Archive | November, 2009
A few weeks ago, I wrote about some of my daughter’s favorite souvenirs. We love to pick up all different kinds of souvenirs when we travel. Today, I am still dreaming about putting up my Christmas tree. I love to collect ornaments when we travel and this morning I spent the morning going through different closets locating all the different ornaments that we collected throughout the year. Next week, when the tree is up I will post pictures of our favorite ornaments!
For now, here are some of the souvenirs that we have laying around the house right now!
I look for pieces of street art that catch my eye. I am ashamed to admit that I purchaed this in December of last year and I need to get it framed! I bought this from the artist in front of the Goldenes Dachl in Innsbrook, Austria. I like this piece of art because there is a little bit of gold leafing that was used for the golden roof.
This is a print of the front of the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. My husband and I got to have a nice date sans children here!
Paula Deen’s Cheese Biscuit Mix reminds me of when we stood in line for 1.5 hours just to say we tried Paula Deen’s restaurant. This is the last of the mixes that we bought.
These are three bottles of wine that we brought home from the Biltmore Mansion, the Matterhorn in Switzerland, and Deep Creek Winery in Maryland back when you could bring wine home on the plane!
This beer (3L) commemorated my husband’s Father’s Day. When my dad moved back to the states, he surprised my husband by bringing the bottle back for us! Maybe we should use it as a bank.
We gravitate towards different glasses when we travel as well! The beer stein is from Frankfurt, Germany. The Kwak glass is from Brussels, Belgium. The Heinekin glass is from our tour of the Heinekin brewery in Amsterdam. The pint glass is from the Pyramid Ale Brewery in San Francisco, California and the small mug held our gluhwein at the Christmaskindlemarkt in Garmisch, Germany.
This is my Rosetta Stone paper weight!!
What sorts of souvenirs do you like to pick up when you travel?
Stop by Mother of All Trips to see what she is dreaming about!
Last weekend we had the opportunity to visit a small-scale sustainable farm with a local group of moms. Little S had so much fun wandering around the farm, seeing the animals, and working…yes…working! The farm owners put us to work because everyone on the farm has a job! Green Acres farm is a small-scale sustainable farm in Walnut Hill, Florida. They raise chickens and turkeys, sheep and goats, as well as collect eggs, pecans, and so much more. The land is beautiful and is left the way nature intends it. All of the animals live out in the open sunshine and eat the wild grass and bugs. When the farm owners talk about their farm, you can just see their love for their farm in their eyes. We started out our visit in the goat pen where the three little goats loved to eat the grass and the brambles from the children’s hand. These little guys were only about 2 months old!
After we saw the goats, we got our first job as farmhands. While Ida came through the area, the pecan trees were stripped of many of their pecans. We got to help pick up as many as we could find (and we even got to take a few home!).
Then we went to visit the turkeys. When we got to the turkey pen, we went inside and got into a big circle and sat as quiet as we could. Those turkeys sure are curious fellows! Once we settled down and got quiet, they came right up to us. The kids loved it when they made the gobble-gobble sound all together all at once!
Next, we went to check out how the chickens live. We also got a job here! We helped move the chicken coops to another area on the field. These little guys are too young to run free right now, but soon they will have free reign of the area! These are the chickens raised for meat.
I think this little guy might lay a scrambled egg!
After a little hayride, the kids got to collect eggs and paint the chicken coop!
She said she painted me a whale! I think she did a great job! What do you think?
These are the chickens raised for eggs.
And of course, I am always looking for a great photo opportunity!
Are you interested in visiting a farm? I found a few of these resources on the web to help you locate a farm near you or an area you are visiting!
Farm Visit - Plug in your county and find farms for specific fruits, veggies, and more.
Local Harvest - Search by farm, grocery or co-op or more
Open Farm Sunday – A day in June when you can visit and support your local farmers
Stop by DeliciousBaby to visit other Photo Friday participants! Thanks for hosting Debbie!
Today I am dreaming of New Orleans…again! Only a short three hour drive away, New Orleans makes a fantastic destination for an overnight getaway. Yesterday I saw a commercial for Miracle on Fulton Street. Fulton and Poydras Streets in downtown New Orleans turns into a winter wonderland from November 27 to January 3. It snows! In New Orleans! There is live entertainment, falling snow, a canopy of lights, movie nights and so much more. We visit New Orleans on a regular basis but haven’t made it over for Miracle on Fulton Street. Hopefully I will be able to talk my husband into the quick trip over! Some of the things I am dreaming about doing while we are there.
And of course we will make some time for several stops at the Cafe du Monde to indulge in beignets!
See what other are dreaming about over at Mother of All Trips, host of Mondays are for Dreaming.
Some of you may have noticed the little blue Raveable box at the bottom of my destination posts lately. I am part of an awesome group of bloggers who are part of the You Rave team at Raveable. This week I was the featured blogger on the home page (I think my picture taken by Adria Peaden Photography is still up on the homepage today!)! What an honor to be a part of this amazing group! When you have a moment, check out Raveable, a fairly new website where you can read hotel reviews before you go. You can also read various travel bloggers’ posts about things to do in the city that you are headed to.
The Kid’s Campus at Metropolitan Park is set right next to the water and both the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Jacksonville Suns stadiums. The Kid’s Campus is a great place to bring the kids to help them burn off some energy. In the summertime, the park has a fantastic splash pad where the kids can run through the water and cool off.
There is a yellow brick pathway around a huge playground. There is a section of the park known as Safe City. Here, kids can ride tricycles around a little town that actually has little buildings, a working street light, railroad, and street signs.
Things to Know Before You Go:
- Wear bug spray. The flies were awful by our chosen picnic area, but when we moved out to the grass they stopped following us.
- The splash pad has employees standing guard. When it is crowded, the employees rotate groups in at 10 minute intervals. At first we were worried about the downtime in between sessions, but it worked out well.
- Be sure to pack a picnic and lots of water.
- School and daycare groups often plan field trips to this park so it gets crowded often.
Stop by DeliciousBaby to check out other Photo Friday participants.
Posted in Sharing on November 9, 2009
On Friday, I wrote about our trip to Wegman’s and why we love the grocery store. It is a great place to get yummy food from the area you are visiting but it is also a fantastic place to pick up souvenirs to bring home to your family and friends. That post got me thinking about all the great souvenirs that we have picked up over the many, many years of traveling. We love souvenirs in this household! We pick up food items, street art, picture frames, jewelry, books, toy cars…whatever catches our attention on the trip gets purchased and brought home with us. We don’t need a reason other than we like it, but the souvenir always reminds us of “that one moment” when the trip occurred.
One of my favorite souvenir collections is my Christmas ornament collection. We have just about collected enough ornaments to decorate one tree entirely without bringing any other ornaments out. I wish I had a bigger house so I could have two seperate trees-one for travel and one for other ornaments. We decorate the tree as a family and each ornament we take out reminds us about that trip and why we picked that particular ornament. In just a few short weeks (can you believe it is almost Thanksgiving), we will be reliving our travels as a family. I will get out the hot chocolate and marshmallows (even though it will be 78 degrees outside!), we will eat cookies that I bake with the kids that morning, and we will begin telling tall tales from our travels as we hang the ornaments on our tree.
Over the next few weeks, I am going to write a little series of posts on the many souvenirs we have picked up over the years and it will culminate with the many ornaments on our tree. I hope it makes you pull out that picture, jewelry, or piece of art and remember why you traveled to that destination!
Today I had my daughter pick out some of her favorites from our trips. It is funny how even though she just turned three, she knows that all these items are from different travels even if she doesn’t remember the travel. As you can tell, Little S usually gravitates towards the stuffed animals!
This is one of Little S’s favorite baby dolls. She picked her out in a Christmas Market in Salzburg, Austria last Christmas. She talks about how Opa and Oma were with her when she got it!
This a book that we picked out when Big S was a baby on our first trip to Europe. It is a book that helps teach numbers to your little one in German. It has been passed to Little S and she adores it!
These three little guys have a special place on her bed. The Space Monkey was bought for her by Grandma when we all traveled up to Norfolk, Virginia to move my sister and her family. We affectionately call this trip the Great Migration of 2009. We drove up to DC to visit some friends and we stopped by the Air and Space Museum. This is what she picked out! Little S picked out the buffalo while we were traveling through Yellowstone. The whale, Shamu, actually came as a gift from my sister and her kids after they visited Sea World. Little S talks about going to Sea World one day too!
Stop by Mother of All Trips, the host of Monday Dreaming, where she is dreaming about a decadent solo trip to Vietnam!
Don’t underestimate the power of the grocery store when vacationing! I love to wander the aisles of a grocery store that is new and different from the ones in my hometown, where the most exciting grocery store is Publix. It is no wonder that I get excited when I see a local grocery, a farmer’s market, a Whole Foods or a Fresh Market and the stores get added to the itinerary. My kids love to wander the aisles themselves, looking for new candies or other treats that we might let them bring home.
On our last trip, we ended up at a Wegman’s by chance. We had a wonderful time wandering through the the bakery section smelling the wonderful breads and sweet cookies. There are more cheeses and olives than you can imagine!
Grocery stores are a great place to pick up the perfect souvenir to bring home for yourself, loved ones or your housesitter. We have picked up hot sauce and pralines in New Orleans, beer at a hard to find microbrewery in Northern California, wine at the Biltmore, divinity and taffy in Savannah, and soups, coffees and teas in England and Germany. It is the perfect gift because the receiver does not have to find a place to store it!
Making a trip to the grocery store is also a great way to save money. Even if your hotel doesn’t have a kitchenette, you can still pick up sodas, juice and snacks to tide you over in between meals. You can also pick up bread, meats, cheese, and peanut butter to make your own picnic lunches.
Stop by Photo Friday at DeliciousBaby to check out some other great travel photos!
Living in the Florida Panhandle, we rarely see the leaves change colors. A lot of the leaves stay green, some change briefly, others go straight to brown. While we were in Washington DC, we had the opportunity to see leaves that had changed into the most brilliant colors I have ever seen. They don’t even look real! I had to touch the leaves to make sure they weren’t silk!
This post is part of You Capture over at I Should Be Folding Laundry and the theme for this week was Photographer’s Choice!
Today I am dreaming of Hawaii. Actually, I have been dreaming of Hawaii for the past few weeks. I lived in Hawaii when I was very little and some of my earliest memories include taking my shoes off before I walked into the school building, playing outside all the time, and being able to speak some very limited Hawaiian. We moved back to the mainland when I was just a little girl, but returned when I was in 8th grade for a brief visit where I remember beautiful hula dancers, being scared of the fish in Haunama Bay, and eating pineapple until I thought that I was going to be sick. My husband, on the other hand, has never been.
We decided a few weeks ago that for our ten year anniversary (which we celebrate in July 2010) we are going to leave the kids with the grandparents and head to Hawaii for a glorious 7-10 (hopefully 10!) day vacation at the end of October. We have the accomodations booked through a family timeshare and the grandparents have said yes to watching the kids and will be able to give a definitive yes at the end of December when they hear whether they have the week off of work. Anytime my husband or I get stressed out, the other one does a little hula dance behind everyone’s back to remind each of us that our trip may be a year away, but it is just around the corner!
We are nervous about leaving the children, but we are ready to take this first vacation on our own. Our children are 3 and 5 and we have never been away from them for more than 2 nights. We have always been less than half a day’s drive away from them. We are nervous about leaving the kids behind, be we are ready to embark on this first vacation on our own. As we start to prepare for the trip next year, I will post about what we are doing and what we have learned about leaving the children behind on a vacation. I am a firm believer that these vacations are just as important for the family’s well-being as the vacations where you take everyone. Hopefully when I am sitting on a beach like this, I won’t feel so guilty!
We have already invested in several books and I have been perusing the blog universe for articles by my fellow travelers. If you have any to share, please leave a comment in this post. Here are some of the articles that are getting my travel feet itching to hop on the place to Oahu:
I have been addicted to Peter Carey’s site, The Carey Adventures, the past two weeks because he is in Hawaii and blogging about the whole trip. The photographs are amazing and our favorite article is about surf school My husband is definitely excited about surf school.
Pam, at the Nerd’s Eye View, is also in Hawaii right now. She wrote a great article about her experience at Hanauma Bay, something that both my husband and I want to do despite its touristy nature. *Updated* Thanks to Pam’s comment below, I am thrilled to find out that Hanauma Bay isn’t going to be just a tourist trap! We are so excited to go! Thanks for the info Pam!
Lorraine, at Keeps Me Smiling, had a great time with her family at the North Shore. Unlike her though, we should be there when the surf is up and the surf contest are starting up.
Carolina, at Kids Go West, writes about the tasty dole whip and touring the Dole Plantation.
Beth at Wanderlust and Lipstick wrote about the show Lost being filmed in Oahu. Oahu is where we are going and I must admit that I have a love/hate relationship with the show Lost! She has some beautiful pictures of the island as well.
Over at Wandering Off, Sarah shares the fact that they traveled in October and loved it. I am thrilled to read this because I have heard some mixed reactions about traveling in October, which is when we will be headed there. Take a look at her pictures at Banyan Tree Park.
I am not the only one dreaming today. Stop by Mara’s site, Mother of All Trips, to see what everyone else is dreaming about today!
Both photos courtesy of www.cepolina.com.
