2008 Florida Vacation Pics

Last Sat­ur­day (the 9^th), Ali­cia, her par­ents, and I embarked on a road trip to Florida for a week of rest, relax­ation, beach, sun­shine, and more. All-in-all, we had a great time, did a lot of stuff, and I saw the ocean (well, the Gulf of Mex­ico, any­way; it’s saltier!) for the very first time.

I’ll be upfront hon­est: The ocean did not live up to the hype; frankly, I’m much more in awe of the uni­verse above me, and next to it, the ocean is but a gal­lon of water on this bucket we call Earth. Still, it’s mind-bogglingly big, and I had a great time col­lect­ing some shells, walk­ing in the beach, sun­bathing, and spend­ing a small for­tune on souvenirs.

I also took a lot of pic­tures, which I’ll get to in a moment. How­ever, I want to point out that I am no pho­tog­ra­pher. My wife is light-years ahead of me when it comes to pho­tog­ra­phy skill, and her cam­era is vastly supe­rior to mine as well. Also, I was not very care­ful in keep­ing my cam­era bat­ter­ies charged, and so about halfway through our trip to the zoo, my cam­era died. My per­sonal vaca­tion pho­to­graph record ends with a shot of a tapir.

All that said, I do want to share my pics. These are all straight off of the cam­era, un-retouched. If you’re inter­ested (there’s over 160!), browse over to my 2008 Florida Vaca­tion set on flickr. Enjoy!

Oh, and you’re encour­aged to com­ment on them! All you need is a free flickr (or Yahoo!) account, and you’ll be up and run­ning in no time.

BONUS! As a spe­cial treat to my read­ers, you can also check out a short video of the sun set­ting; the file is in MPEG for­mat and weighs in at 1,263 kilo­bytes. There is no audio, the qual­ity isn’t ter­rific by any means, and the cutie who briefly jumps into the shot wav­ing is my loverly wife. Sun­set at Holmes Beach