Florida!

Andy's parents invited us to go with them to a Sonus convention.  It was for audiologist and dealers, and in our case future audiologist.  It was so fun, we are so glad we went.  It was held at the sandpearl resort http://www.sandpearl.com/, on Clearwater Beach.  We flew in on Thursday and got there in the afternoon.  We checked in and were offered some Champagne, lol, I think that is the first time I have ever been offered champagne for standing in a long line, or ever for that matter.  We felt very pampered staying at the resort, they were very nice rooms and had robes and slippers in the closet for us to wear in our rooms.  Every night when we were at dinner the maids would come around and turn down the rooms,  they would take off the big decorative pillows and close the blinds, put chocolates on our bed and leave some calm soft music playing so when we got in our rooms at night it was very calm and relaxing feeling.  

 Sonus gave everyone $100 to spend at the resort so I got my nails done at the spa ( everything else was over $200 lol ).  Andy bought the robe, cuase he liked it so much.  When everyone was at class I thought it would be a good time to study for the ACSM so I brought my books to study and sat on our balcony facing the ocean.  I probably read one sentence and then just stared at the ocean the rest of the time.   Lucky for us, Tampa was experiencing record lows for that week : ( , so I didn't want to go swimming to lay out on the beach. It wasn't too bad though I will take blue skies and sunny weather over what we have right now in Provo, UT.  Snow, snow and more snow.  

During some free time we decided to go tour University of South Florida.  It was one of the schools that Andy applied to.  We were very impressed with the audiologist program they had there.  One of the students took us on a tour of the department building.  Every grade has about 14 students or less and only one guy.  He said that next year is the year of the guys, they are trying to get more men into the program.  We also found out that the audiology program had 40 applicants and only 6 of them were guys, so Andy has a pretty good chance of being accepted.  Hopefully that goes for all the other schools as well.  Because the west coast doesn't have as many audiology programs they get more applicants than the east coast schools do.  We heard that University of Washington gets several hundered applicants a year.  We are not sure how true that is though.  

Every meal was provided for us and there was always an open bar.  That was a new experience for me.  It made me realize how Provoized I have become.  Everyone had some kind of drink from the open bar.  My first thought was when one of Andy's dads rep came up to us with a drink in his hand was, what are you doing?  Aren't you embarrassed to be drinking, especially in public, let alone at a business convention?  I felt very silly going up to the open bar and asking for a sprite, they didn't even have Italian Sodas, which are my new favorite thing.  The last night we were there Andy's mom decided to talk to one of the men that is in charge of the activities and had a discussion with him about the drinks and that they should offer something special for the non-drinkers.   He said oh well we have a variety of sodas for you to drink, but she informed him that we don't consider those special drinks like the alcohol drinks are for everyone else.  So he decided that she was right and he immediately got us some virgin pina coladas from the bar at the hotel. 

Saturday it warmed up a bit and was in the low 70's.  The morning was gorgeous, I walked on the beach and "studied" on out balcony again.  Everyone finished around noon and then the rest of the day we had free time.  We walked on the beach hoping to lay out.  We stripped down to our swimsuits and laid out for about 10 or 15 minutes before we decided that it was still a little too cold to be doing that.  That night Sonus put on a beach party for us.  They had dinner and had set up glow in the dark volleyball nets with glow in the dark balls.  We ate some dinner and then played the volleyball.  The next morning we got up early and flew home.  I was very sad to leave.  Now I am itching for spring to come!  We will probably have to wait until the end of April for that most likely.  I will try and post some pictures of our trip tonight.