Sunday, December 14, 2008

Santa Eating Dinner

I went to see my niece Morgan and nephew Will in their Christmas program at church and then we all got together to celebrate my mom's birthday. We had a great time and actually had a surprise visit from Santa. He had stopped off to have dinner. You can see below that Morgan was glad to see him. By the way she was an angel in the Christmas program.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Happy Birthday Doug!!!

We celebrated Doug's birthday yesterday with friends. We watched football, tailgated and then went out for a night of festivities. One of our favorite bands "Fly-by-Radio" was playing at Skybar so we went and listened to them for a while.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Football

I went to watch my nephew Cole play football this weekend. They beat the other team 18 - 13. He plays tackle on both offense and defense and does an outstanding job. There were a couple of times when he almost sacked the quarterback. Cole is giving homage to his aunt kat with his jersey number, even though he doesn't know it. That was the year I was born.


Cole and his dad, Stephen(my brother).

Campfire Girl Outing

Well, I got the pleasure of escorting my 5 year old neice Morgan on her first Camp Fire Outing. Her group is called the Honeybees. We visited Desoto Caverns in Childersburg, AL a couple of weekends ago.

It's been years since I have been and it's changed alot. They have all sorts of activites for kids to enjoy. Everything from water balloon battles, mazes, slip and slides, bathtub shaped go carts and several other things. Here's the link if you are interested. http://desotocavernspark.com/

Morgan is on the far left.


Here's the honeybee's all in yellow!





Morgan getting ready for battle in the air gun cage. There were foam balls they loaded into the air gun and shot at their opponents that were about 10 feet away. She takes after her aunt kat and was pretty competitive. She was really excited when she hit all of the girls.

This was one of the many water attractions they had. I'm sure they are closed now with the weather getting cooler.



Sunday, June 29, 2008

The Bentley's go to St.Lucia!


The following post is full of pictures from our trip to St. Lucia. It's only half of our pictures and we joked and said we didn't take as many pictures as we normally do.

We had a great relaxing vacation that was full of sunny days, long days on the beach reading and watching the days go by.

Hope you enjoy them.

This is the view of the Petit Piton from our balcony, along with the tip top of the Gros Piton on the right.


This is the view we had towards the beach.


While at the resort we took a tour of an old sugar cane plantation right around the bend at Anse Mamim. It had a very interesting history ranging from it being a sugar cane plantation worked by slaves to a fruit plantation after slavery was abolished. It now is being utlilized for mountain bike trials, historical tours and is protected by historical foundations.



This is myself and Meno our very knowledgeable guide. He is showing us the inside of a cocoa pod and how the beans are a light purple before they are processed. He was a wealth of knowledge not only of the history of the plantation but also the plants and herbs in the area.


He was raised by his grandmother that was an herbologist and she passed down all of her wisdom to him that he now shares with guest staying at Anse Chastanet.

This is a picture of the bolier room. They has 6 of these large pots (3 on each side) that were usded to heat the molasses. 3 of them are being used throughout the resort as grills.


View towards the back of the boiler room. You may can see the ripe mangos that are covering the ground.


This is a picture from the ocean looking at our resort. The rooms at the very tip top and to the right are the new Jade Mountain.

This was our room complete with mosquito net and yellow lights. We did not have air conditioning so the net was a necessity. Every night they did a turn down service and lit a citronella coil and set up the net. The yellow lights took some getting used to since they were also in the bathroom. Myself on our balcony in front of the Pitons.

Doug on our balcony

Tree Top Restaurant

They had these elaborate wood carvings throughout the restort. Here are just a few.

This is the entrance to the hotel. This is where the cabs/vans would pull up to let you out.

These were some of the many beautiful flowers that we hand around our room.

This colorful guy was having a little lunch on a tree outside our room. His colors were so vibrant that I couldn't resist getting his picture.

The next several photos are of the beach area.

This was the resorts sailboat.

Doug and I taking it easy in one of the many hammocks on the beach.



This was a view from the beach up towards the Tree Top Restaurant. This helps put into perspective why we had over 100 steps to and from the beach.










The sunset as viewed from our chairs on the beach. The pole in the center of the picture are the torches they put out so the shoreline is softly lit after dark.




Us at dinner one night. Overall the food was okay. Since it is such an adventure to get to the resort because of the roads, we didn't venture out for dinner anywhere else. We had a total of 3 restaurants to pick from with 2 of them being on the beach.








I wanted to include this picture to point our the marine reserve that we had at our disposal for snorkeling and scuba diving if we wanted. You might be able to see the white dots to the right of the picture depicting the boundaries that kept out boats.


Although this was a very cool area to see alot of different type of coral we saw some of the most interesting marine life snorkeling right off the beach. While there we saw 2 octopi, sting ray, an assortment of fish and an eel. We also encountered a few jelly fish, but were never stung.


This is looking down the beach from the beach bar/restaurnat.








Old cannon and wheel.

These are the bottom of the stairs at the beach. On the left you'll see Dave one the many beach attendants we have privey to. They were all nice and brought us "happiness' most days. "Happiness" was a chilled peppermint hand towel and a sprayer bottle filled with water and peppermint. They would offer the towel and then spray you down. Usually they came around when it was especially hot and it was always welcome.

They had lots of potted plants throughout the resort and most all of them appeared to be handmade terracotta pots with faces on them. They were very neat and added a bit of charm to the areas.