WE’RE BACK!!!!  I have a lot of pictures, which I will be posting samples of here and the rest on Flick over the next couple of days, but for now I’ll give you a rundown of our big, Floridian adventures.  Once I add pictures though, this could get pretty long so I think I’ll divide this post into two different ones. One post for the days pre-wedding, and one for the wedding and the day after.

Friday was hectic; I cleaned and prepped our house so that we could take off as soon as Alex arrived home from work. Once he did we were off to the airport at a whopping 10 MILES PER HOUR thanks to good ol’ downtown Atlanta traffic. However, we made it in time and by 11:30 p.m. we were not only in Florida, but we were tossing our luggage into our rental car.

Ahhh the sweet rental car. I must admit…I splurged. Oh did I splurge. We rented a 2010 V8 Ford Mustang convertible in white. Still be my heart! That machine (and let’s be honest here…it was not a CAR, oh no, it was a MACHINE) was so much fun, almost a little TOO much fun. Especially at midnight. On the interstate. With no other traffic. Tehehehe! The convertible was more money, but honestly, we drove everywhere we could with the top down and enjoyed ourselves fully. So, for us at least, the extra cost was paid in full by the fun we had driving around town in the vehicle. (Only issue now is that when I got home I desperately wanted to drive to the nearest car lot and say TRADE PLEASE!) Once we had loaded up our sweet ride, we headed off to the hotel / motel and crashed for the night. Poor Alex had been up 22 hours at this point.

Saturday I woke up and explored the place we were staying at, as well as taking some pictures. I had fun switching between the normal mode and the super-macro mode for some of these shots.

A touch of Paradise

Once Alex woke up, donned our beach gear, and then headed off to find breakfast. We ate at this lovely place called Jan’s in downtown Jensen Beach. The menu was pricier, but the amount of food you received blew us away. One plate combo could feed four children or two adults EASILY. And then…then we headed to THE BEACH! Oh I love the beach. I love the sand in your toes, bathing suit, every dang where you move. I love the salty smell in the air, the salty water drying on your skin, and the taste on your lips after you plunge into the ocean. I love the seagulls, and the way people walk when they realize the sand is hot. What I don’t love…is the massive amounts of Kelp you had to get through to have fun. HOLY COW you’d get half way out to the calmer part and a wave would shove you back into a tangled mass of Kelp. It was so thick you would literally stand there unable to step forward without tripping …. You had to time it right with the waves to glide over the masses. (Although it was fun to get past and then watch others try to fight their way through)

Margaritas and a good book

We spent several hours at the beach relaxing with our friends, visiting people we knew that were also  in town attending the wedding before heading off back to our hotel for a nap. Once my parents arrived we all headed out to grab dinner in downtown. We managed to find our way to the most delicious restaurant. I have to pause here and give a special shout out to the owner:

If you are ever in the Stuart, Fl or Jensen Beach, FL area (lots of small towns here) it is not only worth the drive, but also the money, to go see Jarrett and eat at the Pineapple Republic. The atmosphere, the food, the service…all of the above is beyond STELLAR. The steak literally melted in your mouth it was so tender. The past surpassed anything we could ever have, and while I’d love to offer you up an idea of how my Dad’s meal tasted…he ate too fast for the rest of us to snatch a bite.  PIG!

After dinner we headed back to our hotel where we relaxed in the pool and enjoyed all the fun murals to be had throughout the property. This was both a good and a bad idea. Good in that we were all SOOOOO relaxed (Gosh, I was so relaxed I went to be first. I’m a party pooper, what can I say) but the bad news is after doing this we have now resolved to taking an entire WEEK down there. Just imagine our little wallets moaning in pain. That’s what we managed to do!

Mural by our room