Seasons Change

Obviously I don’t post much here anymore, but I thought it was about time for an update on what our family has been up to for the past year. We are in a new, “non RVing” season of life right now. We moved to Orlando a year ago this month so that our oldest son could get a job and start college. It has been an adjustment living in one place, but it has been good.

We live very close to Universal Studios so we go there quite often. Jake worked a seasonal job there in the fall at Halloween Horror Nights, but now he is just focusing on school. Chris currently works at Universal and can walk to work, which is convenient.

The thing about living in a vacation spot is we get lots of visitors, which I love! Our first visitors were my parents and we had so much fun showing them around the Universal theme parks.

My sister and brother-in-law also visited a few times during the year.

My sister had an exciting year with her new TV show “These Stones” which began streaming on Up Faith & Family. You can find details to watch it here: https://my.upfaithandfamily.com/these-stones. We got to watch episode 2 while they were visiting in September and it was so cool to have one of the actresses, Denise Gossett watch it with us. Later we walked over to City Walk flaunting our These Stones merch.

We also enjoyed a few visits from the Norstrem and Reyes families. We miss parking our RV home at the Norstrem ranch, but I’m happy we still get to visit each other often. In addition, we now live closer to the Reyes’s so we get to see them more often than we used to.

Now that we’re not RVing anymore, my new favorite way to travel is cruising. We went on 4 cruises since moving to Orlando. That’s one nice thing about living in central FL, the close proximity to several different cruise ports.

In May we cruised on Wonder of the Seas to Cozumel, Roatan and Costa Maya. Our favorite excursions were visiting the sloths in Roatan and swimming with dolphins in Cozumel. Aren’t the sloths adorable?!

We cruised on Utopia of the Seas in August just before Jake started college, then Chris & I cruised on Allure of the Seas in October to celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary. We had fun with the 70s theme night and dressed up as hippies.

Lastly in November I cruised on Celebrity Reflection with the my friend Michele and the Cruise Chics Travel Club. This was out of my comfort zone because I’m not usually a fan of going on trips with just ladies, but I ended up having a really great time. Michele & I had a blast at the silent disco!

In August my first baby who grew up way too fast started school at University of Central Florida. It’s so weird to think he’s already in college when it seems I just started homeschooling him yesterday. Where did the time go? He is studying Mechanical Engineering and had a great first semester. He received the FL Bright Futures scholarship which covers his tuition, and we are so proud of him.

I wasn’t sure how I would like settling down in one place because I loved RVing fulltime so much! I miss the adventure of it all, but I can honestly say I’m happy where we are now. I’ll be forever grateful for the 9 years that we were blessed to travel and see this beautiful country as well as some amazing places in Canada. The memories we made on the road are definitely priceless.

So like the title of this post says, seasons do change. Before I end this post I have to share the saddest part of our year. Our precious Miss Kitty, aka Fat Cat passed away in December. She was the best traveling cat. She enjoyed the adventure of going to new places just as much as the rest of us did. She must be one of the most well traveled cats; she visited 46 states and 5 Canadian provinces.

We found out just after Thanksgiving that she had cancer. She had stopped eating and within a couple of weeks we knew it was time to let her go. It was heartbreaking! On December 12, 2024 we said goodbye and will miss her forever. She was 13.

Thank you for following along with us all of these years.