50 years of marriage for my parents - a celebration in Florida

Jay and I headed to West Palm Beach, Florida in June to celebrate 50 years of marriage for my parents! One of their main wishes was to spend a week with their daughters, our spouses, and their two grandsons on vacation together. They picked Florida as the location and off we went to meet them! But not before they took off to the Bahamas to celebrate alone for a week before being joined by all of us in FL. Can you believe their idea of a celebration was to go parasailing in the Bahamas? Those two are nuts. I had a heart attack when I saw the photo - I'm glad I found out about it after they survived and loved it. One thing is for certain, my parents love life and live it up every single day. They take nothing for granted. They love their friends, their friends love them, they dance, laugh, sing, and smile. They are wonderful role models to all because their passion for life is infectious. We all can benefit from being around people so alive!

 The distinguished couple on the big night!

Christina and I worked together for over a month to pull this moment off for our parents. Family and friends all pitched in to help us compile a memory book filled with letters, photos, and tons of laughs for our parents. The final result was a huge, leather-bound book of love for our parents and it was just awesome to give them this gift..... many tears were shed, many laughs were had, and so many stories were told to us that we had not heard before (prompted by old photos!!).

The whole family - Jay, Julie, Jackson, Sara, Christina, Tom, Henry, and Diane. Who needs money when you are impossibly rich like this family right here?

 Someone is popular with his nephews. Love....

Sargassum sp. abounds in this area. My dad had gotten into a habit of giving it to my mom as a "gift" when we were swimming in the ocean. But what they didn't know was how much life resides in this drifting algae! Look closely in the photo above and you can spot a planehead filefish hiding in the algae (look bottom right-ish). Every single piece of Sargassum we looked at has a filefish (or several) associated with it. But the real fun was when some of the filefish thought we were the algae - they would swim next to us and then go limp and float along with us as they thought they blended in with a human. The real find of the day was a chunk of Sargassum that happened to have a Sargassum swimming crab in it. This cute little Portunid crab was feisty and either ready to fight us (at about an inch in width) or swim right onto us - which it did twice to my mother - latching onto her rash guard and sitting there. It was so fun and totally adorable!

Jay and I left West Palm Beach for a day to meet up with old friends in Vero Beach. Jim, Deb, and I worked together in Glacier Bay National Park, AK and our friendship will last a lifetime even if we rarely see each other now. We started our day at the botanical gardens and then left our rental car (key bit of information) at the gardens and drove in Jim and Deb's car around Vero to grab lunch and explore the coast. There was so much to catch up on that we didn't waste a single minute together.

Deb found out about this quirky little museum called the McLarty Treasure Museum that focused on displaying some questionable, some real, artifacts and information on the 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet that sank in a hurricane right off this beach. Modern treasure hunters still find gold and silver coins on the beach after big storms. We got a kick out of the whole thing when we learned that the "treasure" was actually a dowry. Yep....the Italian princess the Spanish king had married refused to consummate the marriage before getting her jewels. Since the treasure sank (and had on other occasions too) I'm left wondering if the poor king ever got laid?

 Old friends...... life is good

Oh - remember how I said that we left our rental car in the parking lot of the botanical gardens in Vero? Well, after we grabbed a beer with Jim and Deb we headed back to get the car and discovered the entrance to the parking lot was locked! Crap! We had no idea there was a gate there and we had no idea we wouldn't be able to get the car until the next day, according to a microscopic sign hanging on the gate that no one would ever see. Soooo we called the police, we yelled hoping to find staff at the gardens, we discussed options. Eventually we realized that Jim and Deb would have to drive us back to Palm Beach.....but not before Jay broke into the gardens to get into our car to grab my glasses (I had my contacts in). Here I am on the phone with my parents with Jay climbing back over the fence (which promptly slammed down on top of my heel bruising it so badly I still am not wearing anything but flip flops). Right after the break-in event, a tiny car pulled up and a really nice woman appeared asking us if our car was locked in the gate. Yes! Yes it was! Happens to be that she was on her way to dinner with friends and drove by and saw us sitting there.....she knew a car had been locked in and figured it was us. At this point the cops showed up, but they had no key and would have been no help. Soooooo praise the botanical garden gods, we got our car thanks to some seriously good luck and a super nice woman!

Jay and I also managed to get out for two dives off West Palm Beach. They were really interesting dives....we were too far north to be on a proper coral reef but we found the habitat and fishes to be fascinating. It had been a LONG time since I've been diving in the Atlantic and I realized that I had forgotten most of my Atlantic fish species. Yikes! Jay made this little video of our dives as I managed to  drop our already-in-need-of-replacement camera right before heading out on the dive. Lots of sharks. Beautiful Caribbean reef sharks. Small, but gorgeous. Sad thing was that every shark I saw had a fish hook or TWO in its mouth. One even had a fish hook in its side. Damn this massive human population and our greed.

Jay's feet and the view of the beach in front of the resort. The caution tape marks a sea turtle nest.

Not only were we together for the big 50th anniversary, but we were together for Henry and Jackson's 10th birthday on July 1st! WOW! The big request was for hamburgers so Christina found a great gourmet burger joint and we had a lively birthday party for those fantastic twins.

We all had to leave the next day, so after birthday cake and some great acting by Henry for evening entertainment, we headed to our rooms to pack up and prepare to say goodbye to swims in the Atlantic, white sandy beaches, and family. I hate saying goodbye to family. Jay and I dropped my parents off at the airport for their flight but we still had an entire day to kill in Ft. Lauderdale. Soooo what did we do? We found a cafe where a "cappuccino" came in a coffee mug with a plastic straw (Florida, what the heck!?) and discovered it was located next to the International Swimming Hall of Fame and a massive aquatic complex. So we swam!

I LOVED swimming in this 50 m Olympic-sized pool in the sun. It was so awesome to stretch out and not do flip turns all the time. I was one happy cookie. Jay even got in and swam laps with me, something he never does here in WA. It must have been the sun.

After the swim we checked out the International Swimming Hall of Fame. I am a swimmer after all eh? We had to see what this was all about. And hey, I met Mark Spitz at the insanely outdated museum.

No trip to Florida is complete without some Cuban food.

Florida pics are here: https://goo.gl/photos/ie8QNksxTpdxddGs7

And now we are in a totally different country - back in Indonesia! I've been meaning to post this funny video of a current dive that Jay and I did in Raja Ampat. The current was so fast you felt like you were flying and I opted to act like Superwoman in this video. It was SO fun!