A Week in Orlando

It might be hard to believe, but Tyler and I haven't left Orlando since my last entry! We didn't have any vacations or work trips to attend, so we actually spent a normal week here in town. Since we were around all week, we were able to go to Disney World again on Saturday. We've now gone to the 4 major parks (Epcot, Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios) so we went back to Magic Kingdom (classic) in the morning and then went to one of the water parks, Blizzard Beach, in the afternoon. I had visited this park with my family when I was 16, so it was fun to visit it again with Tyler.

It's getting very HOT here now that summer has arrived, so the Water Park will be the perfect way to spend the sizzling afternoon hours.

This water park puts all the ones in Arizona and Utah to shame! Besides the wave pool and lazy river, it has 3 slides that are all over 10 stories high and tons of other really fun slides that you ride down in tubes or toboggans (pictured above). Since it has the theme of a transformed ski resort, the whole place is themed with snowmen, santa, wooden lodges, and even a ski lift to get you up to the highest slides.

We had a blast at the park and we highly recommend it to our friends and family who come and visit!

Other than our Disney day, we've been just hangin around in Windermere. Tyler is making visits and giving trainings around Orlando and he's also studying for a certification test he's taking, called LEED. (It relates to construction, and sustainable "Green" building.) He's still rockin the minivan and he's already put 11,000 miles on it in 4 months.

I'm setting up things around the house and looking for a new job. My job with my Salt Lake City company has come to an end, and so I'm now officially voluntarily unemployed. Even though I wasn't laid off, I feel like I can relate to the other thousands of people around the country! Job hunting right now is HARD! It's obviously not the best time to be looking for a job, and Orlando's economy is especially not doing too well either since its based primarily around travel and tourism. I've had a few interviews (mostly over the phone) but nothing has panned out quite yet. I'm only looking for accounting jobs, but either part time or full time... so wish me luck.

Living Life to the Fullest

So the past 5 months have been busy for the Jennings family, but if you've been keeping up with the blog, you already knew that! But today, June 15th, life looks like it might start to settle down. Tyler is out of town tonight, but he’ll be returning tomorrow and then neither of us has any plans to leave the state for at least a month. That’s saying something for us! When I got home from Atlanta on Saturday (yes we went on another work trip – sorry I didn’t blog about it yet - here's a couple quick photos from the amazing aquarium there)

Anyways, when I got home from Atlanta (which is only a 6 hour drive!) I was happy to put my suitcase AWAY and not leave it out on the floor of our bedroom.

Kali, a couple posts ago you told us you didn’t know anyone who travels/has as many adventures as us, and that we’re living life to the fullest. It hadn’t really all set in with us until we read that and talked about it. We obviously realized we were traveling and busy, but because we were so busy we didn’t think much about how unique these experiences really are. We truly have been blessed to see so much of this part of the country and experience these adventures together! We really have been taking advantage of this time and living to the fullest.

Neither of us has ever lived like this before – by “like this” I mean “out of a suitcase” or “from hotel room to hotel room.” Between school and jobs, we couldn’t afford to take more than a couple vacations a year. Luckily, living in Orlando, we’ve been able to work our traveling into Tyler’s work. It’s been great to take advantage of this time before we have kids to travel and see the country together. Add in trips for a brother’s wedding, another brother's high school graduation, and a family trip to Mexico along with our work trips – and you have our year in a nutshell thus far.

In 2008, I finished up my degree at BYU and began working full time in the stressful busy world of public accounting. The only trips we went on last year was one weekend in Vegas, 4 days at Huntington Beach and then AZ for the holidays. I think we went on more trips in the first 3 months of this year! I just looked at Tyler’s Facebook profile, at all the different “Mobile Photo Uploads” he’s posted from this year. There are 64 pictures, from January 14th to today. To name a few we had pictures in:

Provo – Alcatraz – Floor seats @ U/BYU Basketball – Meeting Dwight Howard – Tabernacle in SLC – Tampa – Baltimore – Lots of Golf Tournaments - Palm Beach – Talladega – Alabama – Mississippi River – Daytona – St. George – Miami – Disneyworld – Jacksonville – Mobile – Cancun – a town called Jennings, FL – Atlanta – and today, NASA

I really doubt we’ll ever have another 6 months like this again! In the coming years Tyler will be able to work more from home, but since he’s new he needs to get the face-time with the clients and sales reps so he can get to know them. I’ve been working for my CPA firm in Salt Lake remotely from Florida, so I’ve been able to tag along for all these trips. We're hoping to start a family soon, but until then I'm able to tag along pretty easily.

So all in all, 2009 has been a very exciting year for us. But now most of the traveling is over and its time to actually settle down and become residents of Orlando!

PS I really hope I don’t look like the Seriously So Blessed Blog with all these posts about happy life and fun trips… I promise, we have bad days too! Also I’m not pregnant with twins or president of any wives’ clubs or going to the Spa and “Anthro” weekly ... well not for now anyways!

Cancun...

So, we are back from Paradise - and survived the flu! It was actually the PERFECT time to go to Mexico! Our resort was only at 40% occupancy and everyone was taking extra precautions because of the flu. There was big bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere and they checked everyone's symptoms at the airport.

So anyways, we enjoyed our hotel room view
We stayed at the Royal Sands & Spa, I promise there is an R behind Steven's head...

Every day, Tyler and Michael took time to lanch Steven in the pool, they got pretty good at the back flip.

Our big adventure of the week was a personal tour of Chicen Itza provided by Erik Martinez, a local stake president down in the Yucatan Peninsula. He has his Masters degree in Anthrolopogy & gave our family a tour with an LDS spin on the ancient Mayan City. It was an amazing experience and definitly worth the 2 hour drive out there.After the tour we had an amazing "Mayan" lunch and then, since we were pretty hot, we were going to stop by a "Cenote" which is an underwater cave. Our tour guide had set this up, and we really didn't know what to expect, we weren't so sure about swimming in a cave - but we were not dissapointed!

This was our first view of the water.

It was so much fun jumpin off the cliffs and swimming in the crystal clear water!

To sum up the rest of the trip... we went snorkeling, saw a sea turtle, sting rays, crabs, held a live starfish, played some crazy water volleyball, basketball, tried yoga with Pepe, road bikes down a busy road wearing bright orange construction vests, got lost in the sketchiest part of town trying to find the church building, ate amazing tacos, tried to bargain in the flea markets, and did lots of swimming in the amazing warm ocean!! It was a great trip and the week went by way too fast!


We took some quick pictures on the beach on our last night and they turned out great, even though this first one was taken by some random maintenance worker haha.