Pictures Taken by Pros

At most theme parks these days, it seems, they have their photographers wandering about taking pictures, and distributing little code cards to find your photos online later. An excellent idea, to be sure, another stream of revenue, and keeps people from having to lug their own cameras around and finding someone to take a shot of the whole family.



Here's what we got (even though, with the exception of the water parks, I had my own camera with me) submitted for your approval!!!











One of the better days we had was the day we went to the Disney Studios Park. If memory serves correctly, it was the 4th Disney park we visited. By that time, my wife & the younger boy were pretty worn out, so they stayed at the resort while the older boy & I went. This was coupled with the fact that the remnant of a tropical depression were blowing through that day. The day was mostly overcast & occasionally drizzly.



That made for many of the lines being pretty short. We pretty much walked onto the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror twice, and at the end of the evening we rode the Aerosmith coaster twice. Also, my older boy has patience for and even an interest in some things that my wife and younger boy would quickly find boring, and he's like me in that he'll stay as long as possible to get the most out of a park. We got to go through the museum-like area and the film of the Walt Disney story. The only ride I would have liked to visit that we didn't get on (due to the over an hour wait time) was the Toy Story shooting gallery ride, doubtless a clone of the one at California Adventure, one of my new favorites.







As opposed to last time, we actually made it on a few of the rides we missed out on last time. At Magic Kingdom, we made it onto Splash Mountain and Space Mountain (both much better than West Coasts'), although we didn't have time to visit the Heritage Square or whatever it's called area we missed last time, too.



At the Animal Kingdom park, they'd shut down the Expedition Everest coaster due to lightening last time, so that was our first stop this time. Made it on after a considerable wait, but also got fast passes to return later that night. Last time we'd gone, we'd seen a show on the in room programming that had that coaster as the best Disney coaster. It's pretty good, but I still like the Aerosmith one better. Got to ride the Dinosaur! ride, too, similar to the Indiana Jones ride out here, but differently themed. Got to take a good look at (and about a zillion pictures of) the Tree of Life. Oh, and the river raft ride that we waited for probably an hour or more last time was pretty much a walk-on. Rode it probably 3 or 4 times in a row.



At Epcot, they had Spaceship Earth open this time, so I got to ride it again, for the first time since 1983. They've added video screens to the cars, and at the end they use a photo of you taken at the beginning of the ride on a an interactive cartoon. Pretty hilarious. Rode it again later to take a video of that. Got to ride the Soaring, another California Adventure clone, and Maelstrom, which were both closed by the time we made it to them last time. Mission: Space we got to ride again, and the boy found someone's dropped fast pass for the GM Test Track ride.







The last few shots here are taken at Typhoon Lagoon, which is where we got the famous free shirts.

Drift Away

A little something to try, now that Blogger has an add video function!!! We'll just see how this goes...

As promised, here is the video I shot of security guard Dave at EPCOT singing "Drift Away"

Just a side note, today is my one year anniversary of being at my job. I still like it quite a bit, and just yesterday my supervisor informed me that I'm getting a 5.9% raise in effect on the check I'll be getting this week. Strange, they give you a six month review, then every year from that date you get another review. Your raises, however, come annually from your hire date, so in effect your raises are six months from your review. My supervisor found it strange, too.

Sleep Deprivation Part 3

Day five!!! This is actually the day we went to Hurricane Harbor for their early extra hours. It's all a blur now, but I'm sure of this in retrospect. Take everything I said about that on the Something Completely Different post and put it here. Don't know what we did in the morning of the fourth day, maybe we just played in the pool at the resort??? I know we did a lot of that.

This was the last day we were going to have the rental car, I was scheduled to turn it in at noon that day. We left early enough from there that we could make it back and go out for a last meal with the rental before we were back to having to take the Disney shuttle buses. After dining and leaving the restaurant, my oldest boy starts looking around for the admission card and room key card that he'd had in a Ziploc bag in his swim trunks. He can't find it anywhere, and we head back to the restaurant, because his mom is sure he had it there. Yea, like it's still gonna be there half an hour later. Damit. Ends up being so late I know I won't get the rental back, so I call them up and tell them to add one day. Had to go to the concierge desk at the resort to get them replaced.


After that, it was off to Epcot Center!!! This was the night that it had the extra evening hours, which was a good thing, since it was mid afternoon before we made it there. My wife had been especially looking forward to this, because the guy she had sat next to on the flight out had told her that they have wines from all over the world there. I think she had pictured in her mind something like vats with coffee urn spigots on them where you can drink all you like for free or something.

At the security check going in, the security guard Dave was singing "Drift Away". When we got closer, I broke out my video camera and asked him to sing it again. Probably I'll post that at some point. Pretty amusing.

First stop was the Mission: Space ride. Outside of it, they have a very cool model of the moon, with marks everywhere something has been landed. Red for the first landing, blue for the subsequent manned landings, and white for unmanned probes. There are two different intensities to the ride, so we got our tickets fast passed to come back later that day. However, the line for the less intense version was really quite short, so the older and I rode it. It featured Gary Sinise in the video leading up to it. It was hard for me to recognize him out of the Detective Mac Taylor or Lieutenant Dan roles. Pretty cool ride, but the less intense ride wasn't very intense.

After that we went on the GM Test Track ride. These are the two thrill rides at Epcot Center. This one wasn't much of a thrill, either, but it does go pretty fast and has some nice, high banked curves.

One of the coolest things there was this soda pops of the world pavilion. They have all these different sodas on tap from several countries. Amazing what some people will drink, guess it depends on what you're used to. We attempted to go on the iconic Spaceship Earth ride (the giant golf ball), but discovered that it is closed for renovation. It has apparently had several of these in the course of it's life. Last time I saw it, it didn't have all those stars on the top of it. The structure next to it I had taken to be a crane, but it turns out it used to be a magic wand with Mickey's hand holding it.

We were making our way around the World Pavilion, where they have different countries represented in the buildings, food and attractions. The workers in the various lands are from the represented countries, I understand that they are housed by Disney and are college students. How cool would that be??? That was one of the things I had wanted to do was have some food that I had never tried before. We got to the France land and were on the search for some wine for my wife. The wine shop there had a sampler package of three different wines for $15, so I went to buy one for both of us. Hahahaha, my wife forgot to bring her ID!!! It took a little bit of doing, but finally the clerk let her have her wine.

There was a movie of the French countryside that we watched. It was pretty cool, the screen is a full 180° and we were in the front row, so it was all around us. Did you know that Walt Disney's original concept for Epcot was to have a dome over the whole place and have it air conditioned??? That would have been real nice, that was a lot of the reason we went into the theatre, to sit in the air conditioned building for a while.

Around this time, it was getting towards the time that our fast passes were in effect for the Mission: Space ride. Went back and rode the intense version, first mom and the older, then myself and the older. WOW, what a difference from the less intense one!!! You can actually feel it pulling your face back when it does the launch sequence!!! I had thought it was a standard motion simulator type thing before I had rode it, but after the second trip I figured out that it uses centrifuge effect for the G-forces. Very cool. I was back from our vacation before I found out that there have been a few deaths from this ride!!!

Starved after that, so we ended up going the other way around the World Showcase (we'd only gone about halfway around when we had to head back for the fast passes) and ended up in the China land. I've had Chinese food a lot before, but I wasn't seeing much that looked any better, and they had a real nice sit down restaurant, Nine Dragons. We got a bottle of a strange plum wine to drink with dinner. We were some of the last people to get a seat, as they were closing down for the evening. I believe that it was after the time when the park was closed to all but resort guests. After that we went to the Norway area to attempt to go on a ride called Maelstrom that is a viking boat ride. It was closed. OK, we headed back to a ride called Soaring, which is very similar to the one at California Adventure called Soaring over California. It was closed, too. I was noticing a trend. The Seas with Nemo & Friends ride was still open, so we rode that. It goes through one of the world's largest salt water aquariums, riding in a clam mobile. Nice, but not too exciting. That is the general consensus of most visitors to Epcot altogether, I think, nice, but not too exciting.

Home, Home Again

Ah, it was a good vacation, but it is also good to finally be home!!!



Delays on both ends of first leg of the flights, but still made the connections.





I took 534 pictures



42 videos



and it took 28 minutes to copy them all onto my computer.



61 new messages in my E-mail



24 of them that I actually bothered to read.



There will be more to come, but for now, enjoy a few of the pictures I took!!!

Re Plan

The vacation plans I had for this year were pretty simple. I was going to use most of the money we got back from taxes to buy plane tickets and hotel lodging in Hawaii for the whole family. Take the boys to the Volcano National Park, go skin diving in Hunama bay, bake on the beaches. For a change I was thinking of going to Maui. Every time I've gone (OK, both times) I've gone to Oahu and The Big Island. Makes for a great vacation, with lots of things there that need their picture taken.

A few days after the refund checks came in the mail, my wife tells me, "Lets not go to Hawaii this year, save some of that money." Fine with me, I've still got that week scheduled off, we could do almost anything in that time for considerably less money.

During the next few days, my mind had all kinds of things we could do. Fly out to Vegas (every time I've gone there, I've driven, and that's my least favorite part), or up to the Frisco area, or over to Catalina island, or go camping, or any combination.

However, one thing I'd seen a few ads for came to mind. There have been some spots about how cheaply a family of four could vacation in the Disney resorts in Florida.



I made mention to the wife, and she immediately fixated on that idea. I checked it out, and even with airfare it looked to come out more than a thousand dollars cheaper than the Hawaii trip.

Of course, this would be staying at one of Disney's "budget" resorts. $82.00 per night, I guess there are a lot of places that cost more, but that didn't seem like a real great price to me. Of course, it is Disney, so you know it'll be done up right. I looked at all kinds of options, travel times, dates, etc. The budget resort I liked the sound of best is Disney's Pop Century, which has icons of the 1950s, -60s, -70s, -80s and -90s made into exhibits, statuary and activity themes. Giant Foosball players, the big wheel, and a swimming pool shaped like a bowling pin. How cool is that???

An interesting (OK, not that interesting) side note: while I was getting all this straight, I was preparing an order at Amazon. They had an offer to get their Amazon Visa card and get a rebate of $30.00, almost the whole amount of the order. In addition, earn credit towards future purchases for every dollar you spend on that card. Cool, I was already going to be buying it with a card and paying it right off, if I can get a few thousand racked up as credit towards future purchases at Amazon, cool!!! I applied, but it took a REALLY long time before they got back to me. Meanwhile, its getting closer and closer to the travel time. Finally I gave up the wait and used another card. Trying to get the hotel I wanted on the Disney site, it kept telling me that there were no rooms available on the dates I was travelling. I had gone through Expedia for the flight, and since I couldn't get a room at Disney's Pop Century, I'd look through Expedia for whatever other place I could get near the parks. Well, they had rooms available at Disney's Pop Century, and it was $13 less a night!!! Guess that worked out better for me anyway, then!!!



As far as Disney park passes go, I had been thinking we didn't need to be at a park EVERY SINGLE DAY we're there, but it turns out with their package tickets if you're only going six of the eight days you'll be there, it only comes out to be something like $13 less for the whole family. A clever ploy for them to get you to spend more time (and money) in their parks.

Last time I was to the Florida Disney parks was in the impossibly antiquated year of 1983, can you stand it??? I was 14 at the time, and EPCOT center was a new park. Now they have a wild animal park, two water parks, and Disney MGM studios. The latter has an Aerosmith roller coaster that I'll be reporting back on. They also have the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride that is also at California Adventure. One of the water parks has a slide that actually has water jets that launch you up slopes in the flue. I'm interested in seeing that, too. The wave pool at the other of the water parks is one of the largest in the world, and they have surfing lessons before the park opens (for an additional cost, of course). The surfing lesson (nor the additional cost) isn't especially appealing to me, as I already know the basics, but a couple of hours in an uncrowded wave pool that makes perfectly formed waves every time could be well worth the price!!! The older boy and I may very well take them up on this offer. The parks have days when they open early or are open later for Disney resort guests, for extra, less crowded time. Cool. When we were at California Adventure last time, the younger and I went on the Sun Wheel. He was a little freaked out by it when we went on it, but since then he talks about it a lot!!! When we last went to Disneyland, he wanted to ride it, but, of course, it was in the other park. Hopefully there is something like that in one of the Florida parks for him. The older boy wants to eat gumbo every day. They have a plan where you can pay in advance and have meals paid for at the Disney parks. Seems like a great idea, since you'd likely spend more than the cost if you ate there most days, but I don't know if we'd use all the vouchers you get. Also, since I bought it through Expedia it wasn't offered through them. Probably could still get the deal. Maybe, maybe not...

Something of interest we'll probably pick up is the little stuffed Pal Mickey. Click the link if you want to read all about that (I recommend the read). Wonder if he'll work at the West side parks in the future???


Now here's something I didn't get a chance to do last time I was in Florida. Orlando isn't too terribly far from the Kennedy Space Center. I would love to just tour the place, but as it turns out, there is going to be a shuttle launch the week we're there!!! Of course we'll have to go to that!!!

I'm so looking forward to this trip. It would be cool, since we're in Orlando, to visit with a dear friend who has gone ghost on me. It's OK. I understand that everyone goes disappearing,
into the greatest grey...