Shangri La and Chateau de Busay

We had breakfast at the Acqua coffeeshop at Shang. It was beautiful! While dining, we had a view of the ocean through ceiling-to-floor glass windows. We had nice, cushy, leathery chairs, and the whole restaurant was decorated in white, dark brown and matte chrome. Very classy, very elegant. There was a lot less people at Acqua than at Tides, so that was nice. We had another leisurely breakfast; we were going to spend the entire morning at the pool and the beach.

After lathering on some major sunblock lotion, we all jumped into the pool and spent several hours there. We rented a couple of floating rafts and the girls and Japa had fun racing and doing some relays on them. Even the lifeguards were laughing at their antics! hehehe.

No pictures to share of those yet, because I haven't downloaded them to my laptop yet. Even Ranger joined in the fun, with me as his partner. He wouldn't lie down completely on the rafts, preferring to have part of his legs submerged in the water. But when I told him we were going to join in the races, he gamely lay on his tummy and even paddled a bit with his short little arms to help Mama go faster during the race! It was so cute! :)

After the pool, we hit the beach for a little bit. The sand was powdery soft, and white. According to Bang it was fake sand, i.e., probably dumped there to make the Shang's beach more appealing. But it was very very nice and pretty. There were some coves by the beach, but we hung out where there was a wide expanse of sand and water....and a little bit of shade.

The kids, especially Rogan, enjoyed playing in the sand. There were sand castles, sand mountains, and sand fights.

We went back to the Beach House for lunch at 3 pm. All the kids were ravenous as they practically scarfed down their food!

For dinner, we went to the restaurant owned by Bang's family, the Chateau de Busay. When we arrived, we had just enough time to make use of the natural light for taking photos of the restaurant. Between Elizza, Japa, Rodney and myself, I'm sure we got enough good photos for the website, the menu, and other marketing materials for Chateau. I don't know how my lowly point-and-shoot (semi-DSLR, I think, hehe) camera shots will compare to the others' humongous DSLRs (A Sony A-100, Nikon D50 and a Rebel), but I have Photoshop to help me! Hehehe :)

Ok, couldn't resist not having any photos in this post...I just downloaded our beach photos from my camera. Note to self: need to get other photos from Japa, Elizza and Rod.

There. Just a few photos from the beach. I'm reserving most of the shots for scrapping obviously! :)

{Other Schtuff}

This has been an awesome vacation! Aside from the constant presence of an internet connection (I didn't want to pay for it at the hotel), it was very relaxing, and definitely some quality time spent with the entire family. We are going to have to do this again sometime soon, and not wait for the kids' summer vacation to do it either.

I was browsing through my list of daily-blogs-to-read, and I found a ton of links for great vacation places at Heather Ann Melzer's blog. Definitely a must-read, if you want some reviews for places to stay in Orlando. I'm going to be clicking those links and exploring a lot sometime in the next few days.

Someone also sent me a link to visit Branson Missouri. Looks like a lot of fun, and something to discover, for sure. I am totally intrigued by their replica of the Titanic, the Branson balloon (maybe it's a hot air balloon?) and the Branson scenic railroad. They are going to be celebrating their 10th anniversary this summer and are going all out to attract visitors. I'm not sure how far Missouri is from Pennsylvania (when we go in July), but it's a place worth looking into.

TTFN!