As promised, I’m going to share with everyone some photos from our family vacation.  I know our vacation was months ago, but I’ve been busy.  See the previous post. 🙂

This year we decided to travel to Fort Lauderdale, FL for a week and then to Chicago, IL for another 4 days.  We left on Saturday morning very early (I mean REALLY EARLY), but we were able to arrive in the beautiful city before noon.  We had searched high and low on the internet for a hotel that would allow us to have a kitchen and living room.  If we were going to be staying in a room for a week, it was really important to us not to be in a room with just beds and a bathroom.  So…after much searching we found a hotel that was designed like a mini apartment that was also on the beach.  The Lago Mar.

After we got off the plane and got our rental car, we decided to head to the store to pick up a few things for snacks and a few groceries before checking into the hotel (plus it passed the time we needed for check in).  The lobby of our hotel had some really beautiful tiled murals.

My baby doll was on cloud nine at the pool and insisted that we spend a lot of time there.  The hotel had its own private beach as well as a putt putt coarse, large chess board (like the one in the Harry Potter movie), volleyball court, and awesome pool.

Stan and I did not sleep the night before (because we had to get up so early) so we were beat.  We slept on the plane, on the pool chairs by the pool, on the sofa in the living room; if we seat still too long – we would doze off.   We finally called it quits early, which allowed me to be able to wake up early and take a couple of photos as the sun was coming up .  Remember, I had all of my new photography tips to implement and ended up taking alot of shots of the same thing.  But I think I got some pretty good shots of from our balcony.

I woke up at 6am to get these last two shots.