Maremy's Blog

Day 5 was New Year's Eve.

The day started off in the usual way: breakfast on the lanai and a morning run. I actually went over to Starbucks in the hopes of getting a coffee over there but when I got there, their computer systems were down (their power was not out) and apparently, this means they cannot sell anything. I find it hard to believe a chain like Starbucks does not have a back-up plan for when something like this happens. Anyway, on to better things...

Our plan for the day was to go to a winery in Plant City and than over to Downtown Disney.

The winery is called Keel & Curley. If you're interested, you can check out there website here. They are famous for blueberry wine. For $3.00, I was able to sample six wines. I sampled the dry blueberry wine, a blackberry/raspberry wine, keylime wine, a Cabernet Sauvingnon, and a Merlot. All of them were EXCELLENT. I ended up buying two bottles of the dry blueberry wine (1 for me and 1 for Marty & Karen), and a bottle each of the Cabernet and the Merlot. I'm definitely going to go back to the winery next we're in Florida. Besides the wine, I also bought a wine glass.

Afterwards, it was one to Downtown Disney. I haven't been to Downtown Disney in a few years and it had changed quite a bit. Jeremy took some videos while we were there and hopefully he'll have it posted to the YouTube soon (my very talented fiance is in the midst of editing it all together). We spent the afternoon there, looking in all the different shops. It had changed so much since the last time I was there! There are lots of cool shops there: Virgin Megastore (we bought some calendars here), candy stores, cool glassware stores, an Irish pub, a lego store and MANY others. Besides the calendars, I also ended up coming home with some tea, chocolate covered expresso beans and a new mug (I collect mugs).

We were back to Marty & Karen's around 6:30. Karen staggered dinner and we had it in stages so we'd all make it to midnight. We started dinner around 7:30 and were finished by about 10:30 or so. To start, we had a salad. The main course Karen & I had was grilled salmon and tuna with beans and mashed califlower. Marty & Jeremy had steak instead of fish (plus the beans and califlower). Desert was a lemon cake with some fruit. We also had hot chocolate after dinner. It was all DELICIOUS!

We managed to make it to midnight but we struggled. All of us were really tired since we'd started our day early.

It was a very happy new year for all of us though!