Life Is An Education..

..So is vacation! Another perk of homeschooling, we can go on vacation WHENEVER! As stated in the blog below, this was our first family vacation in probably 5 years or so. Here are a few of our highlights. Today, I will take you on a tour of two of our highlights! The Hotel (my kids' favorite part of any getaway) and The Food!!

The Comfort Suites in Miami was very nice. It was clean and it had beds...that is all I cared about. My boys, however, were in Heaven. #1 We all slept together in one room! #2 We all went to sleep at the same time! #3 It had a hot tub! Nice!

This picture above was my humble attempt at setting my camera for automatic time delay! Really, here we are no long the Engels...we are the Bucketts. (You know, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!)

It cracks me up that we go on vacation to get away from the normal routine of life. Then we get to our hotel and unpack our bags in dressers, set up the kitchen like at home, and bring as much stuff as we can to remind us of what we just left! Hmmm? What is wrong with us!? Here is Kyle with his Webkinz.


The Hotel was one of our children's highlights. The food was one of ours. We miss the international food of New Jersey/New York. Where we live in Florida, we can get good seafood, but the we miss all the different cultural experiences we had living in the melting pot of the North East. So while in Miami we knew we could probably find good authentic Spanish, Cuban or even El Salvadorian food. Boy, were we right!

Above is a picture of where we got some delicious take out. Of course, the language barrier was an issue. So somehow we ended up purchasing WAY TOO much food.

When we lived in New Jersey we lived in a two family house. Our neighbors downstairs went to our church, they were close friends. The wife was from El Salvador and the husband from Costa Rica. OH MY GOODNESS...the smells coming from downstairs was a little too much for this "pregnant-with-twins" Mom and so Ana began to cook for me! Pupusas (homemade) and all kids of amazing food.

Here are some of our delicious delicacies.

OK, so I had to throw this picture in here. My husband worked for Starbucks for 10 years or so. Hence, we became what some might call...coffee snobs. I don't know why people would say such a thing. We just love good quality, bold coffee! So we are so grateful that these places are everywhere...we could not handle the hotel's "dirty water" coffee! So we must have visited this particular place (or one's just like it)...ummm...10 times in the four days we were in Miami and the nearby area!


Except when we visited here. Because here we could get authentic Cafe con leche! Be still my heart! Again, another friend of ours from college, Hendor, originally from Cuba introduced us to cafe con leche years ago. We can make it on our own, but seldom do we ever do that!


Apparently this place is a chain, because we another one driving home from Miami!

This is Kyle (our most picky eater) eating a Yucca Stick! (It wasn't yucka...it was yummo!) We were so proud!

Churrasco Carretero with chimi-churri sauce, plantains and moros rice.

This is a very sleepy me on our first night in Miami adding the cafe to my leche!

So this was the first highlight of our journey...stay tuned for the Miami Metro Zoo and South Beach!