Florida Trip: Part 1- Marriott Harbour Lakes

As a Christmas Present for our children, we decided to take a trip to Florida.

(Side Note: You know what's fun? Filling up a box with crumpled pieces of paper that you write individual words on so your kids have to uncrumple, read, and organize what you're giving them into something coherent.  If you're spending a lot of money on a present, you should get to torment them a little!) (You should also get to be warm.  With Palm Trees.)

We had some free Marriott days because we racked up a lot of points staying at Duke for 6 weeks when I got my radiation, so we opted to stay at the Marriott Harbour Lake.

Honestly, we probably could've just stayed there and been perfectly happy.  It reminded me of the resort from "Dirty Dancing" in that there were hundreds of activities happening over the course of the week.  Harbour Lake had two pool areas with a splash pad pirate ship, jacuzzi area, on-deck restaurant/bar, a video game arcade, and more.  Every day there were tons of activities- scavenger hunts, magic shows, movie and smores night, card games for adults, trivia contest, four square, football, there was always something happening.  We literally could have just stayed at the Marriott and hung out and been well entertained and happy the entire trip.

Plus, our room was amazing.  We opted to get a 2-bedroom Villa because we brought Grammy with us.  The kids and grandma shared a two queen room and PwcDad and I had the master.  The room was incredible with plenty of space to hang out.  We could have easily had people over to play cards or watch a movie- which I'm always thinking about because we'd like to schedule a trip with my brother in law and sister in law, and have space to hang out as grown ups while the kids sleep in a separate area would be ideal.

Our room also had a full kitchen, which really helped us keep costs down.  We hit the grocery store on our first full day and picked up breakfast and lunch foods, as well as snacks, and we were able to eat in or pack lunch for 2 meals a day.  We did dinner out, although we could have easily prepared that in-room, too.

We were really very happy with the Marriott Harbour Lakes, and we'd definitely recommend it to another family wanting to stay in the Sea World/ Disney/ Universal Studios area.

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Disclosure: Marriott neither asked me to write this post nor compensated me in any way, although if they end up reading this and want to, I'd totally go again.