Boca

We are lucky enough to live in a place that is located near quite a few beaches that are less than ten minutes from our house. We really love our Ft. Lauderdale beach but every once in a while Tyler and I really feel like getting crazy, we head out to another part of Florida and see what it has to offer. Tyler mentioned going to Boca Raton and immediately I thought of this:

Not that there is anything wrong with that. To be honest with you, I would rather spend time with my grandparents than almost anyone else in the world but when talking about having a super fun, exciting new adventure, Boca didn't seem like the place to be. However, Tyler convinced me when he showed me this place online:

Ok so it doesn't look like much from the sign but... they promised us that if we went there, we would see these:

And these:

Have I mentioned how badly I want to see a Manatee while we live here? I really really do. Anyway, supposedly this place has great snorkeling so we decided to head North 25 miles and check it out. When we got to the park though... we found this:

 

Can you see that sign? It says that to park there it's $18. If we were going to be there all day, we could have justified paying that but we didn't get there until after 4:00 in the afternoon. $18 for a couple hours on the beach? Maybe we are super cheap but we just couldn't do that when there are about a million other beaches around that are free.

We ended up finding a FREE parking lot about a mile down the road from here and figured that was the beach for us.

Isn't is gorgeous? And don't worry, it only rained on us for a second. That's one of the great things about South Florida... although it rains a lot, it's always only for about fifteen minutes until there are clear blue skies again. Oh and there are a lot of these, which is always a bonus:

and by "these", I don't mean the handsome boys at the bottom of the picture, I mean the rainbow behind them. See the big hole at my boys' feet? It is Owen's favorite thing to do when we go to the beach. Tyler helps him dig:

and then Owen does this:

I wanted to get a cute picture with my son playing in the water but as you can see from the picture below, he didn't really want to hang with me and look at the camera. He wanted to go back to play in the sand with his dad.

Oh well, we did manage to get som cute pics of the little bugger while we were there. Do you guys get sick of lone pictures of Owen? I just can't help posting them. I love this little dude:

 

That's him after he just took in a handful of sand. Yummy... but not really. We left the beach soon after and washed it down with this:

Mmmmmm... nothing better than pizza followed by some coconut ice cream.

Needless to say, I didn't get to see either thing I was expecting to see in Boca (besides one elderly woman who was walking down the beach in a see through white outfit). Next time we head that way, we'll be prepared to pay an $18 parking fee, but we better leave having seen some manatees.