Back From Holiday Traveling

My Christmas vacation was extremely hectic with all the travel, but seeing our families made it all worth it. Our Odysseus-like journey started with 2 1/2 hours of sleep before a 2am wake up/3am departure from our abode to get on the road for a 2 hr drive to the Phoenix airport. Of course, that was the smoothest part of the trip. Arrival in Florida was fine and spending the first leg of our trip with The Boyfriend's family was fantastic. The only hitch was an unexpected family member that I hadn't met yet and was not mentally prepared for. I wasn't really ready for his aunt's brand of crazy, however I made it through the four/five days with only one mental breakdown.

One particularly exciting part of the trip for me was a visit to Norman Love's Confectionery. This dude designs the fancy chocolates for Godiva. The same fancy chocolates that cost a small fortune to order a box. I've always wanted to try them and figured I'd just wait until I got a for-reals paying job and splurge on a Godiva order. When I realized the guy who designs those chocolates is based out of a location right next to the airport we flew into, you couldn't have held me back. Below is a pic of his display case:



Upon tasting them I was so excited at the deliciousness I got a little misty-eyed. The man himself came out to ring the jam packed crowd of customers up at the register and I thanked him very much for the wonderful experience of tasting his craftwork.

The Boyfriend and I made out like bandits this holiday season. I now have 2 new zombie tshirts for my collection, a shiny new laptop (praise baby Jesus), Planet Earth DVD series, a ton of new flannel shirts, enough Aveda to last me 6 months, 2 new microbes (one is featured below as my mustache) and many more wonderful items I'm greatly appreciative for.



The second leg of our trip included many trips to the local pub, a round of shooting Dad's new zombie targets, catching Sherlock Holmes (not bad, love Robert Downey, Jr.), trying Quaker Steak and Lube for the first time, walking through Busch Garden's Winterfest thing (bad pic featured below), and enjoying time with my family.



Back to the travel insanity: On Christmas I saw that our flight for the following morning had been canceled (thank goodness I receive email on my phone). So I spent a crazed 45 minutes talking to various folks to get us on another flight. In the process of getting that fixed, one of the airline representatives had canceled our last flight back to AZ without telling us. As you can imagine it came as a bit of a shock when we found out a mere 15 minutes before our flight, after standing for an hour and a half in the slowest moving line known to man. We ran around the airport and finally had some very nice ladies working for Delta and United help us to get our boarding passes. After a rush to the gate and sighs of relief, we were finally on the plane home- and we stayed on that plane on the tarmac for an extra hour before getting in the air. Ah, yes, the joys of traveling.

Other than the actual traveling, the trip to see our families was really wonderful and I couldn't have felt more a part of The Boyfriend's family. Spending Christmas with both families equally was the best gift I could have received.