The weather was a bit sketchy in the morning but by the time the ceremony started it was nothing but blue skys and sunshine!  Here is a video with a few of my favorite pics from the day.  Congratulations, you guys!  -Jeff

The park has has a rich history that started more than 72 years ago and it has been billed as Florida’s first theme park paving the way for the likes of Disney and Universal.  Julie and Dick Pope founded the park and the botanical gardens in 1936.  The gardens became a backdrop for beautiful southern belles and many movies and advertising campaigns.  Familiar Starlets who have walked our paths include: Betty Davis, Johnny Carson, Carol Burnett, Esther Williams and Elvis to name just a few. Proclaimed the Water Ski Capitol of the World, Cypress Gardens became the birthplace of performance water skiing in 1941.

Over the years the park ownership has changed hands a couple of times.  With competition from the larger parks attendance dwindled and a decision to close the park came in April 2003 after the severe blow to the tourism industry on September 11, 2001.

In 2004 Kent Buescher, owner of Wild Adventures Theme Park in Valdosta, GA became interested in purchasing the park.  In the spirit of the Pope family who initially built the park, Buescher signed a historic deal in 2004 with state and local governments to save the attraction.  Now there are rides, Splash Island water park, a concert venue, historic gardens, animals, the famed Southern Belles and world-famous water ski show.

Here are a few pictures of the ski show and few sights from the garden.  Also, one of Nancy taking a picture of me photographing the ski show.  It would have been good to have my zoom lens but I wanted to travel light.

Over the past 15 years I’ve spent A LOT of time on planes and in airports and it’s something that I’ve come to NOT enjoy much.  It’s becoming even less enjoyable to fly these days with fuel prices so high and the airlines doing everything they can to stop the bleeding.  It’s come to the point now on US Air that you have to pay $2 just to get a soda on the flight and I’m sure they are not the only airline that is doing this.

An airline that I do enjoy is JetBlue.  I was working regularly in Manhattan for 5 years and flew them every week from Tampa to JFK.  It was all one class of seats but they were reasonably priced, provided friendly service, had all leather seats with TONS of leg room in EVERY row, and had a TV and XM radio in every seat.  Not a bad way to fly really.  Let me give you an example of their customer service.  I used to take the last flight of the day out of JFK to home and during the winter months it wasn’t unusual for them to delay the last flight so that connectors coming from buffalo or some other place that was having bad weather could make the connection to sunny Florida.  Well, this one particular night JetBlue delayed us for well over an hour so that the connecting folks would make the flight.  That in itself was good customer service, if you ask me.  I’d sure be happy knowing a plane waited.  Anyway, we were delayed over an hour and the captain went into the terminal and came back with a stack of huge boxes of Dunkin Doughnuts and walked down the aisle himself handing out napkins and doughnuts to all of us sitting there waiting for the other plane to come in.  How many airlines have you heard of that happening on?