Jacksonville Florida

     We're ready for the "best summer ever"! Last week of July is our big vacation every year because my daughter, Abby, and I celebrates our birthday. This year, we're going on a cruise again. So we packed our bags and after 18 hours of drive, we finally reached Jacksonville Florida. This is where our port will be but we decided to stay in town for a couple of days before our cruise.

     So day 1, we got to our hotel at almost 3pm. After eating late lunch, we decided to start our fun by heading to Jacksonville Beach. This was about 10 mins drive from our hotel and closer to downtown. There's plenty of free parking and the boardwalk to the beach was next to it. The weather was perfect, the beach was not so crowded, the place was clean and there were lots of hotel. A "must bring" when you go to the east coast beach is a boogie board. The waves were just right that kids had so much fun! We stayed there until almost 9pm. And yes, we still went swimming in our hotel for another hour.

     

     Day 2, in the morning we went to check out the downtown. We drove to Jacksonville Landing where there's shops and restaurants. Of course, the first restaurant I saw was Chicago Pizza. What are the odds!

But we didn't eat there, instead, we went to Cinco de Mayo mexican restaurant. Surprised? Huh!

     Then we strolled along the riverwalk and took the water taxi for a quick tour. Roundtrip fare $7/adult and $5/kid. You can actually go down to 3 different places if you want to try the other restaurants but we decided to just stay in the boat and enjoy the tour. We saw the skyline view of Jacksonville and it was beautiful. The best part of it was that we saw several dolphins swimming. Awesome!

     We went to Immaculate Conception church afterwards. It's a catholic church closest to Jacksonville Landing. Did you know that everytime you go to a new church that you can make 3 wishes? There was a mass but its in spanish so we didn't stay long, Oh one more thing, it was the first time I've seen a credit card machine to make a donation to church. Cool!

     In the afternoon, we went to Atlantic beach. It's the same shoreline as Jacksonville beach but up north and there's more residential houses in here. Again we enjoyed boogie boarding, making sand castles, and strolling along the shore. The white sands were so soft and there's lots of sea shells and some sort of jelly thing that the kids saw for the first time. It was such a nice day!

    I must say, we really had a blast at the beach! This is one thing that our family can pretty much do every single day and will never get tired of! PRICELESS!!!

    Until next time! We'll be heading on our 5 day cruise to Bahamas! Happy birthday to me and Abby!

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