Day 1

 Yeah, this post is late. This is not the happenings of today, ladies and gentlemen, but of yesterday. Day one of our two week vacation was off to great start when we ordered room service for breakfast.













I ordered waffles with strawberries and cream, milk and a strawberry smoothie. You can't get much better than that, except when they bring it to you on a tray so you can eat in bed!







                                                                                                                                           
                                               

 The next step of the day was getting our garden passes. Now we can enter any Tourists Only gardens anywhere in the botanical gardens, we just have to show the man at the entrance our passes and we can spend as much time as we want in there. I can't wait to use it!

  The pass says "Garden Pass, Western Gardens" on it, and look at that beautiful butterfly on it. I decided to keep the pass in my purse, so I don't loose it.

It was windy and chilly outside yesterday, but I didn't care. What are jackets for anyway? I'm all ready to head out to some really neat gardens, but when we get out there we discover that most of them were closed because of the wind storm last night. Pooh.

 We did go out to the main garden plaza where we walked around on Saturday, but it really was quite cold and the wind was blowing so hard AND it started raining so we only had time to take a few pictures before heading inside. There's this great big bridge over the stream-bed, it's very fun to walk across, but some of the boards on it were messed up in the wind or something (it's very old), and we weren't allowed to walk on it till they took a closer look, so mom just took this picture of me sitting in front of it.

 This picture is pretty bad, but it was raining and freezing and we were both kind of shivering when it was taken. You can see me standing near the Rose Circle. In the spring and summer, those thorny plants behind me are all blossomed and beautiful, but now they're kind of ugly. I need to ask mom if we can come back in the summer when all the plants are flowered. It'll be a whole other experience.

It's so strange to me how most of the gardens are gray and and the plants aren't bloomed yet, but then there are these few spots where, wouldn't you know, it looks like spring! These daffodils were so bright yellow, and absolutely beautiful.

And here's me smelling the flowers, hee hee! After this mom and I were just too cold to spend another minute outside, so we went back to the hotel. It was almost lunch time, so we drove out to town and got soup and sandwiches from a local cafe. Then we went shopping around town.

Look at this adorable t-shirt I got at a store down-town! It's so bright in this dreary weather. I also got a pretty necklace to match.





So, that's about all we did today. It's still rather over-cast outside, and it was actually snowing earlier, but the sun is now poking through the clouds. I hope we can visit the gardens today!

~Katelyn~