Boca Raton Florida Adventure

As you may know, I was one of 150 people, less than 2% of my company that was nominated and received a prestigious award called the Circle of Excellence Award. Award recipients and a guest were flown to Boca Raton Florida for an adventure. It was a lot of fun, however a bit misleading. The brochure stated that this time of year there was a 95% chance of sun for the entire trip. I believe they MEANT to say 5% chance. Although the sun did make an appearance for about 15 minutes - of which I am proud to say that I DID live up to my fair skinned roots and got burnt, the remainder of the trip was a bit rainy.

The hotel was amazing, but WOW were things expensive. Good thing we weren't paying. The hotel had amazing accommodations including an onsite spa, a number of restaurants, dining options, stores, etc... Our hotel room had a bathroom, a bedroom, a walk in closet, and a nook area for preparing drinks. Although there were a few glitches with the room which I believe can be attributed to the Florida humidity. In order to get into our room, we had to put in the key card, and kick the bottom of the door while we pushed. If that wasn't funny enough, we learned through trial and error that one must NOT shut the bathroom door, or one may not ever get out again. Dave made the mistake of shutting the bathroom door (while I was downstairs in a meeting) and he nearly had to break the door to get out. :) hehe






The hotel had some great views, and I fell in love with a few of the trees there. I took MANY more pictures, but I thought I would share a few. There were also many events that you could participate in, but of course you must have the proper attire. These events were tennis, croquet and golf. I am sure there were many others events, but we didn't even attempt after we had asked if we could play croquet and the guy looked us up and down and stated that we need to wear all white from head to toe. When I said to Dave that I don't believe I own that much white, the gentlemen stated that we should not continue this conversation any longer. "Yes Sir"!







The whole trip was JAM packed with events. There were formal events, causal events, as well as LOADS of food to eat...the common denominator was an open bar. Needless to say, we got to see a lot of award winners and their guests feeling VERY GOOD and having a great time! Dave and I found a new fruit drink (non-alcoholic of course) that we became addicted to. Yummy!

The food was very good, but a bit too much for Dave to take. The first few days he got a bit sick...his body was in shock from the fine dining...eventually we had to order room service, so his body could adjust. That's right...he ordered a cheeseburger and fries. No more filet mignon for him! Anyway, he was a bit under the weather, so I had to go to the breakfast event and the meeting that followed solo. I picked a table that was a bit out of the way, but that would allow me to enjoy the outside environment. Apparently, a few of the executives (VP's) thought that I would be lonely, so they sat down at my table. This was a perfect opportunity to hob nob with the big wigs so to speak, however I felt a bit tongue-tied and out of sorts. Although I must have made some kind of impression because when we broke out into groups for our meetings, one of the VP's asked if there were any questions (of course I had one) which he proudly exclaimed to the group, "Ahh...my breakfast partner, Melissa has a question".



Later at the semi-formal awards ceremony, there was assigned seating, and I was sat next to the VP of Customer Management (my organization) and his wife. They were very down to earth and very nice to talk to. I seemed to hang out with one VP to the next throughout the remainder of the trip. I have attached some pictures that were taken - my director calls it my prom picture.




As part of the trip we were able to pick an adventure. We picked the Everglades tour (if you can recall from a previous blog entry). There was a 45 minute ride over to the airboat, so they had invited a woman from a local animal sanctuary to invite some of her tenants to come along for the bus ride. She brought on board an owl, skunk, alligator, hawk and a opossum. The funniest story was the one that she told about owl. Apparently they are illegal to own, and the laws are so strict that it is illegal to even have a feather from one. She told the story of how this guy built a habitat for owls, and then stole an egg when a family came to live there. He raised the owl like a parakeet until one day his friend's wife called the cops on him. Well, since the owl was raised in captivity, it was accustomed to getting its dinner SERVED to him. When the animal sanctuary people attempted to retrain the owl for future release into the wild, the owl had other ideas. When live food was put into his cage, the owl ran screaming the other direction. This owl preferred to be fed with a dead mouse on a silver platter thank you very much! :)



The airboat ride was really cool. We had to wear ear plugs because of the noise, and you had to have very good vision (which I don't) or be with someone who does (Dave totally does). We were able to see alligators, birds, etc... It was cool to ride on the airboat ride. I would have posted a video, but it seems the site to do so is down, so if I remember I will post one.









After the airboat ride, we got to go into a little sanctuary, where Dave got to pet a panther. There was a panther behind a cage with the trainer, Dave asked if he could pet it and for some odd reason she let him. She was going to let me though; however the cat seemed a bit too interested in me, so she made us get out of the cage. I have my own theories as to why the cat was interested, but I won't share on the blog. :P We also got to hold a baby alligator too. That was pretty cool. They feel differently than I imagined.






We did have SOME spare time - enough to get onboard a boat to go to the beach where we quickly made friends with the Captain (as you can see from the below pictures). He was a hoot. We were unable to go into the water because of the strong currents and the man-o-wars...they were washing up on the beach. I never knew how pretty and blue they were. We scoured the beach looking for shells, critters, and anything interesting. We came across many man-o-wars, some coconut shells (which one contained a crab), and got caught in a few random rain storms. We were DRENCHED by the time we left, and rushed back to the hotel for some hot showers before the awards ceremony.

















The finale was great! It was an electric theme, you know where you have those glow in the dark necklaces, rings, bracelets and such. We had a blast, and Kenny Loggins was our entertainment. Amazingly enough, I even got David to dance with me, albiet the slow dancing.






I could go on and on about the trip, but I don't want to bore you are make this into a tiny novel. All and all - it was fun, and I was glad that we had the experience.