Category Archives: Family Life

We didn’t make breakfast this morning and instead went to Disney Springs and took the water taxi to Port Orleans and had beignets and lunch. Although we were disappointed they no longer have Stephanie’s favorite the Po’ Boy shrimp sandwich.

Later in the day we drove over to Merritt Island on the east coast and drove through the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. It was a very interesting and we enjoyed the two hour trek in the car around the gravel roads of the park.

After visiting the refuge we went and visited Marcus Hamilton’s Grandfather, who Stephanie stayed with a couple of days until Nikki and I made it to Florida on Saturday. We had a quick Jimmy John’s dinner while listening to his life stories and then went out and watched the night launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 Dragon launch of CRS-27 and the recovery of the booster out at sea. Although our iPhone cameras could not capture the spectacular display, I found a video of the same launch that better captures what we witnessed. The 2:35 mark of the video shows the separation of the rocket boosters.

We got back to the Condo around 10:00 and then very unusual for Nikki and I we stayed up with Stephanie, Mom and Dad and continued talking and telling stories until shortly after midnight.

Stephanie took Ryan to the airport to catch her flight that was scheduled for 10:!5 this morning. Stephanie bought Crumbl cookies on her way back and cut them up and shared them with everyone. They were delicious.

We had a few thunderstorms roll through. Mom, Dad and Stephanie were outside int he hot tub when one of them came through, but they were able to get out and back into tower 6 without any issues.

Stephanie, Nikki and I went to the Florida Catus Inc. and Nikki and Stephanie picked out some cacti to bring home. Stephanie bought 3 Desert Rose which are expected to flower. On our way there we ran into another thunderstorm and has to use the hazard lights due to such low visibility. Luckily all the storms only last about 10-15 minutes.

Dad was feeling better and not getting the shocks in his heels and was feeling much better.

Mom got a call from the front desk requesting we move their SUV from the handicap parking close to the building as they were going to close that area off due to construction. When I went to move the car there was a bunch of debris, like stucco pieces, some as big as marbles all over their car. I ended parking in the handicap spaces in the parking garage for the night.

Mom made dinner with sausage, shrimp and corn and it was wonderful. Afterwards we played cards until it was dark and then watched fireworks, which were much better than Saturday’s fireworks before sitting around and chatting for a short period of time before bed.

We arrived in Orlando after a long drive and picking up Stephanie and Ryan at the airport car rental near the Orlando airport on our way to my parents condo. Stephanie and Ryan arrived earlier and had rented a car up until we picked them up. We showed up at Bonnet Creek and my parents had the absolute best condo on the entire property. The view from the 19th floor was amazing.

We ended up going to Disney Springs with Stephanie and Ryan to shop for a swimsuit for Nikki. We ended up taking our time and enjoying the shops. Later that evening we watched fireworks from Universal Studios and Epcot from the balcony.

I was awoken at 2:00am with from a water alarm in the basement that triggers an alert to my phone. At first I thought it was an amber alert and didn’t check. Another alarm was sent to my phone around 6:00am, so I had to call Jonny to check the basement for flooding. Luckily the water barely made it out of the sump and there was no flooding damage. Jonny did send me a picture from our house that morning as we did get a couple inches of snow.

Sunday we ended up just hanging out and enjoying the weather after Nikki and I got up early to beat the crowds and grocery shop at the local Publix. The weather was very warm with a high of 85, but it was breezy and Nikki and I didn’t expose ourselves to too much sun the first day. We made steaks, mashed potatos and salad for dinner and it was delicious. Afterwards we went for some ice cream at Scoops located here on the resort property. We then had our picture taken as Ryan was leaving the next morning to go back to Cincinnati.

Jonny completed his entire senior year remotely due to the pandemic and he was able to save himself a lot of money by not living on campus. He also elected to not attend the graduation in person. He completed his degree in Environmental Studies and got a part time job with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division. He is hoping to be able to get something full time later on with ODNR. He is doing a lot of work on the water with the Division of Wildlife and enjoys being out in the field helping Ohio determine quantity and quality of different aquatic wildlife.

Nikki’s brother and family moved to Granville in October. We are looking forward to spending time with family that is also careful during this pandemic. We are excited to have family close by that we can include in our inner circle and feel safe around as they are practicing responsible actions to keep their family from getting Covid and the potential unknown long term effects that have started to show up in a large percentage of people that have gotten the virus even if they only showed mild symptoms

I left for Florida on the 29th of February early in the afternoon and made it to Florida around midnight. I was tired and pulled into a rest area and slept for a few hours until I got cold around 4:30 am. I then drove the rest of the way to Orlando met Mom and Dad and helped them move out of the condo at building 5 in Bonnet Creek to Building 6. Later that morning, my Dad and I left to drive almost an hour away to pick up Stephanie and Marcus. They were pretty much on time and they only had carry on items so there wasn’t a lot of hassle there. We enjoyed the sun and the pools at the resort as well as took a half day trip and went swimming with the manatees up in Crystal River. Stephanie took us to a couple of greenhouses where she picked out some pretty little cactus that my parents drove home for her. We did a bunch of free things around the Disney area, but didn’t want to visit any of the parks. They have a new gondola system that were able to figure out and rode on those several times as part of the free transportation around the parks. We also took the boat taxis again from Disney Springs.

I had the privilege to attend the Kubernetes Conference held in San Diego, California this year. We were able to get out to San Diego the morning before the conference began and were able to explore San Diego a bit. We visited the Midway Museum, which is an aircraft carrier built in the late 1940’s and was in service for 50 years until the late 1990’s. I would recommend it and found it very interesting and giving you an idea of what living on one of these massive ships is like.

KubeCon is a conference held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation located at the San Diego Conference Center. It’s a combination of Education and Collaboration on cloud development mostly based around Kubernetes Container Management. It was very informative and I was able to meet many vendors and attend a dozen seminars.

It looked like it was going to rain on us from the very beginning. We got on 275 heading north and exited on 28 east. We had some heavy traffic for about 5 miles and then traffic thinned out. We rode 28 into Blanchester and fueled up there. We rode on 28 a few more miles and took 68 north east heading into Wilmington. In Wilmington we connected to 22 east towards Lancaster. We got lunch in Lancaster and then completed the 800 mile trip without getting wet as we were quite a ways ahead of the heavy rain. We ran into some mist a couple of times but not enough to get us wet.

Overall, it was another fun trip, no one broke down, although we had a few worries on Day 3 and no one was hurt, although a bike and helmet got some minor scratches on Day 1.

It rained all morning in Louisville and we book a tour of the Michter’s Fort Nelson Distillery in Louisville.  After the tour is was still raining and got lunch close by and then got a lyft back to the hotel where we started packing and putting rain gear on as it finally stopped raining.  We were heading in the direction the rain went, so we slowly packed the bikes and got ready to leave Louisville.  We missed a turn in Louisville and got about 3-4 miles off track.  The first time of the trip.  We regrouped and found a road that would lead us back to 42 while taking us right along the southern bank of the Ohio river.  We caught 42 and took that east.  We caught up with the rain around Warsaw and decided we needed a break off the bikes anyway while allowing the weather to get ahead of us again.  After a short while longer Deb’s bike stalled a couple of times as we slowed down. We did a quick check of her bike and couldn’t recreate the issue and luckily she didn’t experience it after it did it twice to her within about 15 miles. We did catch the rain again in Florence just before we connected with 25.  Before we got to 275 the rain picked up quite a bit, but it was also getting dark and we needed to find out hotel.  We took 275 at about 55-60 MPH in the heavy rain as traffic worked their way around us.   We got to the hotel around 9 located just north east of Cinicinnati.

We took 127 South out of Frankfort until we caught 62 West around Lawrenceburg.  62 was a really nice ride through rolling hills and winding curves.  We caught 53 South and it was more hills and curves.  We got on 555 South and that was a nice wide state highway and eventually turned in 55 South from Springfield into Lebanon.  We then his 68 West out of Lebanon and stayed on 68 to Geensburg where we fueled up.  We backtracked a mile to catch 61 north for a few miles to catch 88 West.  88 West full of rolling hills and curves and we caught 436 West to 218 West to 31E South.  We turned west on 70 and rode that all the way to Cave City and Mammoth Cave National Park.

We booked the 12:45 tour of the cave which lasted 2 hours and then got a bite to eat back in Cave city.  It started pouring and it looked like there was no way out of riding through it so we got on our first interstate of the trip and rode I-65 up to Louisville where we spent the night.  Luckily we passed out of rain around Elizabethtown and were able to stay ahead of the north heading front the rest of the way to Louisville.