ICE!

While visiting home to celebrate the new year my family took my nephew Tyler to see ICE! at the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center. ICE was an ice sculpture attraction for families to interactively discover the story of how Santa Claus became Santa. Honestly the story part was not so interesting to me but the colored and sculptured ice was fascinating enough. The attraction was entirely chilled at 9 degrees to keep everything solidly cold. We were loaned blue coats to walk around in. After meandering through various sections of the Santa story, which included an elaborate town square, there was a culminating ice palace with slides for people to go down on. (I won my race!) The very last scene of the attraction was a large nativity display in clear ice as opposed to the colored ice that was predominantly featured throughout the exhibit. Tyler told me he liked the entire display and not just a particular point. We all had a lot of fun and really enjoyed such an unusual (and cold) activity and such creative uses of ice.

 

Chateau Versailles

Versailles is a place that I never really imagined being really special to me. I developed an interest in it when I was learning more about 17th and 18th century French decorative arts from The Frick Collection. On our trip to France, John and I realized we had time to take our last full day to the Palace of Versailles and it was a very thoughtful and elegant way to conclude our trip. We arrived by the RER to the small town situated next to the palace in a cinematic fog that was very dense and mysterious. Once the fog cleared, the light throughout the day seemed to pause and it felt timeless all around the Chateau and while we were wandering around the gardens. Being it my second visit I was happy to discover more rooms opened the public, a pop-up Ladurée shop, new guest information displays, and lesser crowds since it was mid-Winter. I appreciated and understood so much more of what I saw and I now think it's a place of rich history and it definitely means a whole lot to me now.