Haha I Still Get a Spring Break

Ok after my long hiatus from the blog, here is the most recent update on my life.  As you all know thanks to my adorable postcards, I was in Florida for spring break last week.  Jillian and I planed down there on Thursday night.  It was -14 (non windchill) when we took off and 68 when we landed...just a minor difference.  My grandma picked us up and took us back to her house where my cousin, her 3 friends, and my aunt were already situated.  It was a little cramped in the two bedroom mobile home, but the good news was Jillian and I got the bedroom!  Everyone else crammed into the living room.

All the girls on Clearwater Beach

For the first few days, we went to various beaches.  One day we went to Clearwater which has really soft sand.  It was a little cool, but we persisted and laid out all day since it was our first day out of ice age Michigan.  At night, there are some fun tents with people selling stuff on the pier so we looked around those and some of the souvenir shops.  We also saw some street performers and that was pretty cool!

The guy jumped through this teeny hoop!

Basically every night we played games so that was fun!  I think I have an obsession with Mexican/Mystery/Marxican Train because I made people play it with me at least once a day.  Jillian had some sort of train super power because she won almost every game by a lot.  Another favorite nightly activity was shuffleboard!  I'm pretty good at it!  But sometimes I'm bad...

During some of the days we took bike rides.  One day we biked downtown and looked through the shops.  I've been in all of them lots of times so nothing was too exciting, but I always like looking at the chocolate wine and cute decorations and such.  Another day, we biked to Honeymoon Island.  I'm not really sure why it's called that, but it's just another beach that's close and easy to get to.  We even went in the ocean while we were there!  It was cold but refreshing.  A sad thing that happened though was I got really burnt.  I had to spray aloe with lidocaine on my back and legs for the rest of the trip.  I think I'm allergic to the sun :(

Sad Ashley

At night, we went back to Clearwater and went to this resort/nightclub/bar/live band stage thingy called Shephard's.  It was the only place we could go because two of Kenzie's (that's you Rachael!) friends were 19.  It was weird because they checked all our IDs and then the guy asked if we wanted to pay full price for cover and I was like uhh no?  So he made us pay 5 dollars instead of 7 so that's cool I guess.  There were lots of bachelor parties at the outside live band part.  They hung around us basically the entire night which was unfortunate because some of them were kinda boring, but they made up for making us listen to them by buying us drinks which were pretty pricey.  The inside club part included two 7/8 naked girls dancing on stage and lots of dancing.  There was also a very attractive bouncer who one of the girls in our group managed to exchange numbers with.

One of the highlights of the vacation was our trip to Busch Gardens.  Jillian's dad had free tickets so yay for not spending money! We went there on Tuesday which worked out great because there were no lines and the weather was perfect.  A weird thing that happened was right when we walked into the park, we ran into these girls who were on Kenzie's plane so they joined our wolf pack for the day.  Sadly, I don't like roller coasters so I was the mom a lot and held everyone's stuff while they went on.  I did go on the train and the cable cars though and then we finished the day off with the water rides and those were really fun and refreshing.

That night was Mardi Gras, so some of us went downtown.  Our intention was to play drag queen bingo, but since it was a special occasion, they didn't have it.  Luckily, it turns out that Mardi Gras is a pretty big deal in the little town of Dunedin, so we had fun anyways.  There was a parade and we managed to get some beads.  Then we talked to a few of the locals....one young guy who was really nice and telling us all the fun things to do and then another old man who was clearly high and crazy.  It was pretty fun just to see all the bizarre costumes and walk around the streets.

Mardi Gras friends

On Wednesday night, we went to this restaurant called Cody's which has peanuts you can throw on the floor and it was buy one get one free fajita night!  It was the 6 girls plus my grandma so we all paired up for our fajitas and she said she'd eat the leftovers.  Four of us also ordered buy one get one free margaritas.  Our intention was to each get one and split the cost.  However, our waitress interpreted it as us each wanting two (like we wanted to get wasted with my grandma??) and was really pissed when she had to throw away four margaritas.  Idk why she didn't just leave them with us at that point.  After dinner, we went to Derby Lanes, a dog race track.  We each made at least one bet, but sadly none of our dogs even placed.  Mine was called Jack's Tigress :)

Jack's Tigress: 8th Place! (out of 8)

Early Friday morning it was time for Jillian and I to return to the homeland.  The good news was that Bobby came up that day so at least I had something to look forward to.  We watched the Indiana game at Bdubs with some friendys and then had a game night where we played cranium and made playdoh!  Also, my phone went to the phone doctor and although I'm poor now, at least I don't have to screenshot all your snapchats and guess at the third answer for quizup!

Hope this makes up for my lack of bloggage in the last couple months :)  Miss you all!