Zac and Lori Do Tampa

Zac has done a lot of travel with his work this past couple of years.  And I have learned that if I am a good girl and hold down the fort when he is gone and don't complain too much, that he will take me on a few business trips with him throughout the year.  So when he told me this year that he needed to head to Tampa Bay, FL to meet with some clients at the end of January I jumped at the opportunity to go with him!  I couldn't wait to escape the Idaho snow for a week and go soak my toes in the white sand and ocean waves.

On our way to our hotel, I saw this awesome tower a couple of hotels down from ours.  When we looked it up to see what it was, we found out that it was a rotating restaurant, just like the one in the Seattle Space Needle.  We decided that we needed to for sure eat dinner there.

The view was fun, though it was quite dark and a little hard to know what we were looking at as we weren't familiar with the area.  It also made me feel just a touch dizzy as the center of the restaurant is a bar and doesn't rotate, so we are moving, but the middle section wasn't.  I was worried our waitress wouldn't be able to find us every time she left because we were in a different spot whenever she came back.  It was a great place to try out the local seafood and get a view of the area.

On another night, we decided to drive into the main big city of Tampa, as our hotel was on a fun little island called St. Petersburg.  On our way into the big city, we drove around Floridian neighborhoods to check out the local architecture, because both Zac and I are nerds like that and we fell in love with these beautiful homes with their grand staircase entries.  We did notice that many of them had porches and even yards fully screened, so we are guessing that the bugs must get pretty thick around here during certain times of the year.  When we got into Tampa, we rented electric scooters and took a self-guided tour around the town and all through the beautiful University of Tampa.

We ended our night with a stroll through the mall looking at all of the very expensive things we couldn't afford and then dining at Cheesecake Factory... I so wish we had one of those in SE Idaho.

Sadly, the weather wasn't quite the tropical vacation that I had planned.  I was so mad at myself because I had packed for warm weather and didn't even through in a jacket or a sweatshirt... but then it ended up being in the low 60s and rainy all week.  So my week of snorkeling on the beach was losing it's luster.  Zac and I were looking for "indoor" activities to do on his day off near Tampa and found out that Disneyworld was only 2 hours away... and I had never been to Disneyworld before, so we got up early and headed to Orlando!!!!

I had been to DisneyLAND before, but never to Disneyworld and hadn't experienced Epcot Center, so we decided to spend our day there.

Epcot Center is not so many rides as it is a walk around the world.  It is a huge loop, where around every corner is another city in the world with its beautiful architecture, music, costumes, and best of all cuisine!  My favorite dining experience was sitting in a little French cafe eating authentic pastries.  I was in Heaven!

We stayed from first thing in the morning and finished our loop just as Epcot was getting ready to close.  It was beautiful and magical and totally unforgettable.  We stopped and bought candy for the kids in each of the different areas of the world to take home as a souvenir.

Another favorite activity was begging Zac to drive me to the power company in Tampa after work to go see the manatees that swim in the waters there.  Apparently, they like the warm water that comes out of the plant.  These are some of the other fish that we saw there:

It is hard to really understand from this picture just how really huge these fish were!  They were over six feet long and just huge.  We also saw sharks and stingrays.  Kind of gives you an eerie feeling when you can see what's in those ocean waters you've been wading in all week.

We had this cute little beach condo that we rented for the week that had a little kitchen, living room, and patio.  It felt good to open it up and have the ocean breeze flow through.

The beaches were so white and sandy and filled with more shells than I have ever seen before!

It was rainy, windy, and a little cold, but we still had a magical morning the day we left strolling the beach together looking for some last minute sea shells for the kids.

I loved this sculpture in the Tampa Airport of a giant sea turtle and all of the baby sea turtles forming a giant sea turtle.

I don't know if there's anything I love more in this world than having adventures and making memories with my sweetheart!