A Little Fun in the Sun

 To gather a little vitamin D and to escape the bitter cold of the Midwest, we headed to the Caribbean.  Specifically, St. Maarten which we picked primarily because there is a direct flight there from Chicago.  We went with our good friends, John and Linda, and had a wonderful time.  Of course, who wouldn't with temperatures in the 80's everyday, sun out every day, and no work for Jo for a week.  This was our first week long trip with John and Linda since we were all in our 20's and we are looking forward to many more - especially somewhere warm in the midst of winter.

While there we did a boat trip around the island with several stops for snorkeling.  We saw some turtles who can hold their breath underwater a lot longer than we can.  We also sailed in a 12-meter yacht that participated in the America's cup.  We raced against two other boats and won.  It was great fun, but a lot of work - can't imagine doing it in a real race.  It was amazing to see how far over the boats lean when catching the wind.  We also found some time to relax on the beach and enjoyed many, many guava berry coladas - so much that guava berry liquor found itself in our luggage for the trip home.  

We also took the ferry over to St. Barts, rented a car, and toured around the that island for a day.  The ferry ride over was a wild ride with the ferry cresting 6-10 foot waves, which we all weathered fine, but the woman behind us became seasick within 10 minutes of leaving port.  Thank goodness, it was only a 45 minute ride and we were all happy to get into port.  St. Barts was a beautiful island and seems to have a lot of great bays and coves worthy of a week long visit somewhere in the future.  Although, the airport is a terrifying plummet to land so we decided it would be best to take our chances with the bumpy ferry.

Another highlight was touring the butterfly farm.  We have seen several of these across the world and they always are fun and interesting.  Plus, having a butterfly land on you seems so peaceful and serene.  But all too soon, we were sipping our last coladas on the way to the airport and landing back in sub zero temperatures.

Fortunately, this week the temperatures have been really low so we can re-acclimate to winter rapidly.

The Admirals Win!

Jo spent the week enjoying some warmth in Dallas.  This was the Southern regional meeting and she enjoyed walking outside without a biting cold wind blowing into her face.  She was only there for a few days but enough to get in a few walks and a turn in the pool.  I decided someone needed to be the brave one and stayed home to keep the home fires burning.  Although, the week wasn't too bad weather wise, in other words, we didn't get any new, accumulating snow so I could let the snow shovel cool off for a while and the temperatures stayed above zero.  I spent the week working on various chores around the house since there were a couple of items needing work - one of which is dealing with a small leak from the roof.  Fortunately, it doesn't appear to be an active leak and hopefully was just a result of all the wind blown snow from the other week.  Either way, it won't be fully repaired/looked into until the spring.  Climbing onto a snow covered tile roof is not highly recommended.

For the weekend our only major outing was to another Admirals game.  Jo hosted several Red Cross volunteers in the Northwestern Mutual suite and they must have brought good luck since the Admirals actually won the game, even with Jo and I present (although, Jo did bring her lucky Admirals cow bell and annoyingly rang it a lot).  It was quite a shoot out, for hockey anyway, with the final score 6-5.  I snapped a few photos of the indoor blimp, since nothing says minor league hockey than having a blimp floating around dropping coupons on the crowd and I couldn't think of a more creative picture for the week.  Either way, it was nice meeting some the Red Cross people, enjoying the food in the suite, and catching up with Drew and Amy who were able to join us for the game.

Our little blizzard

Saturday was our first Admirals game for 2015.  Jo hosted several of her HR team members for the game.  We unfortunately continued our bad luck for the Admirals as they lost even though they had a 6 game winning streak coming into the game.  The bright spots were that it was a bobblehead giveaway night so Jo got to add to her ever growing collection and the pizza at the Bradley Center was as tasty as ever.  



Sunday was forecast as a snowy day so we planned to hunker down inside and continue to work on our puzzle.  On the topic of snow, I know the Northeast thought they were going to get a lot of snow and certainly there was a lot of press coverage for their snowstorm - we had quite a bit of snow and wind here in the Midwest and we certainly didn't seem to make quite a big of fuss about it in the news.  I guess we just call it winter and move on.  We landed up getting about 10 inches dumped on us over the weekend and with winds up to 50 mph it managed to create some impressive drifts - even managed to push snow inside the garage.  We did decided to take advantage of all the snow and cross country ski for an hour at our favorite local park, Lake Park.  It was fun being out with the snow coming down around us and the wind hadn't started the really serious blowing yet.  We did debate skiing down the road to get to the park, but decided it would be safer to get in our SUV to make the transit.  Then it was home to some hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls - got to eat to make up for all those calories we burned.


The rest of the day we spent staying warm and watching the wind blow the snow around.  We made some progress on our 3,000 piece puzzle and otherwise prepared for another week.