I’ve had another jam-packed weekend. Jam-packed with fitness, fun, and awesomeness, that is. I think I’m going to dole out each event in a separate post rather than creating one of my usual never-ending tomes.

Yesterday after my one mile ocean swim and 25 mile bike ride I was beat and pretty much sat right here in my comfy office chair with my feet up for several hours. When I couldn’t avoid it any longer I finally showered and got dressed to head to the St. Raphael’s Festival right in our neighborhood with the family.

The festival is hosted by St. Raphael’s Catholic Church and has all the amenities of a big carnival with none of the drawbacks. Yes to big rides, fun games, and good food. No to big crowds and long lines. We have gone to the festival several times and always had a blast. Click here to see our evening at St. Raphael’s Festival last year (plus some other crazy stuff in that post).

They have a “little kids” area with rides geared towards the younger set and the boys hit that up first to ride the Frog Hopper.

After that we walked over to the main part of the carnival and came to this climbing/sliding contraption that Cal was too big to enter.

He’s faking an annoyed face in that photo. I could tell he was psyched to be “too big” for something. Mack was NOT too big.

Next was bumper cars.

Then Tap Out.

Next was whatever this is called:

By this time it was nearing sunset so we decided to go on the Ferris wheel. I LOVE the Ferris wheel here because we get such an amazing view of our neighborhood, downtown St. Pete, and Tampa Bay.

Sunset over St. Pete:

I used the fancy panoramic function on my Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 to take this one:

(click on the image to see it much larger)

It was an amazingly gorgeous fall evening. This has been the most beautiful weekend. It was almost chilly last night after the sun went down!

After the Ferris wheel we headed back over to the little kids area to hit up the super slide.

Back over to the big kids’ rides. It was starting to get dark outside.

About this time I was too tired to stand around watching the boys ride anymore, so I went to sit and listen to the band while Chad took the boys on another round of rides.

They came and got me so that I could watch Cal ride the mechanical bull.

(Click on the above image to see Cal ride the bull!)

The festival was so pretty all brightly lit at night that we decided to ride the Ferris wheel one more time as our last hurrah.

We were treated to fireworks over downtown!

The glow from Tampa, which my camera greatly magnified:

We had a great night and saw lots of our friends. Thank you St. Raphael’s!

Tomorrow I plan to take it easy and stay home, so hopefully I’ll get around to blogging my fun events from today. I hope your weekend was as fabulous a mine.

Cya!