Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

Florida doesn’t hit very high on my list of must-go places but pretty much all of the rest of the families we know swear by it. I won’t say I’m necessarily converted, I don’t see us rushing back year after year, but I’ms starting to get what they see in it. I will never understand why or how people stay at Disney resorts and spend more than we did on this 2 month trip in a week, but Florida itself isn’t so bad. There’s nothing you can’t buy, it’s relatively warm and everything is just so easy.

Since we were traveling late into the night and had no food at our place we thought we would introduce the kids to the local culture and visit an IHOP for breakfast. The kids were pumped with the sprinkle/chocolate/icing extravaganza dessert pancake options for breakfast. Charlie has already said this is the first place he’s going to come on vacation when he’s older and has kids.

After everyone was hopped up on sugar we went in search of my favourite American attraction, Target. The girls needed some new bathing suits, Nora outgrew all of her shoes while we were gone and I never turn down a chance to go to Target. When we left home we were only supposed to be gone a month to DR where we weren’t going to need a whole bunch of ‘real’ clothes, so we were all in need of some different clothing options. The first Target we visited was new and was oddly stocked and quite small so we headed 5 miles up the road to the bigger one. Several hundred dollars and hours later we had some new non-beach clothes. We grabbed some groceries at the closest ALDI and headed back to the resort so the kids could have some time on the playground.

We spent the next day much the same way – just with less shopping. Jacob had some work to catch up on so the kids and I headed up to the the splash pad for the morning. Thankfully I was able to find a dentist online that had an opening in the afternoon so while the kids embraced the Florida culture (again) and learned how to play shuffleboard I headed to have my tooth fixed. We lead a very glamorous life.