The Iowa (China) McQuivey Family: A Break from Winter

It's been a long, long, long, time since we have last updated the blog. Hope you all are doing great out there. This has been a long, bitterly cold winter and to take a break from it all we took a special trip to help celebrate our 15 year anniversary this year. Every 5 years we look to do something big. The planning of this started in Feb of 2013.....the day finally came and we took our boys on their 1st cruise! We asked grandpa and grandma to go with us and we all had a great time! There are more pictures (they aren't digital) so once we get those developed we will update the blog with more....but for now we have these great picture thanks to Grandpa.

1st Stop....HOUSTON TX! We went to the NASA Space Center and were there for over 5 hours and still had things we could have done, but just ran out of time. Great learning experience and you get a real feel for how big the Space Shuttle really is.

This is one of the Space Shuttle boosters, it takes 5 of these for it to lift off.

This is the replica of the International Space station, the actual size and everything. Astronauts train in this before going up.

This will be a new attraction coming in 2015. The Shuttle will be placed on top of a 747 and visitors will be able to go through the 747 and the Shuttle to see what it's like. We will one day go back to see it when it's completed.

Here are the boys playing at the beach in Galveston for the 1st time ever! The ship's boarding was delayed due to fog and so we went to the beach and flew some kites!

Good family photo op.

Elijah flying a kite.

Alright. So that is a little bit of fun before getting to the ship. Due to the port closing and the late docking of the ship our boarding was delayed.....we stood in line for 3 hours. The boys were troopers and we finally got on the ship around 7pm cst.

Here are some of the pictures of one of the highlights of the trip....The FLOWRIDER! It was AWESOME! I will just put these photos on for now and will have to come back another day with more pics.