Our Orlando Trip!

Our trip was AMAZING! This is most definitely the absolute best trip we have ever taken. We all had so much fun and wish that we cold have stayed a few more days... Becca took over 2,500 pictures! No, that isn't a typo! She had purchased a new digital camera before we left and a 2 GB disc that would hold tons of pictures. Each day, she took over 500 pictures and would return to the hotel and download them to her laptop. The hard part is going to be sorting through them all to decide which ones to print! lol!

First of all a HUGE thank you to Make A Wish for making Becca's dream come true. Her wish was to swim with the dolphins. When she asked for this wish, we thought that we'd get one or two days at the ocean and she'd just swim along beside the dolphins. But MAW sent us first to Discovery Cove in Orlando. This place is amazing! We all 4 got to swim with and feed our own personal dolphin, Tyler, and do some tricks with him.


Here are some pictures of Discovery Cove where we went on our first day. Just click on each picture and it will open in a window full size so you can see the detail... some of them won't work for some reason, but most of them do.

This place is an all inclusive resort where you have a half hour personal swim with the dolphins, then the rest of the day is yours to snorkel with the stingrays and thousands of exotic fish in the coral reefs, or just take a relaxing float along their Tropical River that goes the whole way around the area. All food was included for the day, including snacks and beverages, and it was delicious!












The gorgeous pools.












This was another group having their personal swim. The dolphins were waving bye bye!













Here's Jilli with Tyler and a great one of our whole family!

The next day, we went to Sea World. We had the VIP tour, which meant for 7 hours, we had a personal tour guide, Sarah. We got to move to the head of the line at Kraken, Journey to Atlantis and Wild Arctic rides, and had reserved seats at the Shamu and dolphin shows. We got to feed dolphins, sea lions and stingrays and enjoyed an up-close encounter with a penguin!





















Our lunch was ring side seating behind the Shamu show where we got to be right beside the three whale pools while they were awaiting to go out and put on their show! The trainers came out while we were eating and had them do a couple tricks for us and brought them right up to the side of the pool for us to get pictures! We could have reached out and touched them! That's how close they were!!!





























Our tour guide Sarah was wonderful and gave us tons of interesting facts about all the animals. It was an unforgettable experience!