Tampa

We arrived safely in Tampa on Saturday. It was very hard to say good-bye to Jim and Leslie but we will see them in Tampa by the middle of this week. Leslie had the kids busy making Christmas ornaments for our Christmas tree and our time at Henderson State Park. We also were fortunate enough to meet up with Andy and Jennifer and their 3 kids (our friends from Miami) as they were in Orlando for the Thanksgiving weekend. We ended up having lunch together.

We went to the CRC in Tampa here on Sunday morning and I ran into one of my parents' dear old friends (Annie Struik) from Hamilton. It was nice to see a familiar face. I taught one of her grand daughters while I was in Hamilton as well.

Today we had school....we will be doing that everyday this week to make up for lost time while at Disney World. After school we headed down to the Busch Gardens. The kids had a great time. Matthew was thrilled that he went on his first loop-de-loop roller coaster called the Scorpion. There was also an old wooden roller coaster that we went on. Boy, I had forgotten how rough and noisy those are compared to the new ones. Of course there were the huge coaster that scare ya half to death....we went on all those too. Rachel (much to her chagrin) and Matthew were too short for most of those. It was nice not to be fighting crowds and waiting in line all day. We had very short waits if any at all. We also took a train through the African part of the park and saw a baby rhino, 2 baby giraffes ( Matthew didn't believe they were babies, they were over 6ft. tall) and 2 baby zebras. There were also chimps and gorillas in another section of the park. One of the gorillas also had a baby. It was interesting to watch her handle the baby, but she wasn't too gentle.

We heard that Victoria is basically shut down because of all the snow. Reminds us of sitting in the dark with no power waiting for trees to come smashing into our old house in the Highlands. Friends and family reading in Canada we want you to know the weather update for Tampa is 83F....27C.

We have wifi for the next 10 days so in between shovelling your driveways and deicing your sidewalk send us an email....we would love to hear from you. taekema@protoproduction.com bye for now