Florida

Over spring break, we took a really fun trip to Florida. Seana's mom has a time share in Orlando, and she was kind enough to let us put it to good use.

We decided to brave the trip in the car which took us a bout 14 hours. Who knew Seana had a wild streak in her! It was a fun trip.

We even got to pass through Biloxi, Mississippi! Any of you who are John Grisham fans can imagine my excitement. I had to take this picture in honor of one of my favorite authors.

Also on the trip, was Julie Martin who is extremely hilarious. I'm not sure how she did the turban look, but we thought it would make a great picture.

We got there late Saturday night. After attending church on Sunday, we headed across the street to take some pictures at the beautiful Orlando temple. Julie and I practiced some engagement poses in preparation for the photo shoots with Adam and Susannah.

I snapped this shot of the bride to be in front of the temple.

It was a very pretty temple and reminded me quite a bit of the Houston temple. It's a lot bigger, though.

Yahoo for temples and good friends!

Later that day, we went to visit a co-worker of Susannah's and mine who just recently moved to Florida. Sonia now lives just less than an hour from Orlando. She and her family were so sweet to have us over. Apparently, I'm the only one who took the "silly picture" suggestion seriously.

After a delicious bar-b-que, the Gonzalez family took us to Coco Beach to look around. There were a ton of people there.

I was shocked at how cold the water was. Not the best picture of me . . . I'll blame it on the cold water and the wind.

We almost stepped on this little guy as we walked along the beach. Yikes! We saw a few others as well.

I love this shot that Susannah got of Julie.

There was a cool pier that we walked to down the beach.

Gabriel loved the seagulls and kept trying to catch them. It was very entertaining. He kept us entertained with his blonde jokes and even some great Chuck Norris jokes.

After the beach we made some s'mores on the grill and then had some serious excitement . . .

We were there just in time to watch a space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral! It was AWESOME! We just stood in Sonia's front yard. Kennedy Space Center is only about 10 miles from her house. This is when it first took off.

I took video of the whole thing while Susannah took still shots. We didn't hear anything shuttle related at all in the first 2 videos.We have about a million shots of it in the sky, but I'll let this one suffice for now.

Here's video number two. We were pretty excited.

If you listen in this video, you should be able to hear the sound of the take-off. It was quite loud in real life.

Once the shuttle left our view, the sunset caught some of the lingering smoke and it looked so cool.

We thought it was sort of dragonish!

After it was over, we came in and rewound the DVR and watched it close-up. I'm so glad we were able to see it. Julie kept calling it "epic." After we left the Gonzalez house, we sat in traffic for a couple of hours and finally picked Adam Warr up from the airport. I'll post about the rest of the trip in the next post.