April 19, 2021: After taking Autumn and her kids to the airport, I met Josh and the boys over at Disney Springs. It's an outdoor mall, with live music and a movie theater. Josh and the boys went to a movie and then the boys were excited to visit the Lego Store.
Lego Chewbacca
Lego Stormtroopers.
A Lego dragon and knight on a horse.
The sun setting over the water at Disney Springs.
Paxton's favorite store was Star Wars Outpost.
Each of the boys were able to try out different light saber replicas, identical to the ones that the characters used in the actual Star Wars movies. They were in awe! They all have lightsabers on their wish list now. They were pretty cool!
The prices you see here are just for the handle, the light saber portion is another $50-60 dollars depending on the length of blade you choose. Kaden was all set to buy one himself, until he found out that the blade was an additional charge. So he will be waiting and searching for a better deal.
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April 20th: It was a rainy day, like dumping rain, so we decided to find an indoor activity.
As I was searching I came across the World of Chocolate Museum. We were able to book tickets and go on the tour. It was actually very interesting to learn the story behind chocolate.
In short, the Mayan revered and used the cacao beans to make a drink for special occasions. They Mayan's passed the Cacao beans on to the Aztecs who began using cacao beans as their currency. The Aztec King would drink "chocolate-a" drink (which was a bitter hot drink with lots of spices) from a golden cup. When he finished drinking he would throw the cup away, because the cacao bean was worth more to them then the gold. Then Hernan Cortez a Spanish conquistador came upon the Aztecs. They thought he looked like the Cacao God and they gave him all their cacao beans, their gold and their diamonds. He figured that with all they had given him, they surely had more riches and he killed most of the Mayans in the pursuit of gaining their riches. In the end, he realized that there were no more riches to be had and he took the cacao beans to the King of Spain. He brought the King "chocolate-a" drink and after tasting it, said it wasn't fit for the pigs. So Cortez delivered the cacao beans to the monks, since he knew they liked to cooked in their time off and could probably use the beans. The story goes that the monks started adding honey and other sweeteners to the ground up cacao beans and made a sweet chocolate drink. They worried it was too good and if they shared it, people would surely sin. So they kept the secret of chocolate to themselves for 20 years, until they started to run out of cacao beans. At that point, they took their sweet hot chocolate drink to the King and he loved it. So for another 10 years, only the monks and royalty enjoyed chocolate.
King Phillips daughter, Anne, apparently became a chocoholic and is said to have had 20-30 cups of chocolate drink per day. That is quite a lot of chocolate!
Hot chocolate bombs being made.
The original machines used to produce chocolate.
Sculptures made of chocolate.
The Eiffel Tower
Neuschwanstein Castle
Big Ben
The Acropolis of Athens
St Basils Cathedral
Venice
European windmill
The Great Wall of China
L to R: President Obama, Andy Warhol, Neil Armstrong, Christopher Columbus and Thomas Edison
Mt. Rushmore
Japanese Pagoda and Geisha
The Mad Hatter
The Taj Mahal - The only sculpture made of white chocolate...which we learned, isn't really chocolate at all, but is basically the fat of the cacoa bean. The same thing that cocoa butter is made from.
Ek-Chuah, Mayan God of Cocoa
Easter Island
The Statue of Liberty
Abu Simbel Temples
Kaden enjoying hot chocolate made from real melted chocolate.
After the chocolate museum, we tried to take the boys to fight virtual reality zombies, but got there to find they had gone out of business.
We ended up at Dezerland in Orlando, where the boys enjoyed checking out the vast array of cars on display.
Then they decided to test their skills at Axe Throwing!
Kaden was proud to nail it on his very first throw! It took Versii, Paxton and Josh a few tries to really get into the groove of axe throwing.
Versii even got a bullseye.
After Axe throwing and dinner, we went back to our room at the resort and then Josh brings this little "lost boy" in. I was so confused! Then a knock on the door came and to my surprise, it was our friend's the Wescott's who had move to South Dakota! It's funny because, their son Ty was born after they moved away from Utah, so although I have seen an occasional picture here and there, I have never met him in person before. I had seen Sam post about going to Florida on Facebook before we left on our trip. I guess that Josh saw the same post and hurried to message her about the dates. It turned out that they were planning to fly in on the evening of April 20th and we were originally set to fly home early in the morning on the 21st. So Josh rebooked our return flight to the following day on the 22nd, so we could have one full day together! It was quite the surprise! I had no idea!
Ty took a quick liking to Kaden!
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