only variants to that schedule was for one day we went to Daytona Beach and played each other in putt-putt, and went to watch Chris get his tattoo! That evening we went to see the Daytona Cubs play. Our first day there, we couldn't go into the water because Tropical Storm Barry was on its way, but we still walked the beach while it started to rain!

ZOE was awesome, each year they do the same conference, just travel to different areas to do it, so it is neat to see the response of different groups. The church we were at is such a neat place, they had recently bought and renovated a grocery store and strip mall into their building, and it was by far the coolest church I had ever been in! A couple of the speakers were people I had sat in a classroom at Lipscomb learning from and it was a blessing to sit at their feet and learn again, and worshiping with ZOE is always my highlight!

We had left New Smyrna Beach (in between Daytona and where the Kennedy Space Center is)on Thursday to get to Orlando in time for Josh to prepare for all of his stuff. We knew there was going to be a shuttle taking off on Friday and were a bit bummed we wouldn't be right there to see it. Well, sitting in a main session, a man behind us was on his phone and he leaned forward and asked us where we were from, we said Michigan, he had us come to the parking lot with him. This guy works for NASA and he showed us where we could see the shuttle! He even counted down for us while he was listening on his phone! It was the coolest experience, I felt as if I was a little kid I was so excited!