College Friend Trip Favorites

Happy Friday!  And Happy Anniversary Kev!  We have some simple fun plans for today to celebrate 22 years :)  More on that later.

Today I'm going to recap a fun girl's trip that I went on last weekend.  I headed out of town with some of my favorite friends from high school.  We coordinated all of our schedules, made plans for all of our kids to be taken care of and headed to our old stomping grounds of Indiana University.    We all went to high school together and then headed to IU together.  We have been talking about making this trip happen for a long time. 

The Union building behind us.  And a cute 83 year old professor took this picture for us.  He adored IU and was so happy to talk to us about it.

I brought the snacks - a snackle box of gummy candies, popcorn, cheese popcorn and chocolate dipped pretzels.

I also surprised the girls with IU themed goody bags.  The bags reminded me of the striped pants the basketball team wears so I thought they were perfect.  I added in a fun square scarf and a personalized bracelet.  The girls loved their gifts.  Be sure and scroll all the way to the end - you're never going to believe the gift that my friend Kelly surprised me with.

We shopped and all found some cute stuff.

We all have fond memories of the Olive Garden - especially the never ending pasta bowls for college kids.  So we grabbed lunch at Olive Garden.

More shopping.  More relaxing in our room.  Then we headed to a local favorite Mother Bears Pizza.

It was amazing.

We headed down town for dessert at the Chocolate Moose.  They have their own version of blizzards call a BLIZZ.  I ordered an Oreo Blizz with homemade chocolate ice cream.  I'll dream of this for a long time.

We stayed up way too late catching up and walked over to breakfast at Lincoln Square.

Everything was delicious.  Especially that homemade biscuit and strawberry jam.

We headed to campus to restock our IU gear.  Everything was so cute.  The merch was extra cute after the IU football team winning the National Title this year.

The I in IU.

The campus, old buildings, giant trees, etc. are all so pretty.

We were all so thankful to get away and relive our favorite college spots.

My favorite souvenir - a new back to school teacher bag!

WOW WOW WOW!!  Remember how I said we were so bummed to miss out on the striped Trader Joe's totes??  Well my friend Kelly found me one!  I was so surprised and have already carried it several times.  It's such a cute size and pattern.

I hope you have a great weekend!  Linking up with Momfessionals

A Day in Curacao

Our last stop was the island of Curacao.  We didn't realize this was the biggest, busiest island we'd visit.  Major bridges, colorful buildings, McDonalds, great shopping and travel time to get to our resort.  We got in a taxi to head to our resort.  Everyone drives FAST here.  We held on and listened in on the Dutch our drivers were speaking.  They dropped us off at our resort for the day - Sunscape.

It was a gorgeous resort!  We had a day pass and had to check in with our IDs and a credit card. We rented snorkle gear and got to enjoy all of the drinks, food and amenities through the resort.  We encountered people from all over here.  So many different languages were being spoken around us and we saw some people from our cruise ship at the same resort.

There was so much color!  It was fun to keep track of our cruise ship as we moved about the island.

Giant iguanas greeted us.  The boys were thrilled.

We had really beautiful views everywhere we looked.  Can you spot our tiny cruise ship in the distance?

I can't tell you how happy it made us to make a cat friend in Curacao.  We were missing our cats at this point in the trip so Curacao Kitty did our hearts good!

The water was stunning!!

We wished we would have known the shore line was so rocky.  We did not come prepared with water shoes so we walked carefully over the rocks and swam out to enjoy the water.  If you go to Curacao, bring water shoes to protect your feet.

There were hot tubs, volley ball nets, water aerobics classes, multiple restaurants, DJs, Jerk Chicken BBQ at the pool, giant chess game, snorkle gear and a swim up bar.  We popped around to enjoy all of it.  There was something for everyone.

We encountered people from all over, but it wasn't hard to communicate with anyone.

Even if you weren't snorkeling, you could see tons of fish and crabs in this clear water.  The big kids and Kevin swam out in the bay closer to that line of rocks.  They were able to see tons of cool fish and creatures.

We even found some shells.

The resort flowers were amazing.

Curacao looked like a post card at every angle.

We parked our stuff in the shade around these pretty trees.

There was great shopping, big military boats coming and going and lots of traffic on that big blue bridge in the background and so much color.  They had dancers to welcome us at the port.  None of the shop owners were agressive.  Just smiling, friendly faces everywhere we went.

Let me know if you have any questions about Carnival, the ABC islands or cruising with your family!  Kevin is the trip planner.  He found all the locations, arranged all of our travel and found all of our deals.  He'd be happy to answer any questions, too.

A Day in Bonaire

Our second stop was the island of Bonaire.  It's a small, quiet island.  We met up with our excursion group at the port and hoppped on a bus to our excursion location.  The buildings in Bonaire are very colorful and we enjoyed seeing the donkeys munching on grass on the sides of the roads. We admired familar car brands and models of their cars that we had never seen before.  We got dropped off at a beautiful resort to meet our sail boat captains for the day.

We were in a group of 14 or so people all from our cruise ship.  The captains escorted us to our sailboat where we took off our shoes and boarded the boat.  One of our darling children accidentally flipped his Croc straight into the ocean instead of straight into the shoe box.  Luckily, our captain saved the Croc and we went on our way.

The water was calmer than Aruba and everywhere we looked was lovely.  None of us had ever been on a sail boat before.  We sailed for an hour, waving hello to our Cruise ship, put our anchor down and snorkled for about 30 minutes and sailed back for another hour.  Yummy drinks and snacks were flowing.  The crew than ran the sailboat were so nice to the kids.  They answered all of their questions and explained everything that was happening on the boat.  We sat inside the boat with the kids and had a great time.  It would have been really hard for everyone to hang on and be safe if the kids would have had to sit on the outside edges of the boat.

The rum punch was unlimited.  I'm thrilled to say that a lot of punch was consumed and we didn't spill a drop of it.

Leo asked a million questions about fish, sail boats, steering wheels, the wind, the boats we passed and more.  Our captain spoke Dutch to his crew mates and English to answer all of the kid's questions.  They were fascinated by all of it.

This excursion had no age requirements to participate, but Kevin would be the first to tell you that this was an advanced excursion.  It was a challenge for our great swimmers and they all came back to the boat exhausted.  It was more challenging than we expected.  They had fun, but the highlight of our excursion was the sailing.

Gorgeous homes.  Gorgeous views.

We loved sailing here!  If you wanted to snorkle at your own pace, relax and walk on a beach, we'd recommend finding a local beach and directing your own adventure. The kids didn't get to snorkle as much or on their own timeline like they would have wanted to.  However, the gorgeous, very nice sail boat was such a fun experience.  Bonaire was definitely the smallest, quietest island we visited.