My Caribbean Vacation - Day 15 - Lago Mar Day 3

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Also, HERE is my tour of the Carnival Victory


DAY 15 - LAGO MAR DAY 3 - Saturday Sept 14, 2013

I don't think I could sleep in on this vacation if I tried. And I tried.
I just couldn't do it.
I was up at 7:00AM - for no reason. I think Christina was up right after I was.

We sat on the balcony for a while that morning.
The sunrise above the palm trees was beautiful.
It looked like it was going to be another nice day. We felt lucky because John (our limo driver) told us it was cloudy and rainy in Ft Lauderdale and Miami almost every day we were gone on the cruise.
We were happy we had blue skies and sunshine the weekend we were there

 

We showered and dressed and got ready for a shopping day. 

We wanted to go to Las Olas Blvd. 

We heard we could walk around and shop, eat, and explore. Sounded like a good day to us, and we wanted to go outside of our resort and see some of Ft Lauderdale.

When we were ready, we went down to the hotel lobby to ask if they could call us a cab.

The bellman told us the hotel had a van they could use to take us anywhere we wanted to go. He said it would cost the same or less than a cab.

So he called the van driver, and they pulled the van around for us to get in.

The drive to Las Olas Blvd was only a few minutes.

While we drove, our van driver pointed out some things to us.

We had him drop us off at the far end of Las Olas Blvd, so we could walk back. We told him we would walk as far as we could, and we would call him if we got tired and needed a ride back. He gave us his card.

When he dropped us off, the first thing we saw was a Cheesecake Factory. Oh yum! 

One of my very favorites.

Of course we went in to have lunch there.

 

I have never had a bad meal at Cheesecake Factory. They give so much food there is never any room left for dessert.

I had really good chicken terriyaki. I think it was the best I have ever had.

After lunch, we walked down Las Olas Blvd.

 

We walked in and out of some shops.

It was a really nice day.

These were cupcake benches outside of the ice cream store. They were so cute!

We stopped in the ice cream shop and got bottles of water.


We walked toward the ocean. It was a pretty long walk and we were getting hot and tired.
By that time we were close enough to our hotel that we didn't want to call for a ride.

We walked across a draw bridge, and when we got to the highest part in the middle, the part we walked on looked like this.

The water was about 50 feet down, and we could see through the bridge all the way down.
It was kind of creepy and we got off the bridge as quick as we could.

Finally we made it to the beach:

We walked straight down to the water, and walked along the waters edge all the way to our hotel.

This area of the beach was a public beach. We couldn't believe how crowded it was. We were so glad Lago Mar had a stretch of private beach. I don't think we would have had a relaxing day if we were in the middle of all of these people.  

We saw a lot of roped off turtle areas. They must have layed eggs here

By the time we got back to the hotel it was about 4:30 in the afternoon. We had walked ALL DAY.
We were exhausted and hot.
We sat on the balcony for a long time cooling off and relaxing.

After I got home from my vacation I used Google Earth to measure our walk from The Cheesecake Factory to our hotel. We had walked 3.5 miles that day. A mile of it was on the beach.
No wonder we were exhausted!

We also noticed that Lago Mar was quite a bit more crowded today than it had been the last 2 days. A lot of people had come for the weekend.  There were also a lot of kids. It really was a great resort for families. They had a lot to do to entertain the kids.

I had a sudden craving for an ice cream cone, so we went down to the soda shop and got a cone.

It was really good, but now we were hungry for dinner.


Again we were too tired to care about looking for dinner. Originally we wanted to go out somewhere nice to eat. We just weren't up to it at all. We made it easy on ourselves and we walked back to the soda shop and got some food "to go".
She boxed up our food and we carried it back to our room.
We ate dinner on our balcony.
We drank our Sprite in wine glasses for no reason.
Our musician was back again, playing his tunes by the pool. We sat there on the balcony most of the evening and listened to him play music. What a nice treat!

Looking down from our balcony at the pool at night was way more beautiful than this picture shows.

It was a great evening.
Lago Mar was just awesome and I really really loved it there. I will definitely go back there again.
Definitely.

At some point that night we went out and found the hotel business center. We used our room key to get in and we printed our boarding passes for the airplane the next day.

When the music was over, around 10, we went in and watched TV in our bedroom while we packed our stuff. Since we had only been there a few days, it didn't take long for us to pack up.

We ended our last night of vacation watching TV from our beds before we fell asleep. 

The next day was time to go home................my awesome vacation was over.

I really had a wonderful time. The whole thing was good. It rained a little, but it really wasn't bad at all. It sure could have been worse! All of my planning and saving and waiting for this vacation was so worth it. It was really a vacation of a lifetime, and I felt lucky I got to do this.

As nice as this trip was, after 15 days I was also getting pretty homesick. I missed my Sweetheart. I missed home.

DAY 16 is HERE!