Happy New Year - Snow & Ice Exhibit

Happy New Year to all of our family and friends!

May this New Year be even better than the last one was...

We chose to ring in the New Year by attending the Ice & Snow exhibits at the Gaylord Palms Hotel & Convention Center. This pose was taken in the Ice exhibit.

When we got to the Gaylord, we saw these stuffed polar bears all over the place. It turns out they were part of a contest sponsored by Coca-Cola. Katrina picked up the contest sheet and started looking for all of the bears in the area. This one was in the concierge foyer.

Here is one of the bears in the alligator pit.

This one was at the gift shop...

Everywhere we turned, we came across another, strategically positioned bear.

Next, we went over to the Snow exibit, which let us Floridians have a go at playing in the snow. Bradley is taking a shot at throwing a snowball through a target.

Then the both of the kids tried their luck at 'Elf Bowling'. The object of the game is to win tickets to enter into a drawing for prizes later.

Here is a closeup of the Elf Bowling Alley. It turned out to be harder than it looks.

I even tried my hand at the ring toss game and unfortunately, I did not meet with success.

Katrina & Brad grabbed a snow-tube and went for a slide.

Then we sidled over to the snow-play area and made a tiny snowman.

Since I hadn't tried throwing snowballs, Katrina and I competed to see who could hit the targets consistantly.

Boy, I wanted to hit them so hard, that the targets might spin al the way around, but the snowballs would splatter, making them only sway back and forth. Darn!

Wouldn't you know it, we found another stuffed polar bear in the Christmas tree.

Katrina, Brad and I wanted to make a bigger snowman, so we went over to the snow-pack zone and starting working. We used the orange box-tools to help us shape the snow.

Since we really couldn't get the bottom 'snowball' formed into a ball shape, we did the classic half-ball shape and built on that. In this shot, Brad seems to be trying to command the snowman to life (sorry, no silk have to be found), while I did my best to make a funny pose. It didn't work too well...

This picture was taken to show you we did all of our snow-fun with bare hands and now they are bright red... Whew, too cold for me. And I can see Brad made the mistake of crouching in the snow, as you can see by his wet knees.

After we were done with the Snow exhibit, we went into the Ice exhibit. Even though we had our jackets on and such, we were given these reflective blue parkas to wear into the exhibit. At first, I thought this was overkill, until we were halfway through and found out the air temperature was 9 degrees F. I found out how cold it was by the fact that my hair was a little wet from our activities at the Snow exhibit, but when we left the Ice exhibit, my hair was frozen solid and was a little 'crunchy'.

It really was beautiful what they did with the colored ice in this exhibit.

And the Christmas theme was displayed throughout.

Well, would you look at that? It looks like we found the last stuffed polar bear of the contest...

Peekaboo, I see you!

The detailed work in the ice was stunning.

Hello Santa, we've something waiting for you!

Nice...

This is a cute shot, but it looks like brad is freezing.

Hey! The even put some ice slides in here!

Here comes Bradley!

Heigh-Ho, Santa... Away!

Will you look at that? Frosty found himself a wife!

This was my favorite part, where the ice is very detailed without the help from colorization.

The lighted sections actually had wiring running up through them.

You know, this was a really fun way to celebrate the arrival of the New Year. Now we gotta figure out how to top this one next year...