forts, rivers, movies and rashes (Day 3)

After such a long day on Tuesday, we wanted to relax on Wednesday so we just explored Jacksonville and took it easy. It was great to just take it slow and just enjoy spending the day together. We started our day at Fort Caroline. This is a fort for a French colony.

The Spanish attacked this Fort in 1565 and killed all but 50 people and then the Spanish built a fort of there own on the site which was destroyed later by the French. Fort Caroline wasn't too impressive and it was easy to see why it was so easy for the Spanish to attack. The cannons in the fort were pointing towards each other at the entrance to the fort...not terribly useful.

The sun came out after the visit to the fort so we walked along the river walk in downtown Jacksonville.

After relaxing at the hotel for a while, we went to go see Insurgent! I was really excited to see this movie and it was awesome! This series is one of the few that I think the movies are so much better than the books. We saw it in IMAX and 3D which was great. It had been so long since I had been to an IMAX and it was a lot of fun. After the movie, we went to Olive Garden for dinner and got cheesecake factory for dessert...so yummy!

In addition to going to a lot of fun places on our trip, Mike and I also got a chance to exercise on this trip. It was great to start each day by being active and waking us up. I love starting the day early. It makes it feel so much longer and I'm so much more productive. I just worked out in the hotel gym but Mike went out running in the city. He took a couple pictures on his morning runs. I really loved having the gym all to myself at the hotel but these pictures kind of made me wish I'd gotten to watch the sunrise with him.

Another eventful thing that happened during our trip was that Mike got hives! It really started on Tuesday that Mike started to itch and noticed some red bumps and patches on this arms and legs. We figured it was probably an allergic reaction to the bar soap in the hotel since that was the only thing that had touched his skin but I didn't use it. On Wednesday morning he was looking a lot better though. Then after lunch, he suddenly flared up again and it was a lot worse this time. It was all over him and it was so gross. I felt so bad cause he was so uncomfortable all afternoon. At this point we thought it might be the food we were eating but he ate each thing one at a time after we got home and had no reactions so its a mystery. Thankfully it was gone by Thursday morning and he felt much better and looked better too. I guess we'll never know for sure what caused the reaction, we decided though that it might have been an allergic reaction to Florida ;) Hope not though!

Downtown Disney (Day 2)

After we went to the temple we drove to Disney World. We couldn't afford to go to Disney World but we had fun with the free areas of the park. I love all things Disney so I was pretty happy. Even though we didn't get to go to the park it was still a lot of fun. We started by going to the Disney Boardwalk. Its a resort so unless you're a guest there isn't much to do but it was really pretty and I loved the way they designed it.

Next we went to Downtown Disney. This is the market place of Disney. They have some interactive rides and a theater but mostly is restaurants and shopping. We had so much fun walking around and shopping and singing along to the Disney music. Honestly, I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning and this wasn't even really Disney World!

The first place we went was the Lego store. This was Mike's favorite stop we made. It was amazing seeing all of the lego displays they had made. 

This was about $400

 We also got to visit the Disney store. We saw a lot of things we couldn't afford but also a lot of stuff we wanted. I'm a big Disney princess fan so I wanted pretty much everything. I kind of wished we had a daughter so I could live vicariously (and have an excuse to behave like a 5 year old girl) but oh well it was still fun anyway :)

Belle is my favorite :)

 Our original plan for dinner was to go to the Hard Rock Cafe since that was where we went for our 1 year anniversary. Hard Rock was in Universal Studios so we had to drive over there and when we got there we found out that it was going to be $17 just to park! We both said no way! (Disney had free parking and shuttles to take you anywhere you wanted to go) and then headed back to Disney. The only good part about the drive over was that we were by the Wizarding World of Harry Potter so we saw Hogwarts from the road :)

We ended our time in Disney by going to Planet Hollywood for dinner instead. The food was delicious and I love the atmosphere. Its so loud and fun and they have tons of stuff to look at. Even though it wasn't what we had originally planned, it was great!

Going to Disney for real is definitely on my bucket list (it was before but now I have more motivation)! I also decided we would need at least a week because we spent half a day just at downtown disney....that's without rides and without kids! This was the best day of the trip though. We were exhausted and made it back to Jacksonville around 11:30 but it was worth it.

Even though we didn't go to Disney, we wanted a souvenir to remember the trip so we picked out a puzzle. Since we both enjoy doing puzzles and Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite Disney movies of all time we picked out a 1000 piece Beauty and the Beast puzzle. It took us a week to do it after we came home but I love it!