Key West

Key West was our first stop on the cruise. We had decided that this would be the one "Shantel and James" day since we had never been there before. It also helped that the ship did have a service that would watch Macen all day while we were in port.

This is the little island just off the western tip of Key West. Check out how blue the water is and the cotton candy clouds in the sky, sure beats the 40 degrees and overcast that we left behind in Kansas City the day before.

A picture of me at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville in Key West. Shantel and I both enjoyed a Cheeseburger in Paradise, yes they came with lettuce, tomato, Heinz 57, french fried potatoes and a big kosher pickle, we both skipped the cold draught beer, I had loaded landshark lager (if you don't know what that is I'll introduce you to it at our next island party) and Shantel had a big margarita, called of course "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere". I can already feel the cruise weight piling on.

The obligatory picture at the Hard Rock Cafe, where we enjoyed a beer in the souvenir pilsner glasses and soaked in the atmosphere, This is the last glass from the states I'll add to my collection for awhile, I can't wait to hit the European Hard Rock Cafe's.

Believe it or not that house used to be government housing for the old Navy base at Key West. Nowadays it goes for $6-8 million on the real estate market. You don't get government housing like that anymore, at least in the Army anyway, and I'm pretty sure the rest of the services don't either.

A picture of the ship that we cruised on, the Carnival Imagination, believe it or not it's one of the smaller ships in the Carnival fleet, small doesn't mean boring though, it had plenty of ammenities to keep us occupied for the 4 days we were on board.

The Cruise That Almost Never Was

OK I was going to call this post "The Vacation That Almost Never Was", Shantel informed me though that no matter what happened, how many planes we missed or if we missed the ship, she was still getting a vacation and we were going to the beach, hence the new title and now for the story.

We left our house at 5am to make it to the Kansas City Airport so we would be on time for our 7 am flight. We had no issues getting our bags checked and making it through the long line at the security checkpoint prior to flight time. The plane pulled away from the jetway and was getting ready to take off when suddenly the engines shut down and the Captain announced a 50 minute ground delay due to bad weather in Atlanta, OK we had an hour between flights in Atlanta so this shouldn't be a big deal.

Well it became a big deal. Delta didn't hold our connecting flight for an hour, only about 20 minutes and we just missed it. The flight attendant had assured us that Delta would rebook us on the next flight, once again not quite true, we had to do that ourselves and since everyone else had missed the earlier flight too we had to go standby. I let the ticket counter clerk know that I had paid for three seats but we were willing to put Macen on our laps if it got us on the plane. That was the key to getting us on the plane as we were the last three passengers on the plane and there definitely wasn't a seat for Macen .

The whole time we were waiting though I was working Carnival's travel hot line letting them know what was going on and they told me that there were a lot of ship's passengers with that issue and that we just needed to hop in a cab and get to the pier as quickly as possible even if that meant leaving our luggage behind, because the ship was still going to sail at 4pm. I even searched the internet for resorts in Key West, Miami, and Orlando just to ensure that I knew what the driving distances were and what our options were so we would get our vacation. When our plane did leave Atlanta it was about 2:45pm. This is going to be close.

We landed in Miami at 3:50pm got right off the plane, left the luggage and ran for the taxi line and jumped in to the first taxi that would take us to the port. Luckily it was only about a 20 minute drive to the pier. Bottom line we made the ship but once again we were the last three on the ship as I walked on with the hotel director and the chief of security. We were going to get our cruise after all!! Yeah.

What about our luggage, you ask? We left it at the airport and started working with both Delta and Carnival who both went out of their way to make sure the luggage met us at Key West. Luckily for us we all brough swim suits with us in our carry on bags, which was great for bumming around on the ship until our luggage showed up in Key West.

Here are some random pictures from the week:
Macen was promised the pool every day while we were on vacation and he reminded us constantly, "Go to pool!!" was a favorite mantra of his right up with there with "Chocolate milk!!" and the varation on the pool theme "Go to beach!!"

As you can tell Macen isn't the only one who enjoyed the pool, I still like the water slides and this ship had a really cool twisty water slide and then a side by side racer slide in a splash park on the rear deck of the ship. We spent most of our time there. Macen even tried to go down the racer slide but he was too short. The kid was really angry about that, maybe next time buddy!

Boat drinks!!!!!!! Literally made to look like a Carnival smoke stack funnel and when you're done drinking, clean it out and use it as a piggy bank for the kids, marketing genius!! We might of had a few too many mojitos this day and gotten a little too much sun, but fun was had by all.

Macen posing with the towel animals that our cabin steward made him each night. He got a monkey, a puppy, a turtle, and I think the last one was a frog. Of course he promptly tore them up but he did think they were pretty cool.

Macen really enjoyed the cruise he was convinced that the water was a big lake and when you tried to tell him ocean, he would say no "Big lake!"Here is Macen staying at Camp Carnival after we got back on the ship after Key West. He had no interest in joining us in the pool though, barely even acknowledging our presence. This was the only day he spent at Camp Carnival though.

Cowboys vs Chiefs

This weekend was the Cowboys/Chiefs game. Since we are from Missouri it stands to reason that most of our family are either Chiefs or Rams fans, even if I have corrupted Shantel into liking the Cowboys. So we got together a big group of family who are Chiefs fans, our friend Ruder and his wife, Kelly, a coworker and went to the game. What I found really interesting was all of the Cowboys fans that were there. I know that the Chiefs haven't been that good lately but they do still almost always sell out. The game was close to a sell out but I would say it was about a 40/60 split Cowboys/Chiefs fans, there was definitely a lot of blue and you can see some of it in the above picture.

This is Macen and Grandpa Hugh playing Redneck Golf, no else played since we were busy cooking, eating, and drinking. It sure kept Macen occupied though.

Our tailgate set up, we had brats, smoked sausages, chili, grilled onions and peppers, beer and of course hot cocoa. Our new cold weather tailgate beverage of choice is hot cocoa with Dr McGillicuddies Menthomint schnapps, its kind of like drinking a york peppermint patty. MMMM Good!!!!

Macen loved the football game in fact he was a little upset that we had to tailgate first, he wanted to go straight to the stadium. He was shouting first down, Romo to Witten, and Defense all day long as well as trying to play hide n seek in our row.

Not a bad picture from the next to last row in the stadium. When I realized that I was going to have extra tickets, I offered them to my high school buddy Dale and his little brother Drew. Drew's comment about the tickets was that Dale and I, as Army Majors, make way too damn much money to be sitting that high up and he promptly bought lower level tickets for some outrageous amount of money. After getting to our seats, I'd have to admit that Drew was right, I'll have to hold out for lower seats next time at Arrowhead and save the wear and tear on the knees of climbing that high and the stop off for extra oxygen.

The obligatory family picture. It was really really cold.

Check out Macen and his Romo jersey. This is after the game, and even though he liked the game he was ready to go home, Shantel put him in the car so he could warm up and he promptly crawled into his seat and said "I'm Ready", to go that is, he'd had enough and was ready to go home even though we were eating the leftovers and waiting for the traffic to clear.

It was a great a game. I was actually glad the Chiefs played the Cowboys close that way there was a lot of smack talking going back and forth between Mike, Hugh and me, made for a great time. The only draw back, other than the cold, was that there seemed to be a lot rude Chiefs fans, I got called an A-hole by some guy as I was walking down the aisle of the section to the bathroom and some girl called me a "star covered jerk" as I was waiting for the girls to get through the pat down line. Those weren't the only comments I heard just the loudest ones. What the heck? The only time I've seen anything similar in Texas was when the Cowboys played the Redskins and my old roommat Fitz , a Redskins fan, was there with us, I really thought he was going to get his butt beat, but then again if you know Fitz you know he was instigating it as much as the other fans were.

Eat

This is Macen begging for food, ha ha! He is literally yelling "Eat", "Eat" here. As some of you know Macen got pretty sick about 2 weeks ago. It got bad enough we have to take him to the hospital for an IV for a day - he had pretty much stopped eating and drinking and he was vomitting off and on for a week. So needless to say, his eating is all messed up. He ate 2 boxes of cereal in 4 days. And now he has been having lunch around 9am. The kid thinks he needs to wake up at 5am every day. Thats a whole other story though that I won't bore you with. Normally he doesn't eat much and we have to beg him to eat more. So I thought it was funny he had climbed up in his chair and was yelling to eat.

Marathon Pics

Here are some misc pics from the marathon. Macen wasn't feeling well so this is about as active as he got. He did play kick ball in 2 states at the same time :) Downtown Omaha has a suspension bridge you walk on over the river with the state line of NE and IA marked around the middle. Macen kicked the ball back and forth over it.

26.2...Been There Run That

Sunday was the Omaha Marathon, I've never run a full marathon and since I've been thinking about stepping up to do a full Ironman, I figured I'd better run a full marathon first.

Mariah ran the half marathon and since the route was the same for both races until the 9 mile marker, we ran together. At the 9 mile marker we high fived and she turned around and headed back and I kept going. Mariah finished in 2hrs 8min, really good for a 17 year old.

The run route went through the downtown Omaha area, by the riverfront, down by the zoo and around Rosenblatt Stadium (home of the College World Series) and then back to the north part of town and finally finishing back at the riverfront.

I wanted to finish in under 4 hours but since it was my first marathon I thought it would be realistic to finish in about 4.5 hours. When Mariah turned around I was on pace for 4 hours and kept that up all the way until about mile 23 when I finally hit the wall. I managed to finish in 4hrs 20 min. Faster than I thought would finish but not as fast I would have liked. Still that's respectable for my first marathon. The jury is still out on whether or not I'll do another marathon, let alone a full Ironman, I'm still having a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of running a marathon after swimming for 2.4 miles and biking for 112 miles. Given plenty of training time I might be up for it.

I want to thank the two college age guys out drinking beer at 10 am on Florence Drive at about the 18 mile marker, they gave me a cold Budweiser, which I drank about half of, after all I am a beer drinker with a running/triathlon problem. It tasted pretty darn good. Also there was the girl at the 21 mile marker who gave me an energy gel, I probably needed that gel more than I did the beer at mile 18. The volunteer on the bike at mile 24, needs thanking as well, she really got my mind off how bad my legs were hurting and kept me shuffling to the finish. Finally the guy with the ice bags at the end of the race really, really needs thanking, I probably wouldn't be walking today if he hadn't of let me borrow the ice for my knees for about 20 minutes.Mariah and I with 3000 other runners getting ready for the mass start of the 10k, half marathon, and marathon.We've just finished the first 6 miles here. Still on pace for a 4 hour marathon and a 2 hour half marathon and feeling strong.

Done, Spent, Drained, Nothing Left, where's the wheelchair??? 4hours 20 minutes. Mariah ran the last quarter mile with me after resting for 2 hours, that's why she's smiling so big.

Sad Day in the Scrogin Household

With our impending move to Germany we had decided that we weren't going to take our truck over with us, it is just too big and screams here's the American. But what we were going to get and when we were going to get it was all up in the air. That is until this weekend. After looking at Volvos and BMWs the last couple of months we finally went and looked at the Fords and Shantel decided she really liked the new Edge crossover they have and it does kind of have a European flair to it, so we asked what they wanted for it and what they would give us for our truck. Bottom line everything came together rather nicely and now we have a new Edge.

Here is a picture of our old truck. It will be missed. If I had a dollar for every time one of us has said "I miss the truck" since Saturday, then I could buy it back from the dealer even after he marks it up for resale. I can already tell you we'll be getting one of these again when we come back from Germany. Here's the new Edge, not quite as much cargo space as the truck. Notice I've already had to go get a bike rack and we are talking about a roof rack with a cargo box eventually to make up some of the lost room. It has lots of gadgets that I like and plenty of passenger space that Shantel likes. It drives pretty smooth and it has plenty of oomph when out on the interstate. The gas mileage is also much better than the truck, getting about 21 mpg on the way home this weekend, whereas the truck normally got about 15 mpg.