The Disneymoon - October/November 2012 About This Page:

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WDW 2012 – The Disneymoon!

WHO :
Carolyn – Trip Planner, 12th trip to WDW
DH – Husband of above, 5th trip to WDW

WHEN :
Florida : Saturday 27 October to Saturday 10 November 2012
Dallas/Austin : Saturday 10 November to Tuesday 20 November 2012

ACCOMMODATION :
Florida : Disney’s Saratoga Springs Resort
Dallas/Austin : Stay with family, rent RV

PLANNING

In September 2011, and before we went to the USA for our big, month-long trip in October 2011, we became aware that Disney were once again offering UK residents a special discounted offer on the older DVC resorts, plus free dining for 2012. We collectively have the backbone of an amoeba, so we had a quick discussion about it and straight away booked for another trip in mid-October. However, a few weeks later, the Formula 1 race calendar was released for 2012, and we realised that a new race was scheduled for Austin, Texas in mid-November. Being Formula 1 fans, we worked out the logistics, and were able to move the trip to Disney onwards by a couple of weeks. Therefore, this trip will be 2 weeks in WDW, followed by a flight to Dallas, stay with my brother and his family for a few days, before we hire an RV and drive down to Austin for the Formula 1. My brother originally said he would join us for the race weekend with his 2 boys, and that they would all camp with us. This would be followed by driving back from Austin to Dallas, a flight back from Dallas to Orlando, and then back to the UK on the same day.

This trip took a massive amount of planning – from booking flights from and then back to the UK, internal flights to and from Dallas, RV hire, campground booking, the Disney part of the trip, tickets to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party, Universal’s Halloween Horror nights, (purely because one of the houses belongs to Alice Cooper!), Kennedy Space Centre, and Sea World. We also had all the dining to plan and then book.

Once we had got engaged in October 2011, we decided that as we already had this holiday booked, we might as well turn it into a honeymoon. Therefore, in order to make the holiday extra special, we were also interested in doing the Behind the Seeds Tour, and in picking up the Photopass package.

We booked a hire car through the same company we have used previously, and as soon as the Photopass Plus package was offered at a discounted rate for pre-purchase, we got that too. We decided to book the BTS tour once we got to Florida. Everything booked, (including flights from the UK at a shockingly high price!), dining decided on and reservations made, RV hire sorted and campground found and booked, (again, at a very high cost – people clearly looking to make a fast buck out of folks wanting to visit the F1!), F1 general admission tickets bought, all we had to do then was wait for October to come round!

In the meantime, we got married in June 2012 at a little Registry Office in Cheltenham, with a very small group of family and friends, and then took them all to a small, local music festival where we had set up a marquee in the camping fields. My daughter had decorated the marquee with pretty lights, balloons and banners, and we provided lots of good food, and wine and beer. We had hired tables and chairs from the festival organisers, and as we arrived at the marquee, after all the guests, we were welcomed with hand-held confetti cannons! (My daughter works in pyrotechnics!) We had a truly wonderful day, everyone enjoyed themselves immensely.

We then had tickets for some of the Olympics and Paralympics events in London throughout the summer, so we had a very busy year all told!

On Wednesday 03 October, I got home from work to find an envelope waiting for me, marked “The Magic Starts Here!” Inside, there was a confirmation booking letter, accommodation, dining & ticket vouchers, a book of discount vouchers, an A-Z Guide (which bizarrely only went up to U), and “The Little Book of Magic”, which was a kind of mini guidebook. On checking the confirmation letter, however, I realised it said that although I should have received a voucher for 20% off Characters in Flight rides at Downtown Disney, Characters in Flight was no longer in operation at Downtown Disney. I was aware that the balloon had been removed a little while ago, but had read only this week that it had been replaced with a new one, which was expected to be taking bookings for guest flights within a week. I rang the Disney Holiday helpline, who told me it would be next year at the earliest before the balloon would be fully operational. However, with 3 weeks to go before we left for America, we still had time to get a voucher from them if it became clear that the balloon was working before then.

Shortly afterwards, the balloon did indeed appear to be operational again, (which I discovered thanks to various Disney fan sites and a live webcam site!), so I once again rang the Disney Holiday helpline. They told me that as my vacation was occurring shortly, there wouldn’t be time to send me a new voucher, so they would ensure it was waiting for me at Saratoga Springs on my arrival.

DAY ONE – SATURDAY 27 OCTOBER
Plan – Drive to Manchester airport, fly to Florida, check-in at Saratoga Springs
Actual – So I had set the alarm last night to go off at 4.50 a.m., as we wanted to be leaving the house by 5.30 a.m. for our drive to Manchester. However, I suddenly woke up this morning and slowly became aware that it was getting light outside – WHAT TIME IS IT?? It was 6.00 a.m.!! (I later realised that I had set the alarm to go off Monday to Friday, and this was Saturday!) A bit worrying but no real panic, we had plenty of time and it was only an hour and a half drive to the airport. We had the world’s quickest wash and dress, grabbed coffee, and were out of the door and packing the car by 6.30 a.m. The drive went quickly and in just over an hour we were pulling into the pre-booked car park near the airport.

I had checked us in with Virgin Atlantic the day before, and had our boarding passes, so we had to just find the bag drop desk and check in our cases. We had one case each, plus one empty one packed inside DH’s case for the return journey, which I had already paid for separately with the airline. We also had a small wheeled case each as hand luggage, and my travel handbag, which was quite large but still small enough to fit under the plane seats.

Luggage-less, we now headed through customs and into the airport in search of breakfast. We found a Frankie & Benny’s, and DH had a traditional breakfast, (bacon, egg, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms, hash brown), and I had scrambled eggs on toast. We both had coffee. It was very good, if rather expensive, but took ages to get to us and I was a bit worried about the time! However, we were finished by around 9.45 a.m., and as boarding was due to start shortly, we quickly made our way to the gate, stopping off at W H Smiths on the way to pick up my traditional magazine and mints before boarding. (On a side note, I swear every time I fly that this will be the last time I buy a magazine like this – I usually pick up some expensive, luxurious, glossy fashion and beauty magazine that I wouldn’t normally dream of reading, because it is a special occasion of going on holiday and I like to treat myself. However, I end up lugging this great big thing across the world with me, whilst occasionally flicking through the first third of it, really irritated that it is nothing but adverts; then I read the odd page, really irritated that none of the fashion pages appeal to me or show things that will fit me; then I get really irritated by this season’s “must have” make-up (I don’t wear make-up); finishing off by getting really irritated at the air-head celebrities that make up the last readable bit of the mag. At this point, I usually leave it in the hotel room or at the return airport somewhere! Note to self : next time I fly, forget the glossy magazine!!)

Boarding was smooth and quick, and we took off a little early. We amused ourselves by watching a couple of films together, (Brave, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, both of which were lovely films), reading, and playing some video games on the seat-back TVs. The food on the flight was fine, standard fare really, and about 5½ hours into the flight we began to watch another film, “The Hunger Games”. However, we shortly began to experience some severe turbulence, which just seemed to get worse and worse. Apparently, because we were flying south alongside Canada and the East coast of the USA, we were being buffeted by Hurricane Sandy. After a couple of hours of this, people began getting quite nauseous all round the plane, which was horrible. About 30 mins out of Orlando, there was a minor incident where a passenger near the front began to choke on a boiled sweet; however, we didn’t know what was happening, all we knew was that there was massive turbulence and suddenly 3 or 4 flight attendants ran down the aisle past our seats – this made us over-react and panic somewhat, convinced the plane was going to crash! (I am a rather nervous flyer!) Anyway, things settled down a little and despite the shuddering of the plane, we managed to land safely and slightly early (with kids throwing up all around us!) We were so glad to get off that flight.

Customs was very quick and quite friendly, and there was the usual Illuminations music playing in the Customs Hall, which was lovely. While we were in the queue waiting to be seen, I got chatting to a young lad and his grandmother, who had never visited Disney World before, so I was able to give them some hints and tips about visiting for the first time. (DH was standing behind me, smirking and muttering “you just can’t help yourself, can you!” I ignored him).

Our luggage came out surprisingly quickly too, and we were soon riding the monorail to the main terminal building. We made our way to Alamo to collect the hire car, and were pleasantly surprised that just like last year, we were not hassled to upgrade either the vehicle or the insurance by the car hire operative. We were directed to the parking garage and told which row to pick a car from. Originally, and looking for something ‘American’, we had chosen a Pontiac G5; however, they were no longer available so in the end we opted for a bright red Chrysler Sebring with a black interior. (We had had a Sebring in 2010, and really liked it).

We loaded up the car with our luggage and following our pre-printed directions, began the drive to Saratoga Springs. We did make one small mistake and didn’t take the left hand turn that we were supposed to, but we turned the car around, went back, and carried on in the correct direction. Soon we were driving under the purple arches, feeling very happy indeed! The weather was very warm and sunny (unlike when we had left the UK, where it was 28 degrees Fahrenheit when we parked the car!)

We were very impressed with the look of Saratoga Springs overall, and we parked up in the 30 min parking bay and went into reception to check-in. We were assisted very quickly, and assigned room 1136 in Congress Parks. (We mentioned that we were on our honeymoon, and were given loads of celebration badges). There was a letter from the Disney Travel Company waiting for us, that contained a new book of discount vouchers, including one for 20% off Characters in Flight tickets, as promised. We walked through to The Artist’s Palette to pick up our free refillable mugs, and got some coffee in them to take with us.

We got back in the car and drove round to Congress Parks, being utterly amazed at how close we were to Downtown Disney – we could see the Rainforest Café and the Characters in Flight balloon on the other side of the lake that we were beside. We found our room and dragged all our luggage the short walk to it from the car park. Wow! The room was gorgeous – very big, and on the ground floor, with a patio area outside the French doors. It was all decorated in brown and green, themed to horse racing, and there were cushions on the sofa-bed that had prints of Disney cartoon horses on them – cute!

We took quick showers, did some minimal unpacking, and then drove to Fort Wilderness for our dinner reservation at Trails End. We love this restaurant, and it has become a tradition of ours to have our first meal there each visit. We checked in and then sat in the rockers on the porch to wait for our pager to go off, which it did within about 10 mins. We were starving, and once seated quickly got some fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, gravy, pulled pork and ribs, with DH also getting a little salad too. The pork and ribs were a lot more smoky-flavoured and less sweet than I had previously had from Trails End, and I wasn’t overly keen on the flavour, so DH finished those off for me. We had a small amount of seconds, then moved onto dessert, which was a small portion of fruit cobbler for both of us.

It was all very delicious, and we finished our glasses of Sprite, settled the bill with 2 table service credits, and slowly made our way to the beach area in time for Wishes from the Magic Kingdom at 9.00 p.m. (We did wonder whether we were watching Happy HalloWishes, as there seemed to be a lot of very bright orange and yellow fireworks! However, upon checking the dates of the Halloween party later, it would appear that they seem to have just jazzed up the regular fireworks a bit. They just seemed way more colourful than usual). Afterwards, we drove back to Saratoga Springs for more unpacking, a little TV, updating notes, and then bed. What a long, tiring, but wonderful day.

DAY TWO – SUNDAY 28 OCTOBER
Plan – Epcot, Universal Studios
Actual – We were up quite early this morning, and whilst I showered, DH finished his unpacking. Then while he showered, I made coffee, and when he was dressed, we sat on our patio to drink it, which faced Downtown and provided a lovely view.

We made a brief stop at Artist’s Palette to fill up our refillable mugs with coffee, before heading out to our favourite park - Epcot, which was a very short drive away, getting there shortly after rope-drop. We were very excited to be there for the Food & Wine Festival, which we love!

I had brought the Photopass voucher with me, and as we stepped through the turnstiles, we paused to have a couple of pictures taken, having them loaded onto a temporary card. We then went to the Photo Centre to collect our proper card, and had the photos transferred to it.

Next we headed for Living with the Land, picked up Fast Passes for Soarin’, then got in the standby line, which was showing a 30 minute wait but was actually less than 20 mins. We were seated in the third row, and during the ride, noticed some large strands of something white and floaty on the screen, which was a little distracting. Off there, round to the standby queue again, this time showing 25 mins, but took the same time as before to get through. We got the first row this time. We do love this ride!

We were ready for some breakfast now, so went into Sunshine Seasons where we picked up 2 adult breakfast platters and coffee for 2 Quick Service credits. This was bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes, French toast, and a biscuit – yum! Very tasty and exactly what we needed.

After we had finished eating, we strolled back round to Soarin’ to use our FPs, although the queue still took 15 mins to get to the front of. We got row 3 again, which was fine.

We finally left The Land via a restroom break, and walked over to Mousegear in search of Bride & Groom ear-hats, and a key-ring to keep the room safe key on. We got lovely ears, mine are white and sequinned with a veil down the back, and DH’s are a black and white top hat and tuxedo, very smart! The key-ring I chose was a diamante Mickey head and ears shape, (although within a week the diamantes had started to fall out and I had to return it for a refund!).

We were beginning to feel the heat now, so ducked into Club Cool for a refreshing sample of drinks. While we were in there, we got chatting to a lovely lady from New Jersey, who was down visiting her son, who was a parade Cast Member at the Magic Kingdom. Instigated by her, a lengthy and hilarious discussion about the British dessert called Spotted Dick ensued, with me also attempting to explain to her exactly why us Brits find the words “Fanny Pack” amusing! Nice lady.

The park seemed really quiet today. We walked round to Spaceship Earth which had a 10 min wait and was fun as always, then headed over to Mission Space (green), which was also showing as 10 mins but was a straight walk-on. After this, we walked dejectedly round to the closed Test Track so that DH could stand near the hoardings and sob quietly (this is his favourite ride EVER), before checking out the new test car that is merely a giant advert for Coca Cola nearby.

We then began our slow stroll around World Showcase, stopping for coffee near America, and also stopping for Photopass photographers as we went. We checked out the process for selecting a pearl in Japan, as this is something I intend to do at some point this trip, and went to see the Terracotta Warriors model in China, which we have always somehow missed up to now. We were also on the lookout for Epcot 30th Anniversary pins along the way, but only saw them in one place, the pin station near Spaceship Earth, so got one from there.

It was by now time for our 4.00 p.m. reservation at the Garden Grill, so we checked in, along with what seemed like a hundred other guests, and sat with our pager along the wall near the restrooms and lift. We were seated quite quickly, and thoroughly enjoyed our dinner there, although were initially somewhat dismayed that the dessert had changed from seasonal fruit cobbler, to some kind of warm cake thing, which turned out to be AMAZING! We finished off the meat and fish platter, then requested more turkey and stuffing, which our server happily brought to us. The stuffing in particular was very, very good. We met the usual characters during dinner, Farmer Mickey being our favourite! Chip & Dale didn’t seem to be too mischievous today, and Pluto was really playful.

After dinner was over, we left the park and drove back to our resort. We picked up some more cash, changed our clothes for Halloween outfits, and headed out to Universal Studios for our very first Halloween Horror Nights event. DH was wearing a bright orange t-shirt that he had drawn a design on to commemorate HHN and Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party, (which we were attending a few days later), his Groom ears, and an orange shirt with “psycho ward” details on it. I had another bright orange t-shirt, on which I had drawn big bats with pointy teeth, a spider dangling from his web, and the words “If you can read this, then you are blissfully unaware of what is CREEPING up behind you!” across the front. I also wrote, in smaller letters, “I’m with PSYCHO!” and an arrow across the lower back. We set off for Universal at around 5.45 p.m.

The event was due to start at 6, and by the time we got there the queue of cars to get in was huge! It took us ages to park, but once we had found somewhere (Spiderman 356), we got out of the car and I proceeded to draw “Alice Cooper” eyes on DH with a make-up pencil, which completed his psycho look for the night. We then had to queue to get into the park, which was a very unpleasant experience. It was very crowded and hot, and we were given conflicting information regarding a bottle of Sprite I had clipped to my bag at the time. One security officer told me I could take it in, (once she had sniffed the contents and ascertained it was indeed Sprite), but the next security officer told me I couldn’t take it in and would have to throw it away or drink it before entering. We tried to explain it had already been cleared by someone else, but she wasn’t interested. It all got a bit heated, and we shared most of the Sprite before she eventually just waved us through with about a quarter of a bottle left. Not the most positive start to the evening.

With hindsight we should have picked up a map to the houses at this point, but because we had never attended this event before, we didn’t know how the whole thing worked. The lighting levels in the park were extremely low, making it hard to get your bearings, and we had no idea as to which direction to go in to find the houses we were interested in (Penn & Teller, and Alice Cooper). The theming and atmosphere was incredible, there were gravestones and broken bits of building set up throughout the walkways, heavy mist rolling along the ground, vast areas of darkness, and the ‘streetmosphere’ actors were knicker-wettingly terrifying! You would be walking warily along a walkway, and suddenly the person you could see out of the corner of your eye walking next to you would turn and run towards you, waving their arms and screaming at you – aargghh!! Or you would round a corner and see this thing with a pumpkin head running towards you, rattling something in their hands and yelling at you! Neither of us are very keen on scary stuff, (me in particular), and we found the whole experience to be very scary indeed. Mind you, there was one hysterical (for me!) moment, when DH managed to avoid a grim reaper on stilts menacing him, only to completely miss the zombie on the ground that lunged towards his ankles – DH screamed like a girl, swore, and leapt upwards by around 3 feet! It was so funny, I nearly fell over laughing, and couldn’t see properly through the tears streaming down my face!

A bit further on, there was a glass coffin with a ‘decomposing’ corpse in it that was writhing around, and the coffin was full of rats. I have to confess that the rats were really cute! Little twitchy noses and whiskers, and fluffy paws! I am guessing that we weren’t supposed to find them cute, though.

Anyway, eventually we managed to find a queue for a ‘house’ (which was actually a backstage warehouse), and having no idea what was in there or where else to go, we joined the 40 minute-long queue. It led to The House of Horrors, and was basically a maze of rooms that you had to walk through whilst actors and props did their best to scare the bejaysus out of you. And it worked, too! Nearly frightened us to death. Someone horrible dropped out of the ceiling towards us at one point! We barely got out of there alive, and discovered that the next house across was the Alice Cooper one, so we joined the even longer queue for that. While we were waiting, DH entertained us both by adopting his ‘psycho’ stance – he slumped slightly, and stared hard at people in line with big, starey eyes and a small, mad smile. It made people laugh but also edge away from him slightly, which was really funny!

The Alice Cooper house was GREAT! We loved it! We sang along to the music all the way round, and knew EXACTLY what to expect as we are very familiar with both Alice’s music and his shows; this meant we understood all the little scenarios, and didn’t even worry when we stumbled into the spider room! A scare actor went to jump out at us at one point, but spotted DH’s eye make-up and just grinned at us instead, putting up his thumbs to DH! The whole house was so much fun, apart from the very end – when suddenly a psycho (that wasn’t DH!) ran at me from behind some mirrors and chased me screaming out the back door!! We collapsed with laughter and exhaustion as we walked away, hanging onto each other for support.

We were completely shattered by now. It was nearing 11.00 p.m., and it was only our second day in the USA, so the time difference was catching up with us. We had been on our feet all day and evening, and the sheer terror of HHN had also tired us out – it was so hard to walk around in a relaxed manner when things kept jumping out at you! We wandered around a bit more, finally finding Penn & Teller’s house, but it had a 75 minute wait so we sadly decided not to visit, thinking that we just couldn’t stand in another queue for that long. Someone nearby was studying a map and I tried to peer at it over their shoulder; they felt sorry for us and gave us their spare map. We had a look at it but decided that the crowds were just too heavy and we were exhausted, so after a quick look around the Men in Black shop (more to get into somewhere light than anything else!), and buying a souvenir Alice Cooper HHN t-shirt for DH, we called it a day and left.

Overall, we thought it was an interesting experience, and whilst we loved the AC house, I’m not sure we would repeat the event again, as it was just too crowded, busy, and overall darned scary for us!

We got back to SS too late for coffee refills, so we just crawled into bed and hoped we wouldn’t have nightmares that night!

DAY THREE – MONDAY 29 OCTOBER
Plan – Magic Kingdom
Actual – After a blissfully nightmare-free night, we were up early this morning. Usual coffee, showers, picking up more coffee in refillable mugs, etc., and we were on our way to the Magic Kingdom. On our arrival, we admired the lovely Halloween decorations and posed for a couple of Photopass photographers, before signing up for the Sorcerer’s of the Magic Kingdom game. We didn’t really think that we would take part in this, but it is nice to have a couple of packs of the collector’s cards, and if we decided to take part later, at least we had the option to do so. (We never did actually do this!)

Next we headed into the Main Street Confectionary, picking up Rice Krispie treats for breakfast, which we ate whilst sat on a quiet little bench in a side street off Main Street.

Today, I was wearing a guest nametag with my name on it that I had purchased about 12 years ago from a shop in MGM studios, with a tiny picture of Tigger on it. It is shaped exactly like a CM nametag but is coloured green, and I love it – it always gets so much attention from cast members, who always want to know where I got it from! I don’t think the shop sold them for very long, as I never saw them again after the year I bought mine.

Anyway, breakfast over, and so the exploration began. First of all, we walked round to Adventureland and walked straight on to the Jungle Cruise (showing 5 min wait), which was fun as we hadn’t done that ride for several years. Pirates of the Caribbean was next, (10 mins), and again was a straight walk on. Round to the Haunted Mansion (15 mins), and straight in there. Where were all the people?? After that, we had a quick look around The Yankee Trader, (planning to buy some kitchenware at some point this week or next), then went to the Liberty Tree Inn for our midday reservation.

This was our first visit here, and we really liked it! We were seated within 5 mins, and I ordered the Freedom Pasta, (Fusilli Pasta with Sauteed Chicken, Seasonal Vegetables, and Mushrooms tossed in a Cream Sauce),and DH had the Angus Cheeseburger (topped with bacon, cheddar and provolone, served with tavern fries). We had Sprite and pomegranate lemonade to drink. Dessert was Martha Washington’s cake (a slice of rich chocolate cake, layered with a liberating chocolate coffee icing; yummy! But very rich), and Ooey-Gooey Toffee Cake (vanilla cake with a gooey toffee filling, vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce; very sticky, nice, but EXTREMELY sweet!). Two table service credits later, we were about to leave, when our server came over and handed us a beautiful Mickey & Minnie Christmas tree decoration that they had bought for us as a honeymoon gift! How kind. We had been wearing our Happily Ever After badges and our Bride & Groom ears (although I wore mine more than he wore his!), and had already received many good wishes and ‘congratulations’ from cast members and guests alike.

After lunch we walked slowly round towards New Fantasyland, relaxing and letting our food go down. We admired the new castle walls, and then DH scuttled off a little way to take some photos while I stood at the barrier across the entrance to NF and gazed longingly in. There were cast members guarding the entranceway, and to enter you had to be either a cast member yourself, or a member of their family, and had to be pre-registered and wearing a wristband. I was “ooh-ing!” at the sight of the Beast’s castle, when a tall cast member wearing a CM nametag that identified her as ‘Caroline’ came over to me. She spotted my nametag, and addressing me by name, asked what I was looking at. I told her that I was admiring the wonderful new expansion area, and that I couldn’t wait to be able to explore it when it opened. She then asked if it was a special occasion as I was wearing Bride ears, and I explained that we were on our honeymoon. She asked where my Prince was, and as I was telling her that he was taking photos somewhere, he reappeared and came over to us. Caroline asked us if we had eaten yet, and we told her we had just had lunch at the Liberty Tree Inn. She then told us to follow her, weaved her way round the barrier, then said “Goodbye!” and began to walk away from us, back out again! We looked at her, each other, then back at her again – what?? “Off you go, enjoy yourselves!” she said.

Did she really mean this? HAS SHE JUST LET US INTO THE NEW FANTASYLAND THAT ISN’T EVEN OPEN YET??

Yes, she had. She actually let us in when we weren’t cast members or family or anyone special. We could not believe this! After thanking her profusely, we walked slowly down the pathway past the mine train construction area and towards the Be Our Guest restaurant. I am guessing that had we not eaten already, we could have dined there – drat! Still, we weren’t to know this was going to happen.

I can’t describe how we felt at that moment – the sun was shining, the sky was clear and blue, and we were strolling towards a brand new area of Walt Disney World that we weren’t supposed to be in yet. There were a few other people around, but it was certainly not crowded by any means.

We walked over the bridge, which was beautiful in itself. The landscaping and architecture in this area is simply stunning, so pretty, and so detailed! We stopped and took some photos of the gargoyles on the bridge, (apparently all named ‘Frank’), before stepping into the restaurant foyer. There is a beautiful stained glass mosaic of Belle and the Beast just inside the doorway, and again the detail of the stonework here is amazing. DH was busily taking photos when I stepped up to the barrier at the entrance to the Ballroom, and quietly began to cry.

I had never seen anything like it in my life – picture if you can the Ballroom in the film, with the chandeliers and soft lighting and beautiful floor – this room was EXACTLY the same as that. I just could not believe how breathtaking this room was, and it didn’t take long for another cast member to notice me blubbing like a baby. She came over to me and asked if I was okay. I just about managed to mumble something like “oh my life, this is so beautiful, I never expected it to be this amazing” blub, blub. She smiled and beckoned to another cast member, and then asked him to give us a guided tour. So he did.

He opened up the barrier, and led us through each room of the restaurant, explaining and pointing out everything as we went. The huge Belle and the Beast music box in the Rose Gallery; the candles that the servers give to you when you place your order, that you can put on ANY table in the room and your server and meal will find you; the mysterious West Wing with its lightning storm every 15 or 20 mins, where the pictures change in front of your eyes and the rose in its glass case loses a petal at a time. He led us back into the Ballroom and made us look outside through the windows to see snow softly falling, and explained to us how even at a quick- service lunch serving, your meal is brought to you, rather than you collecting it yourself. He was wonderful, attentive and friendly, and clearly totally dedicated to working in this restaurant. He was disappointed to hear we had already dined and told us that we could indeed have eaten there today! Unbelievable.

We finally left the restaurant, having taken many photos, thanking every cast member we met, and completely in awe of just what Disney Imagineers have created here.

We then walked back a little to have a look at Belle’s cottage and garden, then went inside the cottage to experience Enchanted Tales with Belle. This is a really cute little interactive story-telling session that both kids and adults can be involved in. The technology that brings you the talking Madame Wardrobe and Lumiere is incredible, at no point does this not look real! The experience of stepping through the magic portal is just wonderful, I have no idea how the Imagineers have done this but the result is breathtaking.

We really enjoyed this, and afterwards we moved round to explore Belle’s Village. We took some photos in Gaston’s Tavern, which is a really fun place, and had a look round a shop there too. We spotted Gaston, who was posing for photos (and favouring the ladies!), and hurried over to meet him. He was wonderfully in character, flirting with all the females and being very full of himself! He was really funny. We got some Photopass photos taken with him, and then walked down to Under the Sea - Journey of the Little Mermaid. This area is also beautifully done, with immense detail. The queue area is interactive with a fun and cute little game involving a busy little crab, on screens placed periodically throughout the area. There was no queue and we walked straight in, although we were able to walk slowly and take lots of photos as there was no-one behind us.

We boarded our clam shell and thoroughly enjoyed the ride, which is very colourful with lots to look at and admire. It wasn’t quite as ‘dark’ as we thought it would be, (read ‘scary’), but is extremely well done and we loved it.

Overall, we spent most of the afternoon in the New Fantasyland area, exploring and taking photos as much as we wanted to without having to battle the massive crowds that this area will gather when it opens shortly, so we felt extremely privileged to have been given this opportunity. As we made our way around the barrier at the entrance, we spotted Caroline again, and went over to give her a hug and say thank you. She appeared to be a member of management, as she seemed to be in charge of a group of trainee CMs, and we could not thank her enough for her kindness.

After this, we headed into the new Storybook Circus area, and had a quick look around, although it was very hot and crowded in there. I would have liked to explore the new Dumbo section, maybe even going on the ride, but it was just too crowded, so we gave up and caught the Railroad train to Frontierland.

We picked up Fastpasses for Big Thunder Mountain, then went against our normal touring rules of waiting for no longer than 20 mins per ride and joined the standby queue, which was showing a 40 min wait. However, something kept going wrong with the ride because the queue kept stopping and it took us an hour to get to the front of the line! We really enjoyed our Wildest Ride in the Wilderness, though, when we finally got there!

We walked over to Tomorrowland next, going straight into the Carousel of Progress, which we love, followed by a quick trip around on the TTA. Back over to BTM to use our Fastpasses, and we were on the ride really quickly this time! Quick trip to Pirates next, with a 15 min wait advertised but almost a straight walk-on.

It was now time for our dinner reservation at Crystal Palace, so we checked in there and waited around 10 mins to be seated. The food was, as usual, fantastic. We sampled salads, carved meats, macaroni & cheese, mashed potato, bread, pasta, etc. The jasmine rice wasn’t there any longer, which was a shame, but the dressing I adore was still there – mandarin, honey, sesame and zinfandel – gorgeous! We finished off with an array of tiny, bite-size desserts. During the meal we were visited by Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and Tigger, who bounced up and down with excitement and kept pointing at me when he saw my nametag with his picture on it!

We were finished there, and were about to ask for the bill, when our server brought us out another dessert plate! It had chocolate-dipped strawberries and raspberries, salted caramel chocolate balls, Pooh drawn in chocolate, tiny ‘hidden Mickeys’ drawn in chocolate, and a big chocolate disc with “Congratulations!” written on it. He said it was from the servers to celebrate our honeymoon! We thanked him profusely, and although we were already full to bursting, somehow managed to eat everything on the plate. We had never had salted caramel chocolate before, and were delighted to be able to try it – we loved it! The salt crystals balanced out the sweetness of the caramel perfectly.

We waddled out of there just in time to go into the preferred viewing area for Wishes, having received a voucher for this from Disney Holidays in our vacation package. (The CM refused to actually take the voucher from us, saying we could keep it as a souvenir or to use again!) The seats were all taken but we stood near a railing to watch the fireworks, which were beautiful as always.

Afterwards, we exited into a very, very crowded Main Street. The park was open until midnight, but we were too tired to stay any longer, it being around 10.00 p.m. by now, so we left the park and headed to the Ferry, which was busy but quite quick to load.

Back to SS, refillable coffee (hot chocolate for me!), TV and bed. Another wonderful day.

DAY FOUR – TUESDAY 30 OCTOBER
Plan – Blizzard Beach, Winter Summerland Golf
Actual – This was to be our first relaxing day, so we slept in a bit, watched some TV, and relaxed until around 11.00 a.m. We decided to hold off on the water park and golf today, as we just needed to relax a bit. We drove to Denny’s on the 192 for breakfast/lunch, where I had the Build Your Own Slam, (bacon, sausage, hash browns, biscuit, pancakes), and DH got the Lumberjack Slam. All was very delicious.

Next we drove to the Super Wal-Mart to pick up some bottled water, (we got one large bottle to keep in the fridge and to keep topping up our small bottles with), powdered flavourings, coffee bags, coffee mate, (we were getting through our hotel supplies quite quickly and didn’t like to keep asking for more each day!), a phone credit card, (I had purchased an AT&T Go Phone on eBay before we left home, as it is cheaper to do this than to take my own phone), and an extra SD memory card for DH’s camera as he was taking a few more photos than he had anticipated this year!

We took this lot back to SS, then left the car there and walked round to Downtown Disney, which was a lovely 5 min walk from our room, alongside the lake. Using a tip that I had picked up from my sister last year, we went to Earl of Sandwich to pick up lunch for tomorrow, (a Montagu and an Hawaiian BBQ, with bottles of Sprite, a peanut butter brownie, and an apple & cinnamon muffin), using two counter service credits. We looked around the pin store, Once upon a Toy, and Ghiradelli’s, (where we got a sample of Milk Chocolate Pumpkin Spice – yuck! But DH loved them!), as one of the essential gifts we needed to take back with us was large tubs of chocolate buttons. However, they didn’t have any at all, not even the small tubs! We asked if they had any in stock, and after checking a cupboard, a staff member told us they were indeed out of stock. However, she reassured us that they had new deliveries every day and to be sure and check back again. World of Disney was next, where we picked up a pack of postcards as I had to send some to various people for a Fairy Godmailer. We noticed the lack of choice now in the postcards, I guess not many people send them any more.

We were finished at Downtown, so walked back to our room, where DH took a nap and I wrote some postcards. At around 5.00 p.m. we began to get ready to head over to Epcot, where we had a 7.00 p.m. reservation at Via Napoli, our first visit there.

When we arrived at Epcot we went for a quick spin on Spaceship Earth first, as there was virtually no queue, before checking in at the restaurant. Check in was a bit of a zoo, it seemed to be really busy. People were checking in and then just standing at the desk, without moving away for other people to be able to get to the desk, and there seemed to be loads of kids running around everywhere. Eventually, we were seated in the conservatory area, which has quite a low ceiling and was INCREDIBLY noisy! There were screaming babies, yelling kids, people talking really loudly, and we couldn’t hear or understand our server properly, as he had a very strong Italian accent.

We ordered drinks, opting for soft drinks that weren’t on the dining plan. I had a lemon San Pelligrino, and DH ordered some sort of blood orange juice drink. They arrived as we were studying the menu, and were very odd – DH’s was watery and a bit weird, and mine had a nasty, chemically taste to it. I love this drink normally, I have it a lot at home, but this tasted as though it had been put in a glass that was still full of dishwasher water, it was vile. When the server came back to take our food order, I asked him to change my drink for a Sprite, which he happily did, and didn’t charge us for the original drink. DH just drank his blood orange stuff, he said it was just ‘okay’.

We decided on : DH -Mezze Rigatoni alla Creme con Pollo - cream, chicken and peas with pasta, me – pizza : Prosciutto e Melone - parma ham, cantelope. We both ordered Tiramisu as dessert. The food arrived quite quickly, although we had been ‘entertained’ while we waited for it by a very small child who fell, head first, off her booster seat on a chair. She just skimmed the floor with her head, and was caught up in the restraints. Needless to say, she screamed the place down. She seemed to be unhurt, but was clearly traumatised by the whole event. Unfortunately, her parents chose to attempt to pacify her in the restaurant, rather than taking her somewhere a bit quieter, which meant that whilst we felt sorry for her and the family, we were all subjected to a prolonged period of her screaming in terror. She never seemed to settle down again after that, as every now and again she would begin to cry loudly again.

Our dinner was superb, full of flavour and very fresh tasting. I had to ask for a ‘to go’ box for about half of the pizza, it was enormous! The Tiramisu was absolutely amazing – huge portions, and a very strong coffee flavour, (but not bitter). It was gorgeous!

Between courses I visited the restroom, and was horrified by the condition of it – it was filthy dirty, strewn with litter and paper towels, and smelt. This was something we are not used to in a Disney park! To get to the restrooms, I had had to walk through the main restaurant, which was incredibly hot as food is cooked in there, and was also very noisy, like our conservatory room.

We did enjoy our food here, it was superb, but we probably would not choose to eat here again. I know it sounds as if I am being terribly negative about the restaurant, but we just did not enjoy the level of noise and clamour in there, I’m afraid. We also felt it was very over-priced for the style of dining and type of food offered, as the bill came to over $75! (Although, obviously, we just left 2 table service credits plus a tip).

As we left the restaurant, Billy Ocean was just finishing his Eat to the Beat set, and we sat at the back of the auditorium and sang happily along to “When the going gets tough”, and his final number, “Caribbean Queen”, which was great fun. After this, we walked slowly back round towards Morocco, which is where the preferred viewing area is for Illuminations, where we handed over our voucher and joined two other couples waiting for the fireworks. We are convinced there are new fireworks in this display as well as in Wishes, as once again there seemed to be a lot of very bright yellow and orange fireworks. The show was beautiful, as always.

As we finally walked back through Epcot towards Spaceship Earth, someone tapped me on the shoulder and it turned out to be the lovely lady we had met a couple of days ago in Club Cool! We chatted a little again, and she told us to be sure and watch out for her son when we went to the Halloween Party at the Magic Kingdom – apparently, he is the tall hitchhiking ghost in the parade!

Eventually, we arrived back at SS, stopping off for coffee and hot chocolate on the way, and watched a little TV before bedtime.

DAY FIVE – WEDNESDAY 31 OCTOBER
Plan – Sea World, Mickey’s Not Very Scary Halloween Party
Actual – Our wake-up call, set last night before we fell asleep, was 20 mins late this morning! Odd, that has never happened before. Anyway, we got up and showered, had last night’s leftover pizza for breakfast, which warmed up lovely in the microwave, and collected our picnic lunch out of the fridge.

We drove to The Artist’s Palette and got some coffee in our refillable mugs, picking up a couple of peanut butter cookies with snack credits to have later, and then drove to Sea World. We had been unsure as to whether we would be visiting this park on this particular trip, so hadn’t bought tickets in advance. However, after a chat about it yesterday, we decided we would go.

We parked the car and found the automated ticket booths, where we purchased two adult single-day tickets, and picked up a map.

The park was really quiet today, it was great. We walked round and stroked the stingrays, looked at the dolphins and the manatees, ate our cookies, visited some sea turtles and some very cute, tiny alligators! We also saw the Shark Encounter and the seal exhibition, before sitting down on a bench near Journey to Atlantis to have our picnic lunch, which we had picked up yesterday from Earl of Sandwich.

After this we went to see the sealion and otter show, which was very good, although made SUPERB by the mime who entertains the crowds before the show! This guy is hysterical, we love him! One new thing we saw him do today was to follow a man with a rather expansive girth, and behind his back make baby-cradled-in-arms movements!! He also did his usual thing of escorting people across the stadium and out the other side, when they thought he was taking them to a seat, stole things out of people’s backpacks, pushed people in wheelchairs straight out the exit, and generally created trouble everywhere – he is just brilliant!

Next up was the dolphin show, (also good fun), and then we picked up some coffee before being seated for the Shamu show, “One Ocean”. This was really, really good, and DH managed to get some amazing photos of all 6 whales jumping out of the water at the same time!

We wanted to see the Wild Arctic exhibit with the polar bears and beluga whales, but it was closed for refurbishment, so we decided to leave at that point, after a quick look around the shop.

We were headed for the Magic Kingdom tonight for our Mickey’s Not Very Scary Halloween Party, and we arrived around 6.00 p.m.. Parking wasn’t too bad, and we were soon in the park. As expected, it was very crowded! We had prepared ourselves for this though, knowing that the actual 31st October party would be very busy. We were amazed at the guest costumes, they were so detailed and people had gone to so much trouble, it was lovely!

We fought our way through the crowds up Main Street, and made our way to the Haunted Mansion. Wow! The CM’s make-up was really good, extra dark and scary, and Madame Leota was sitting on the front lawn of the Mansion talking to people! There was piped-in swirly smoke, and the music seemed a bit more ominous than normal around the area. When we exited the ride, we queued up near the hearse to have Photopass pictures taken, and when we viewed them afterwards, there were two different ones – one with a ghost driving the hearse, and one with the three hitchhiking ghosts in it. We had been told to pose a couple of different ways, which then looked really good with the ghosts in the pictures!

We were quite hungry by now, so went to Pecos Bills for yummy Deluxe Cheeseburgers and fries, plus coffee. We love the toppings bar in here! While we were sat outside having our dinner, we saw the parade go by, although we didn’t have a very good view as we were sitting down, but we did see the headless horseman, which was great! The parade soundtrack was lovely, really catchy, and we made a mental note to look out for it in the stores.

After dinner, we began our candy hunt. Some stations had HUGE queues, and others had much smaller ones. All the stations we visited though surprised us somewhat by not giving very much candy away – we only received 3 or 4 items per visit, which was a bit of a disappointment. We had expected the CMs to be much more generous, particularly as it was the last-but-one party for this year. By the Jungle Cruise there was a CM handing out tiny boxes of raisins, which was a nice change, and at least all the candy seemed to be ‘branded’ – Reeces, M&Ms, Snickers etc. We managed to visit almost all the stations at some point during the evening, and eventually ended up with a full candy bag each.

At one point we stationed ourselves in Frontierland and watched the second parade properly – we really loved the gravediggers! And we attempted to wave to the tall hitchhiking ghost, although he probably didn’t have a clue as to who we were. The only ride we managed to fit in was a quick whizz round Big Thunder Mountain, which had a 10 min wait, as we were concentrating more on seeing the Halloween decorations than riding. By just before midnight we were exhausted, and had collected all the candy we could carry, so we decided to catch the ferry back to the TTC and head for home. (We had a quick look around the Emporium before we left, but couldn’t find the parade music. We did get a Halloween Party pin, but were very disappointed that the adult-sized t-shirts had all sold out; we picked up a couple of very small kiddie ones to cut up and sew onto plain t-shirts once we got home, as we really loved the design on the front).

On our way out, we stopped at the Fire Station to pick up the Halloween Party Sorcerer’s of the Magic Kingdom cards to keep as souvenirs.

Back to SS, too late for coffee refills, bedtime!

DAY SIX – THURSDAY 01 NOVEMBER
Plan – Hollywood Studios
Actual – Today our aim was to get to the Studios as early as possible in order to ride Toy Story Mania, which we love! Therefore, we got up early, did the usual morning routine of shower/coffee in refillable mugs/etc., then headed out to the Studios, getting there shortly after rope drop.

TSM was already showing as a 30 min wait, so we grabbed Fastpasses which were for between 1 and 2 p.m., and joined the standby line. The queue actually took around 40 mins, but the queue area is so interesting and fun that you don’t really notice the wait much. Mr Potato Head was a bit quiet this time though, he didn’t do much! DH and I are really, really competitive on this ride, and he lost by only a few points on our first ride!

Next up was Star Tours, with only a 10 min wait, where we got Darth Vader, the Pod Race, then a battle in space that we hadn’t seen before. We were starving by this point, so went to our favourite counter-service place in the Studios, the Backlot Express. DH got a turkey sandwich, coffee, and a seasonal pumpkin cupcake, while I opted for chicken nuggets & fries, strawberry parfait, and chocolate milk. Yum.

After our early lunch we thought it best that we stayed a little more sedate until our food went down, so headed to the Great Movie Ride, which was almost a straight walk-on. However, we had decided to wait for the Western version, which we requested, and were shown over to the extreme right hand side of the loading area to wait for the next available car. This took 12 mins, and was a 4-car wait, so we reckoned that a car loads up every 3 mins!

It was now time for our TSM FPs, and this time DH won by a narrow margin. Wow, this ride really is great fun!

The crowds were really low today, everywhere we went was so quiet. The Muppets was next, with not only no wait, but not even time to watch the pre-show movie! We walked almost straight in, and enjoyed the show very much. We stopped for coffee in the Writer’s Stop, to discuss our next move.

We decided to explore One Man’s Dream, as this was something we had looked at briefly a few years ago, but hadn’t really explored properly before. It was fascinating, we both enjoyed it very much, particularly the artefacts on display, and the model of New Fantasyland. It was great to look at the model of the Little Mermaid ride and listen to other guests trying to guess what it would be like, knowing we had already ridden it!

We seated ourselves in the movie theatre to watch the lovely little film in there, and whilst I enjoyed it thoroughly, DH fell asleep almost as soon as it began! He woke up as it was ending, and asked if we could sit through it again, as he really wanted to see it. I agreed, as I enjoyed it so much I would have liked to see it again. However, he fell asleep again! And missed it all – again! I refused to sit through it a third time, so he will have to wait until we visit again to see the film.

Going on a tip I had read somewhere on the internet, we went into the Art of Animation building to see if Sorcerer Mickey was in there. He was, and, as I had read on the ‘net, there was only a very short queue to meet him! (Meeko was in there too, but by the time we had finished with Mickey, he had gone unfortunately.) Anyway, we had some lovely ‘action’ photos taken with Mickey by the Photopass photographer, as well as a couple of posed ones.

We didn’t have time to meet any other characters, as it was now nearly time to check-in for our dinner reservation at the Sci-Fi Dine In, (a first for us), so that was where we headed next. The check-in area was packed, and we had a bit of a wait to be seated, but our first impressions of this place were very favourable! We loved the atmosphere and the seating area, it was all great fun! It was a bit dark, and in fact when we did get our food it was a bit hard to see what you were eating, but we loved the old movies and the theming in general. We were in a car on our own, somewhere in the middle of the restaurant but towards the back of a row.

DH ordered The Reuben - Corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss, thousand island dressing on marble rye bread, served with a pickle spear and fries, a Tango, and Peanut-Butter Chocolate Cake. I was interested in the Rib-eye Steak with garlic mashed potatoes and onion rings, served with blue cheese butter; however, I wanted to check if I could substitute the potatoes with fries, as I have dietary issues with garlic. I asked the server, who brought over a manager. She was very nice, and said that I could indeed make the switch, but that she also thought that there was a kind of seasoning used on the steak that I may have a problem with too, and she would check for me. Very kind of her, I thought.

Our food arrived, (it took a while), and whilst DH’s was perfect, what I actually received was steak and fries. No blue cheese butter, no onion rings (of which I could have eaten one and given the rest to DH!), no vegetables or dressings at all. I decided not to make a fuss and just ate what I had, as it was really tasty and I was hungry by then, but I wouldn’t have minded the rest of the order! My dessert was Heath Bar cheesecake, and I had a vanilla milkshake to drink.

All the food was lovely, but once again we did think it was not worth the $70 bill for just a sandwich, steak & fries, and 2 desserts! We were so glad we weren’t paying out of pocket for this food.

Anyway, it was nearly time for Fantasmic to begin, so we dashed over to Sunset Boulevard to pick up coffee to go, where I had a very odd CM encounter. Basically, the guy that served me seemed to be angling for an invite over to the UK! He asked me where I was from, and then kept telling me how easily he made friends, and how he loved to visit his new ‘friends’ all over the world to experience as much of the world as possible. Lovely idea to have, but he was just a little bit too forceful with his words, and seemed to be trying just that little bit too hard to be my new ‘friend’. I smiled and nodded a lot, before grabbing the coffee cups and legging it! DH was a bit hurt that I didn’t notice him waiting for me at the end of the queue as I hurtled past him towards the coffee creamer! He was okay with it once I explained the reason behind my hasty exit, though!

We took our coffee into the Fantasmic theatre, where people were just beginning to be seated, and got great seats about a third of the way up, slightly to the left hand side. We thought that the Dragon was a new one this time, although we might be imagining that. This is DH’s favourite Disney show, and we both really enjoyed it.

Afterwards, the park was closed, so we followed the crowds back out to the car park, returned to SS picking up coffee/hot chocolate on the way, (did you know that if you leave the hot chocolate to go cold, it tastes just like my favourite chocolate milk? No? Neither did DH, until I told him this EVERY TIME I did it over the next 2 weeks!), and read a little before bedtime.

DAY SEVEN – FRIDAY 02 NOVEMBER
Plan – Shopping day
Actual – We slept in a bit this morning, with no wake-up call to disturb us! We lazed around in the room for a little while, watching TV, writing postcards, and generally resting. Around 11 we went on a hunt for a post office, going to the one we had used last year, as I had to post some HP Brown Sauce to an online friend in Texas. Well we found the location of last year’s post office, and it wasn’t there! I cannot believe the way post offices move around and open/close randomly in the USA, that never happens in the UK! There was another British family looking for it at the same time as us, and they were bewildered too. Some construction workers at the site told us where the nearest one was, but we drove around for a while and couldn’t find it, so eventually had to send the parcel by FedEx as we managed to find one of their outlets on our travels. It cost me probably 3 times what it would have done to send it by the postal service, but that was okay because at least it was done then!

DH suggested we spend a few hours at Blizzard Beach, as we hadn’t done that earlier in the week, so we went back to SS, changed into swimming costumes and collected towels, sun cream etc., and made our way over there around 1.00 p.m. We had a great time! We rented a locker and dumped all our stuff in there, then went for a lap around the lazy river, before realising we were starving! We paid a quick visit to Lottawatta Lodge for bacon cheeseburgers, fries, chocolate cake & cheesecake, and orange soda, before spending an hour or so floating around in the wave pool. Neither of us are big fans of water slides, and whilst I wouldn’t have minded doing the family raft ride, I really couldn’t be bothered to walk all the way up to the top of the slide, so never mentioned it to DH! DH was quite happy playing in the really deep part of the wave pool, while I pottered about in the shallows, and then eventually we went back to the lazy river again, which we both love. We did about 3 or 4 laps of this before the park was closing and they began clearing everyone out. DH had a quick shower, as he can’t stand being wet for too long, while I was happy to sit on a towel in the car and shower when we got back home. DH had never been to Blizzard Beach before, and we had a fun afternoon! One thing we did notice though, we couldn’t find any Photopass photographers there, which I thought was unusual – I’m sure I’ve seen them standing in the lazy river and at other places in the water parks before.

We drove back to SS, where I had my shower and DH took a nap. I finished writing my postcards, and read my Kindle for a while, before waking up DH so we could go to the Turf Club Bar & Grill for dinner. We hadn’t made a reservation, but didn’t have to wait too long before we were seated. DH ordered Roasted Free-Range Chicken Breast, with Red Bliss Potatoes, Tomatoes, Peas, fresh Herbs, and Roasted Broth, and I had Grilled New York Strip, with Asparagus, Mashed Potatoes, and Blue Cheese Fondue (which I gave to DH). We both ordered peach fruit crisp with vanilla-bean ice-cream for dessert, and I also had a vanilla milkshake, (which I had discovered recently I could get instead of a soft drink on the dining plan!). The food was really, really good, and the fruit crisp was absolutely outstanding. We got chatting to a lovely older couple from New York at the table next to us while we waited for our food; I love talking to other folk at Disney!

After dinner, we were both quite tired (an afternoon at a water park can do that to a person!), so we just went back to our room, read, watched TV, and then bedtime!

DAY EIGHT – SATURDAY 03 NOVEMBER
Plan – Animal Kingdom
Actual – So our wake-up call was 20 mins late again today, plus the digital alarm clock had gone back by one hour, despite the clocks not being turned back until tonight! Weird.

Anyway, we got moving pretty quickly and were at the Animal Kingdom shortly after it opened. We made a breakfast stop at Pizzafari for Bounty Platters - scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, french toast, breakfast potatoes, and biscuit, plus coffee. Yum!

After breakfast we headed over to the Safari, which had a 20 min wait, and were able to experience the new zebra area that had been built in place of the poacher’s truck, which was lovely! There were loads of animals out, we saw at least 2 baby elephants, and had a giraffe come right up to the truck again, (the same as last year! Although possibly not the exact same giraffe …..hard to tell, really. Unless you are another giraffe, obviously. I’m assuming they can tell the difference between themselves??). Moving on. There was a distinct lack of lion, although we did see the top of the female’s head, and there was one point where a small herd of rhino seemed to be heading straight towards the side of our truck, worryingly!

Anyway, we survived the two-week safari, and from there went to the Pangani Trail, where we looked in vain for more than one gorilla but never succeeded in finding any. Rafiki’s Planet Watch was next, where we sat in a quiet booth with Grandmother Willow and listened to the rainforest, which was nice. Rafiki himself came out, so we joined the queue and had a Photopass picture taken, before going outside and watching a couple of CMs give a very informative and interesting talk about owls, complete with prop owls.

Back on the train to the main part of AK again, we picked up coffee to go and went to see Festival of the Lion King – we love this show! We were giraffes, and did our best to make our patchy-hide friends proud of us. I braved It’s Tough to be a Bug, (not keen on this – not a big fan of spiders or beetles or anything creepy crawly, in general), and then we had a minor spat about the parade – DH insists we do not spend enough time at this park, we only ever do one day (true), we never see the parade (also true), and we miss out on too much stuff here (probably true). We sulkily watched the parade, which was really lovely and in places reminded me of Tapestry of Nations/Dreams, with the huge puppets. He stopped sulking long enough to talk to me again, and we began a walk over towards Expedition Everest, agreeing that next time we visit WDW, we will schedule in 2 days at this park, as we obviously weren’t going to have enough time today to explore the Maharaja Jungle Trek, (which I love because of the tigers and the bats), Dino-land (including Finding Nemo), and the Flights of Wonder show. We have also never seen DeVine, either.

We arrived at Expedition Everest, but because we were both very wary of doing this new-to-us ride, mostly because of the big steep slope we could see the trains ascending, we sighed with relief that it had a 45 min wait posted and no Fastpasses left, and used this as an excuse not to bother this time.

As we walked away, we noticed some lovely velvet bath-towels on a nearby kiosk, so bought a couple for our newly refurbished bathroom at home, as the towels were in the exact right colour scheme (brown & cream) to match.

It was approaching time for our dinner reservation at Yak & Yeti, so we went over there and checked in at the front desk. We were immediately taken upstairs, (the restaurant seemed very empty), and seated near the stairwell. DH ordered Maple Tamarind Chicken - Seared chicken breast, Indonesian tamarind glaze, coconut ginger rice, baby bok choy, shiitake mushroom stir fry, whilst I decided on Duck with Anandapur Glaze - roasted half duckling, orange wasabi glaze, jasmine rice, stir-fried vegetables. I was sorely tempted to have the Shaoxing Steak & Shrimp that I had had last year, as it had been outstanding, but eventually decided that it was better to try something new. Our dinner was absolutely gorgeous; we love this restaurant, the food is superb quality and so fresh and tasty, and the atmosphere and theming is really lovely. We both had Cherry Lime Sprite to drink, which was sharp and fresh-tasting, and finished with the Mango Pie – ooh! We love this!!

The park was closing once we were finished, so we had a slow walk around the Discovery Trails around the Tree of Life, as we had never properly explored these before. It was lovely, quiet and calm, we really enjoyed this.

We left there eventually and drove back to SS, parking the car and then walking to Downtown to pick up tomorrow’s lunch from Earl of Sandwich – DH got the All American, and I got the Earl’s Club, with a brownie and Cupcake Coronet ,and bottles of Fanta Orange and some kind of blue energy drink thing. Interestingly, EOS was PACKED – the queue wound around the barriers, back down the restaurant, out the side door, and down beside the Christmas shop! I have no idea what that was about, but the queue did move quite quickly at least. A server from there was wandering up and down the line giving out small copies of the menu and asking if anyone had any questions. I told him I had a question, and asked, “what’s with the giant queue?” He laughed, and said he had no idea, it just seemed to have gone mad! We chatted for a little while before he moved off to assist someone who REALLY needed his help. I was served eventually by a really nice guy with an English accent. I asked him where he was from, and he said he was the new General Manager of EOS in London, and was just over in Florida learning a bit about how the company worked! I wished him luck, and battled my way back outside to where DH was sat near the Christmas tree, just relaxing and keeping an eye on the world in general.

We took the short and lovely walk back to our room, and watched some TV before bed. The clocks went back tonight, (although ours already had!), yay – extra sleep!

DAY NINE – SUNDAY 04 NOVEMBER
Plan – Kennedy Space Centre
Actual – Up very early this morning, showers, coffee, grabbed picnic lunch from the fridge and headed on out to Kennedy Space Centre. A couple of days before we got there, the space shuttle Atlantis had taken a long and slow journey from the VAB across to a hanger near the entrance to KSC, where she would be housed for a few months as a new and exciting exhibition space was built around her. We had missed this, but were okay with it. However, as we turned into KSC, we looked to our right hand side and saw the back end of Atlantis through the open hanger doorway! Wow, that was really exciting!

We parked up, and I found out our tickets. I had booked tickets a little while ago that included a visit to the Vehicle Assembly Building, as well as the usual bus tour. Just after I booked these, a new tour was announced that included a visit to the launch pads – ah well, you can’t have it all.

We attempted to find out where we were going for our special bus tour, and eventually managed to find the bus stop. We had to register with a staff member first, and receive a special sticker which showed which tour we were on. We boarded the bus in plenty of time for our 10.00 a.m. tour, and the tour guide arrived shortly afterwards. He was lovely! Really cheerful, friendly, chatty, and incredibly informative. He obviously loved his job, you could tell from the level of enthusiasm he had all the time. What a nice guy!

The bus set off for the VAB, with our tour guide telling us stuff along the way. We stopped for a photo opportunity at a viewing platform, where behind us we saw a couple of wild dolphins leaping up out of the water together! We were blown away by this, neither DH nor I had ever seen dolphins in the wild before, it was completely amazing! The tour guide said to the bus driver that there was no point in trying to talk about anything technical when wildlife made an appearance!

The VAB was fabulous, really interesting and absolutely HUGE! We were in there for quite a while, looking round, and there was a woman who used to sew the covering tile blankets for the space shuttles in there giving a talk on her work. We got back on the bus afterwards, and then we drove out to the launch pads – it turns out you can have it all, after all! It seems that they amalgamated both tours into one. It was fantastic to see a couple of the launch pads, we got taken to the viewing areas nearby where we got off the bus and took loads of photos. There was a very funny moment when we first stopped the bus, where two quite large tortoises were ‘playing’ around. The male was clearly very amorous, but the female didn’t seem that interested, and then to compound his misery, a bus-load of tourists turned up and started taking photos of him trying his luck! It was very amusing to us, although not to the poor male tortoise, I imagine! Anyway, we looked at some fascinating information boards, took loads of photos, and got back on the bus for our drive to the next area. On the drive, we saw a couple of alligators in two separate areas, which was brilliant if a little unnerving! We also saw the giant eagle’s nest that had been there for very many years, surviving every hurricane and big storm that blew through. The female eagle was returning to the nest while we watched!

We stopped at the Saturn 5 building, explored there, and watched a new (to us) and really interesting film about the lunar landings. We bought a couple of cups of coffee and some Cheetos, and sat outside on the patio area to eat our picnic lunch that we had brought with us, watched by a hundred hungry birds ……

After lunch, we made our way across to the area that housed the space shuttle simulator ride, as we had always wanted to give this a try. As we got there, we saw a very home-made sign on a board that said “Atlantis Exhibition”, so we followed the signs, and were directed into the big open hanger that Atlantis was in! How exciting! It turns out that for a few days in the next week, the exhibit was open to the public prior to being closed down for the new exhibition to be built, and we just happened to be there on a day that it was open! Wow, we couldn’t believe it! We got some official photos taken which we later purchased, and had a good look round the hanger, talking to staff members as we went. You couldn’t get right up close to Atlantis, but you could get close enough to appreciate the sheer size and scale of her – she was beautiful! We spent quite some time in there, just admiring this amazing and enormous shuttle.

Eventually, we left there and went to the space shuttle simulator ride. They had just let some guests in and closed the doors, so we waiting in the queue area for the next ride. While we waited, we were joined by 4 or 5 NASA crew members, who chatted with us until we boarded. They said that they had been bussed in from different parts of the country to help out with the special Atlantis weekend that had just happened, and it was great fun to talk to them – I asked them for a job! One lady was really lovely, she told me her name was “Star”, although I may have misheard her. We loved the simulator ride, I had been quite worried about this, thinking it would be jolty and throw us about a lot, but it didn’t – it was really smooth, and very exciting!

Once this was over, it was nearly time to leave, so we managed to fit in a little shopping first! We got some (replacement) oven gloves, (shaped like astronaut gloves!), a couple of mission patches, and picked up a lovely space shuttle leather jacket for DH (I already have one from a previous visit). We went for a quick stroll around the rocket garden, before leaving and driving back to SS.

Dinner tonight was at the Artist’s Palette, where we had lobster rolls and brownies, before retiring to our room for TV and bed. What a great day!

DAY TEN – MONDAY 05 NOVEMBER
Plan – Epcot
Actual – Up with the lark again, usual morning routine, then off to Epcot. We headed for The Land first, and picked up Fastpasses for Soarin’ which was already showing a 50 min wait time! We rode Living with the Land, which we love, and then went to find out about the Behind the Seeds tour, as we were very interested in this. We were too late to sign up for the 10.00 a.m. tour, which was full, but managed to sign up for the 11.15 a.m. one.

We went to Sunshine Seasons to pick up coffee (paid for out of pocket), and pumpkin cheesecake (DH) and a cappuccino cupcake for me, which we got as snack credits. DH loved his cheesecake, he has had this one before, but whilst my cupcake was tasty, it wasn’t as strongly coffee flavoured as I would have liked.

After this we walked round to Spaceship Earth, which was showing a 20 min wait! The park was really crowded. We enjoyed our ride, and then rushed back to the Land in time for our tour. There were 14 of us on the tour, and our CM guide was called Mary, from Guildford in the UK. She was absolutely fantastic, so knowledgeable and interesting, and we just loved this tour! Such good value for money, the tour took just over 1½ hours and was fascinating! We learned all about hydroponics and other ecological ways that Disney uses to grow food at the Land, which is served at restaurants all over WDW. We tasted freshly grown and harvested cucumber, and learned how they grow it in a container so that when it is sliced, it is in a Mickey ears shape! We also learned all about the fish farming techniques they use, we fed some Tilapia fish, and because I was wearing my bride ears, I got to release some ladybugs onto an aubergine plant! (This is normally only something they let kids do!) I always wondered about the ‘gators that they have in a small tank there, and we were told that they are raised at Epcot until they are 3 or 4 feet long, before they are shipped off to a farm where they are – gulp – slaughtered for meat and skin. We also found a hidden Mickey near the ‘gators, which was a coiled hosepipe and was only visible from the backstage tour!

Eventually, the tour was over, although Mary seemed quite happy to carry on answering questions from us as long as we wanted, but we hightailed it out of there as our Soarin’ Fastpasses were open by this point. We walked straight onto the ride, getting the second row.

Next up was Mission Space, and as I had previously promised DH, we both went for the orange side. (He had done this before, but I hadn’t as I suffer from travel sickness). Urgh. I didn’t really HATE it, but I wasn’t keen. It didn’t make me feel nauseous, but I found it very hard to breathe in there as my chest felt constricted, and I was incredibly disorientated when we left the module – I had to sit down for a few mins on a nearby bench! I’m glad I’ve done it, but it isn’t something I will rush to repeat, sticking to the green side from now on I think.

We visited the Food & Wine Festival Centre next, as we hadn’t been in there since it was the Wonders of Life, years ago! We were given a Ghirardelli milk chocolate caramel sample as we went in, and it was really interesting to look round. We got a F&W t-shirt and pin for DH, and the CM gave us a 20% ‘honeymoon’ discount! We also picked up a handful of free Princess stickers that they were giving away in huge amounts, claiming they had pallet-loads of these things to get rid of!

We now began our Food & Wine Festival experience. We started with Australia, where we each had a grilled lamb chop with mint pesto and potato crunchies – yummy! Potato was a bit odd, more like bits of crisp (chips) than actual potato, but still nice.

Next was China, where we each got chicken satay with spicy peanut sauce and pickled vegetables – also yummy! Very nice peanut sauce, if a little TOO spicy for me, but very tasty, and the chicken was very tender.

From the Cheese stand, DH got a Trio of Artisan Cheeses: Beecher's Flagship Reserve Cheddar, La Bonne Vie Goat Brie and Rogue River Creamery Echo Mountain Blue Cheese, which he loved – he is definitely a cheese bunny!

Hops and Barley was next – we each had a Linda Bean’s Perfect Maine Lobster roll, which was delicious! And the best use of a snack credit too, costing over $7 each normally. We had a quick coffee break, then headed for Japan, where we bought a pearl picking ticket and waited in the quite long queue to select a pearl (I had been given some dollars from my mum and dad for my birthday in August, and had saved them for just this treat!). I chose my oyster, going for the old adage that the ugliest oyster has the prettiest pearl, and it sort of worked – I got a 7 mm ivory pearl, which to me didn’t seem out of the ordinary though. (The woman who went before me got a pair of pale blue/grey pearls from one oyster!). I chose a lovely silver setting and chain, choosing to have the pearl glued to the front of a Japanese symbol that means health and long life, and was given a receipt with instructions to collect my pearl in a couple of hours’ time.

We left there and continued our walk all the way round World Showcase, not feeling the need to eat anything else just yet. We visited Figment in Journey into Your Imagination, which was fun, then saw the Captain EO film (which I love!), followed by a visit to the Living Seas where we once again marvelled at how fat the manatees get just by eating lettuce! (Maybe they are secret chocolate snackers??)

We paid Japan another visit in order to collect my necklace, and then checked in at Biergarten for our dinner reservation. We were seated quite quickly, in the middle of a table so we had a family of four on one side of us, and another couple on the other side. Both sets of people were really lovely, and we enjoyed their company very much as we dined on fabulous German cuisine. This is such a great restaurant, we love the ambience and the music, and the food is wonderful! We sampled both hot and cold potato salad, carved pork with crackling and apple sauce, Bavarian sausage salad, breaded chicken schnitzel, pretzel rolls with butter, Bavarian cheesecake, Black Forest cake, and DH had some sort of red fruit compote as well. It was all really delicious! We both had orange soda to drink.

We left there very full indeed, and took a slow stroll around the Seven Seas Lagoon for a little way. The park had really emptied out by now, there was hardly anyone around, and we were able to just pick a spot by a fence to watch Illuminations from, without anyone in front of us. It was so lovely!

Firework show over, we strolled back to the car, drove back to SS, and did our usual thing of coffee/hot chocolate, TV, and bedtime.

DAY ELEVEN – TUESDAY 06 NOVEMBER
Plan – Magic Kingdom
Actual – Me : “Get a move on, we need to be out by 8.30!” Him : (wearing just a towel after his shower, sitting on the bed in front of the TV, and all indignant) “I’m drying, you know!”

We had experienced extremely dry and sunny weather up to this point, upper 70s to 80s, with virtually no humidity, and no clouds – lovely! However, today was forecast to be cloudy and overcast, with some rain. Oh well, we didn’t let that put us off and we carried on with our plans for the day. In reality, it sprinkled with rain a tiny bit until we were actually walking through the archway and into the Magic Kingdom, when it promptly stopped raining, the clouds cleared, and the sun came out! That was the only wet weather we experienced during the whole time we were in Florida.

The Magic Kingdom had, overnight, ditched Halloween in favour of Christmas, and the Christmas decorations were out in full force – gone were the pumpkins, and here were the toy soldiers and the tinsel and wreaths, trees and baubles – incredible that this lot just appeared overnight!

Our first stop was City Hall to pick up some Disney Dollars and First Visit badges. In the office I work in, there are two separate families who are visiting WDW for the first time next year, and I wanted to make up some little goody bags for their kids with park maps, Disney Dollars, First Visit pins, stickers, etc., so I needed to get these. Both families have not told their children yet that they are going to Disney, so they are going to use these goody bags to tell them – how exciting!

We needed to get some breakfast, so went into the Confectionary to get our usual rice krispie treats. However, while we were there, we decided to have a look round in there rather than just grabbing our treats and leaving. I was drawn to the counter at the back of the store, where they sell fudge and cupcakes. I was perusing some amazing looking treats there, and in particular was drawn to a milk chocolate ‘puddle’ with caramel and cashew nuts in the middle of it, when I noticed that a lot of the treats had a Disney Dining Plan symbol next to them. You are kidding me! I could get these with a snack credit? How come I have only just discovered this?? Much as I love the rice krispie treats, the idea of being able to get my sticky paws on some of this lot on a snack credit was an amazing one! DH decided to stick with the rice krispies, but I chose my chocolate puddle with delight – and when we sat on our usual hidden bench to eat our breakfast, I wasn’t disappointed – it was FAB! I love cashew nuts anyway, and burying them in caramel on top of milk chocolate was my new idea of heaven!

After breakfast we made our way down Main Street and turned right into Tomorrowland. Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin had a 5 min wait time, so in we went. Twice in a row. He beat me then I beat him, or it could have been the other way round, either way we were VERY competitive! We got the ride photos from both rides put onto our Photopass card, and they are very funny because in both of the pictures we are both pulling very serious, concentrating-hard faces.

Feeling rather brave, we decided to conquer Space Mountain, which neither of us had ridden for several years. It was showing a 10 min wait but was a straight walk-on, so we didn’t get to experience the interactive queue area, which didn’t really matter. The terror I felt as I crammed myself in an ungainly and undignified manner into the rocket ship was dreadful – what am I letting myself in for? I didn’t know whether to leave my glasses on or not, and in the end, opted to remove them, figuring that what I couldn’t see, couldn’t kill me. Well it sounded like good logic to me! I tucked them into my bag, wrapped my bag handle round my legs and feet, and crossed my fingers. In front of me, I could see DH quaking in his rocket. Well, it was a bit “eeeeek!” but wasn’t too bad, and we survived to tell the story.

We staggered over to the TTA and rode that twice, without getting off. DH expressed some interest in the Astro Orbiter, which neither of us have ridden before (it is too high for me!), so we joined the queue and I went up in the lift with him, having ascertained that I didn’t have to actually ride the darned thing but could watch safely from the side. It was awfully high up there! DH said he enjoyed it, but it was not something he felt he needed to repeat very often. I got some amazing photos of around the Magic Kingdom from on high, plus some good photos of him on the ride too.

A quick trip on the Carousel of Progress (another favourite of ours), and it was time for lunch. We headed for the Columbia Harbour House, where DH got the Lighthouse Sandwich - hummus with tomato & broccoli slaw on toasted multigrain bread with fries, and I had the Lobster Roll with fries. We both got coffee, and had chocolate cake and apple crisp for dessert.

After lunch we visited the Haunted Mansion (10 mins, but was straight walk-on), picked up Fastpasses for Big Thunder Mountain, and then went on Splash Mountain (25 mins). We actually put on our ponchos before riding this, so didn’t get as wet as we have done in the past. I also tried to keep my eyes open during the big drop, for a change! We had our ride photo added to the Photopass card, as before.

We next went back to BTM and rode using our Fastpasses, (yee-ha!), and then decided to see the Country Bear Jamboree as it had just been re-fur-bished (see what I did there?) and we hadn’t seen it in ages. It was fun! I always forget how much I love the un-PC songs – my favourite has to be “Blood on the Saddle”. The bears were looking very furry and mighty fine.

Pirates of the Caribbean was next, showing 5 mins but a straight walk-on, so we rode it twice for the heck of it. Wandering back towards the hub, we realised that we hadn’t had a Dole Whip yet this year, so throwing caution to the wind, we stopped for one, using snack credits. Yummy pineapple ice-cream!

We then went into Fantasyland, and rode It’s A Small World (10 mins), where our boat got stuck in the ‘white’ room for a good 10 minutes! Singing merrily along through gritted teeth, we were glad to finally get out of there. Peter Pan was showing something ridiculous in the way of wait time, so we bypassed that and went into Mickey’s Philharmagic, which was just about to start another showing. It was lovely, as usual. We joined the queue for The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, just to see the interactive queue area, as we wanted to play on the hunny wall! It was great fun, and we discovered that if you wipe off large areas of hunny, there are pictures of characters hidden underneath! The ride was lovely, but also got stuck for ages at one point, with no sound or lights. Some kids in a car behind us started shouting “is there anyone there?”, which we ignored, but when they finally said, “if there is no-one there, make a noise!” we started making groaning, ghosty noises for a laugh! They shut up just after that, for some reason. The ride started up again eventually, and we looked behind us at them when we exited the ride – they didn’t seem too traumatised, and weren’t little kids, so we didn’t feel too bad about scaring them!

We walked around to the hub, and the castle was all lit up with ice-lights, which was really pretty! We stopped for a couple of photos with Photopass, before making our way down Main Street to Tony’s Town Square Restaurant for our dinner reservation. We were seating reasonably quickly, and in more or less the same place as we had been last year! In addition, just like last year, we had a ‘look at us!’ kind of family at the next table, so, JUST LIKE LAST YEAR, we studiously ignored them the whole time we were there. DH ordered the mushroom ravioli, and I ordered the pork tenderloin, which came with pasta in a sort of creamy sauce, and was AMAZING. The tenderest pork I have ever eaten in my life! For dessert we ordered pumpkin cheesecake (DH) and tiramisu (me). I happened to mention to our server that my pork was incredible, and she brought the chef out to meet me so I could tell him myself! Apparently, he loves getting feedback from guests, and I was more than happy to oblige. The quality of the food in this restaurant is just so good. (Having said that, the tiramisu wasn’t the best I’d had, being a little lacking in flavour and more like a heap of whipped cream really, but still very nice).

After dinner, we decided to go next door and meet Mickey in his new Town Square Theatre location. There was an extremely small queue for this attraction, and we were very quickly ushered into Mickey’s dressing room. Again, we got some lovely Photopass pictures taken, and Mickey was wonderful – he made a big fuss of us because I had my bride ears on!

We took a slow walk round to Liberty Square in order to see the Hall of Presidents, which we hadn’t done yet this year. We had a short wait, before being ushered in, and were blown away by the audio-animatronics in this attraction, as always. They are amazing! The way they look at each other, move their heads and hands, cross their legs, and stand up and sit down again – incredible.

Haunted Mansion was next, showing a 5 min wait but we went straight in. There seemed to be very few people around, despite it still being a couple of hours till closing time!

We went to try our luck with Big Thunder Mountain, and managed to ride it 5 times in a row! (Did I mention that I love this ride??) It was showing a 10 min wait, but we walked straight on four times in a row, and then as we pulled into the station at the end of the 4th ride, the CMs announced that if there was no-one waiting to board in our row, we could stay on the train if we wanted to! So there wasn’t and we did. It got to the stage where we didn’t even bother asking for two separate rows, because as we approached the loading area, the CM would just smile at us and wave us to two rows! Great fun.

We were getting very tired by now, it was about 10.30 p.m., so we began to slowly make our way towards Main Street. We tried for Pirates of the Caribbean but it was closed already. However, the Magic Carpets was still open and there was no queue, so we rode that instead, and it was also great fun.

We exited the park via the Emporium, but didn’t buy anything on this occasion. I was still looking for the Halloween Parade music, but couldn’t find it anywhere.

We caught the ferryboat back to the TTC, drove home and went straight to bed, exhausted but happy.

DAY TWELVE – WEDNESDAY 07 NOVEMBER
Plan – Hollywood Studios
Actual – After our late night last night, we struggled to get going this morning, and consequently didn’t get to the Studios until around 10.30 a.m. It was packed, really busy today. (To be fair, we would have been there slightly earlier, but were so busy playing the Swolphin game on the way in and squabbling about it that we missed the turnoff for the car park and had to double back on ourselves! For those not in the know, the Swolphin game is deadly serious and consists of trying to be the first person each day to spot the Swan & the Dolphin hotels, and thus getting the great satisfaction of being able to yell out, as loudly as possible, (although hopefully not quite loudly enough to cause the other person to have a small but fatal heart-attack), “SWOLPHIN!” There may or may not also be a small amount of celebratory arm punching involved. Thank you to an online friend for introducing us to this game – you know who you are and IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!!)

We headed over to Toy Story Mania to pick up Fastpasses, and they had a return time of 7-8 p.m.! We got them anyway. Standby was showing at 70 mins!

We were hungry, and it was slightly too early for our favourite counter service restaurant, (the Backlot Express), to be open, so we decided to try the ABC Commissary for the first time, as that opened slightly earlier than BE. DH had the blue cheese chicken burger, fries, and pumpkin cheesecake; I had the seafood platter (shrimp and cod sticks in breadcrumbs), fries, and a strawberry parfait. We both had coffee. It was all very nice, and we liked the theming in there; it was also very quiet at that point, which was good. It is great that we now have a back-up for Backlot Express in case we are very hungry that early again!

We needed a bit of a sit down now so went to MuppetVision 3D, which was completely and utterly full! I have never seen that theatre full before, it was packed! When we came out of there, it was around 12.40 p.m., and we wanted to see Lights Motors Action, in case that show closes in favour of a new Cars-themed area, as there are rumours at the moment that that might happen. The show started at 1.10, so we made our way into the theatre, which was also full!

The show, which we have seen before and enjoyed, was very interesting. One of the black cars blew a gasket and leaked oil all over the floor and its own exhaust, causing a small fire underneath the car. The first we knew of it was when the show stopped, the driver leapt out, and about half a dozen men ran towards the car carrying fire extinguishers. We could see small flames under the car, which were soon put out, fortunately. Then they had to get a fork-lift truck in to remove the car, and then they spent another few minutes thoroughly cleaning and drying the floor with a special machine in order to remove all the oil! Only when this was being done were any announcements made to us to explain the delay, which was when we learnt the reason behind the fire. As the show progressed, I don’t know whether they were trying to make up for lost time but Lightning McQueen never made an appearance, and then there was another (unexplained) delay before the motorbike scene! None of this stopped the show from being really good though, and we were glad to have seen it again.

We exited, unusually, to the front left side of the stage area, and because this was the first time we had gone out this way, we saw a hidden Mickey made out of pebbles in the bottom of the water at the front of the stage! We walked towards the Backlot Tour route beside the runoff roads for LMA, and were able to see quite a bit of the backstage area; there was also one of the drivers standing at the fence, talking to people and letting them take photos of/with him.

After this we went to see if we could get into the Voyage of the Little Mermaid. There was 30 mins to the next show, but we were happy to wait as it would be the only chance we would get to see it today. The show was cute, but this particular Ariel didn’t have the best singing voice – she was a little flat in places. The Eric was a bit ugly, too! And clearly quite embarrassed with what he was doing, which was a bit weird.

Beauty & the Beast show was next, which again was 30 mins to the next show but wasn’t too busy so we were able to get good seats off to one side and just relax for a while. This was a great show, we really enjoyed it, and it always makes me sniffle a bit at the end, no matter how many times I have seen it!

We walked round to Rock & Roller Coaster to pick up a Fastpass to take back for my daughter as a souvenir, which I tend to do on most trips. I have no idea what she does with them though! We had a quick coffee break in Sunset Boulevard, sitting at the tables there for a little while, before heading to the Hollywood Brown Derby for our early dinner reservation.

They had a slightly different menu since we were here last year. We ordered Sprite and orange soda, and then DH ordered the Spit-roasted American Bison with sauteed beets tossed in an herb-shallot vinaigrette, forest mushroom, white truffle croquette and a cocoa espresso barbecue sauce, and he was warned the bison would be served very rare. When it arrived, it was so rare that it was almost still lowing, but it tasted AMAZING (I tried a bit!). I ordered the Charred Filet of Beef - over Zellwood corn and Pancetta Risotto, arugula pesto and pickled rainbow carrots. It was absolutely gorgeous! The risotto was just wonderful, but I gave DH the pesto as it had garlic in it. For dessert DH had the Citrus Honey Nest- filled with a candied ginger blueberries over a lemon cheesecake, which he said was really lovely, although the ‘nest’ bit was a bit odd. Not nasty, just odd. I had the Warm Seasonal Fruit Cobbler - with Créme Fraîche and Orange Blossom Honey, (which was a red berry fruit crisp). The food here is truly outstanding, and they even gave us a small glass of complimentary champagne with half a strawberry in it as a honeymoon treat! The only complaint we had really was the time it took us – it took AGES to be seated, although the restaurant was nearly empty, and then it took forever for the waiter to take our food order, and even longer for it to be served! By the time we got to the asking for the bill stage, we were tempted to go and find him because he had disappeared for the longest time! We got the bill eventually, and he left with my Key to the World card to take the table service credits off it. When he came back, we grabbed the card, left the tip on the salver, and hightailed it out of there as our Toy Story Mania Fastpass time was nearly up!

We made it with minutes to spare, and were straight onto the ride, which was brilliant fun as usual. For the first time though, DH won! I usually win by a very narrow margin in here, and he blames the fact that I apparently ‘waste’ my life playing computer games at home and he doesn’t, as to why he never wins. But he did today! Smug doesn’t begin to cover it.

We dashed (as fast as our full-of-dinner tummies would let us!) over to the Fantasmic theatre in time for the show. Disappointingly, the Dragon wasn’t working tonight – there was just darkness when he should have been rising up and growling at us all, and the flames just appeared on the water without him spitting them there! We were actually glad of the flames, as it was a bit cooler tonight.

We left the park after this, drove home, collected up a couple of armfuls of washing, and walked just literally round the corner from our room to the laundry room. While the laundry was washing, we explored the pool area – we hadn’t realised how close to us this quiet little pool was, and it was so pretty! There was a hot tub there too, and some rocking chairs to sit on and look across the lake at Downtown. It was a really lovely area, and we decided we needed to go swimming there at some point soon.

We dried the washing, and then retired to bed quite late.

DAY THIRTEEN – THURSDAY 08 NOVEMBER
Plan – Shopping / pack / pool
Actual – I had a very restless night, unfortunately. I think I was just overtired, and couldn’t seem to settle at all. The alarm call came way too early for my liking!

After much talking about this, we had decided that today was the day we were going to be brave bunnies and go on Expedition Everest. We drove over to Animal Kingdom, left all our bags in the car so we could go through the ‘no bag’ line, and strode straight over to the ride. It was showing a 5 min wait, and we moved quickly through the line, before being seated. I was in the seat next to the loading area and began to mouth “help!” at a woman who was standing there – she just laughed! We moved off and it was lovely – all gentle and pretty, with a very smooth track. Up the big incline (DH was looking all around him and trying to point out some lovely sights but I was concentrating very hard on not looking down or falling out or dying of fright so didn’t see anything he pointed at!), and then began the swooping and shrieking. To be honest though, I LOVED IT! It was a bit like Big Thunder on steroids! The ride photo does show me looking a bit like Beaker during the big drop (big eyes and bared teeth!), but it didn’t feel as bad as the Splash Mountain big drop, because it curved round at the bottom. We managed to completely miss seeing the animatronic yeti somehow, but did see the shadow one at the broken track section. The whole thing was brilliant!

We got off and went to the shop, where DH bought me a tiny, very cute yeti keyring, and we went to get the ride photo added to our Photopass. We realised suddenly that we had left the PP card in the car though, so knew we would have to go all the way out, pick up the card, and come all the way back in again. Before we did that, we had a brief discussion as to whether to repeat the ride again straight away, but decided that once was enough for our first ride. We will definitely do this one again though!

We decided to stay in AK for breakfast, so while DH went out to the car to collect the PP card, I went to Pizzafari and got us Bounty Platters and coffee, as we had really enjoyed these before. After breakfast, we returned to EE and loaded up the ride photo.

We left AK and drove over to the Super Wal-Mart on the 192 to pick up our usual shopping and gifts to take back home with us, and then drove to Downtown Disney to get stuff from World of Disney. I still wasn’t having any luck with the Halloween parade music! We got lots of goodies, mostly things to take back for other people though! I did manage to sneakily pick up the lovely Mickey watch (purchase with purchase) for DH as a Christmas surprise present, along with some Turkey Leg boxers for him too. We paid a visit to Basin to get some very pretty slices of soap, getting some Christmas soap for us and some Halloween soap for my daughter. I got 10% off my purchases here with a voucher that had been in our holiday booking pack.

We took all our purchases back to SS, picked up some more money, and then drove back to Downtown as we had more shopping to get. First of all though, we gathered our braveness around us again and went to ride the Characters in Flight balloon. After I had made such a fuss to get the 20% off voucher, we felt we may as well actually use it! It was late afternoon by this point and nearing sunset, so we wanted to ride while there was still enough light to see by.

We were both a bit apprehensive about this ride, but it was really wonderful. The CM who was our guide was so good, he told us every tiny thing that was happening so that we wouldn’t worry about anything, and the ascent and descent were very smooth indeed. When we reached the full height of the ride, we were stationary for quite a while, which gave us plenty of time to walk around and take lots of photos. The sun was setting, and this made for some spectacular views/pictures. There is one point where you can see the Epcot ball, Expedition Everest, and the top of the Tower of Terror, it was amazing! It was all so pretty, and we could even see our room and pool from up there! We were so glad we rode this, and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again, even without the discount on the tickets.

After we disembarked, we took some more pictures from underneath the balloon, and then walked back round to Ghirardelli’s to see if they had the chocolate buttons in stock yet. We got a Milk Chocolate Peppermint Bark sample as we entered, but were dismayed to see that they didn’t have any buttons yet. We even checked the cupboard ourselves but it was akin to Old Mother Hubbard’s and there was nothing in there!

We drove back to SS via the Artist’s Palette to collect dinner. DH chose a turkey, brie & cranberry sandwich, and I picked a beef & horseradish sandwich, with Sprite and some more of that blue energy drink thing (which DH really liked). We also got a couple of brownies, (but ended up saving those for tomorrow’s breakfast). We drove back to our room, popped dinner into the fridge, changed into swimwear, and walked round to our pool, where we spent a happy couple of hours, including 30 mins in the hot tub. It was lovely, really relaxing, and just what we needed at the end of another wonderful day. The pool was empty apart from us, as was the hot tub. Towels were supplied, although we did borrow a couple to wrap around us on the walk back to the room (DH returned them to the pool area the next morning).

We eventually went back to our room, had showers and dinner, watched a small amount of TV and were in bed and asleep by 9.20 p.m. (too tired to start the packing tonight)!

DAY FOURTEEN – FRIDAY 09 NOVEMBER
Plan – Epcot
Actual – Our final day – never an easy prospect to come to terms with, although it was helped SLIGHTLY by having brownies and coffee for breakfast, sitting outside in the sun on our patio!

We started our journey today with a quick visit to the airline check-in desk at reception, as because we were flying internally to Dallas with American Airlines tomorrow, and would be able to check-in at this desk rather than having to go to either the Virgin mobile check-in desk at Downtown Disney like we normally do, or just check-in at the airport, I needed to ask whether we could in fact pay for our luggage at the desk or whether we had to contact AA directly to make payment in advance of our flight. The helpful young lady there told me I could indeed pay at the desk, by credit or debit card. This was in direct contrast to some information I had read online before leaving the UK, so I was quite pleased with this, and we set out for Epcot.

In all the time we had been at SS, I had been doing a little driving – just from the room to the front desk area, to get our coffee each morning, and sometimes back from there in the evenings. I NEVER drive in America, the idea terrifies me – the wrong side of the road, vehicles coming at you from all directions, confusing roads and traffic signals, etc. (I happily drive everywhere at home!). So I had been getting a little more confident this year, and today I drove us to Epcot! Minor achievement for me.

I managed to park quite easily, without hitting anyone/thing, and we headed on in. First of all, we did our usual thing of making for the Land pavilion, picking up Fastpasses for Soarin’, and then riding (listed as a 40 min standby, but we could tell from looking at the queue that it would be much less than that, and it actually turned out to be about 20 mins), getting the third row. (This was actually quite worrying, as it now transpired that I could tell how long a ride queue would take just by looking at it. We tried this out with several rides throughout the day, and I was totally accurate each time – you know you have been spending too much time at Disney when ……..).

Spaceship Earth was next, (10 mins), and we were delighted to find that there were new and added choices for ‘your future’! To Leisure and Work, they have now added Health, Home, and some environmental choices. Much as we love the first part of this ride, we have always felt that the second half was definitely lacking something, as we do tend to ride it quite often and thus have used up all the choices until now. Therefore, it was great to finally have something new to add into the mix. When we got off the ride, we did the ‘build a body’ thing where you have to wear 3D glasses and use a lever to pick up bits of skeleton, internal organs etc., placing them in their correct positions. This is such a fun little game, we usually try to play this each time we are in SE.

Back to the Land, we were now in our Soarin’ Fastpass time, so we picked up another set of F/Ps, and were quickly standing in the small loading area, in row 1. Whilst there, we were hugely entertained by a lovely young CM, who sort of hid to one side and mimed his way in a very camp and over-the-top fashion through the pre-show spiel along with Patrick. It was really funny!

We thoroughly enjoyed our flight, and when we exited we realised it was nearly time for our lunch reservation at Le Cellier.

DH had the Wild Mushroom Filet Mignon, with wild mushroom risotto and white truffle butter sauce, while I had the New York Strip Steak - topped with bercy butter, served with cream cheese mashed potatoes. Nom-nom-nom. It was all delicious. DH had pomegranate lemonade to drink, and I had Sprite. For dessert we couldn’t decide between the white chocolate cheesecake with citrus shortbread, and the chocolate ‘moose’, so we had both and shared them. They were all lovely, but the citrus shortbread was gorgeous!

After lunch we thought something relaxing was in order, so we headed for Ellen’s Energy Adventure for a good sit down/snooze, er, I mean, an exciting, educational, and informative experience! There was no wait for this, we were just in time for the pre-show spiel and then went straight in. We do enjoy this ride really, it is fun and interesting.

Next was Mission Space (definitely green side!), with a mere 5 min wait time. We were surprised to see the screens in the simulators all seemed to be very yellow coloured and a bit pale. (We mentioned this to a CM afterwards, who just appeared a bit confused and didn’t do anything about it). The ride was very smooth and gentle after our ‘orange side’ experience the other day, but the two teenage girls who were riding with us appeared to have no idea what they were doing or what was expected of them. I think they didn’t speak much English, listening to what little conversation they had with each other, but they certainly didn’t follow the instructions to push buttons when they were supposed to. I was going to do it for them, because we all know that if the buttons aren’t pushed, the mission will go horribly wrong, but fortunately there is a computer over-ride that automatically happens if required, (with an announcement too! I never heard that before!), so all was well in the end.

We realised that we needed to start finishing off rides we hadn’t yet done, so we went round to Norway to ride the Maelstrom. The park was filling up a bit now, and this ride was showing a 25 min wait time. We would normally have left it a while to see if that would reduce, but as this was our last chance this trip to ride, we just joined the queue. It went down quite quickly, and probably only ended up being around 15 mins. We entertained ourselves by trying to spot the Viking in the painting wearing Mickey ears! We have been on this ride loads of times, and I always forget that the backwards section can be a bit startling! We didn’t wait to watch the video, as we have seen it many times and it really needs updating.

Our next Soarin’ time was approaching, so we went back to the Land, rode Living with the Land, (10 mins), (where we spent some time staring at the people who were doing the tour we had done the other day!), and then F/p’d Soarin’ again, for the final time this trip, happily scoring the first row. Funnily enough, the screen had the floaty white things back on it again, just like our first ride.

We had a quick coffee break in Sunshine Seasons, before going back to Spaceship Earth again and excitedly riding it twice in a row with minimal wait, to try and experience more of the new ending combinations. From there, we went to the small photo store to pick up a DVD we had seen earlier, for DH to give to me for Christmas. It is about Imagineering the Magic at the Magic Kingdom, and luckily comes in a European format (PAL).

We were a bit peckish by now, so walked round to the only other Food & Wine Festival booth we were still wanting to try, Canada. DH had some Cheddar Cheese Soup (yuck!), and I had the Wild Mushroom Beef Filet Mignon with Truffle Butter Sauce which was really delicious!

More mopping up of undone attractions now, so we walked round to the American Adventure pavilion, to experience the show in there. There was a short wait until the next show, so we sat on a bench and relaxed a bit. When we were let into the theatre, it was quite busy but we were very good and moved all the way down the row, as instructed. The show was excellent and we really enjoyed it.

Still feeling in need of more food, we were very happy to partake of some funnel cake next. We love funnel cake! But don’t often get to have it at the moment, as the Dining Plan more than fills us up all the time! This was paid for out of pocket, as it wasn’t on the DP, but that was fine. DH had the pumpkin spice version, while I just opted for the sugared one. It was really lovely, we found a bench near the theatre and thoroughly enjoyed our treat.

We walked slowly and tiredly back towards Morocco afterwards, to find the preferred viewing area for Illuminations for the last time. (It was a shame we didn’t quite get our timing right and didn’t get the extra bit at the end for the holidays, but there is always next year.) I tried not to get too emotional about the show, knowing it was our last for this visit, because over-tiredness does tend to make me a bit tearful anyway.

After the fireworks and lasers had finished, we strolled around World Showcase against the direction of the exiting crowds, finishing up by standing on the bridge in France for a little while, before sadly leaving Epcot and heading back to SS.

We stopped at reception to pick up some sets of park maps for work colleagues, and fill our mugs with coffee/hot chocolate, before heading back to our room for a little TV, and bed.

DAY FIFTEEN – SATURDAY 10 NOVEMBER
Plan – Leave WDW, fly to Dallas
Actual – We were up very early this morning. Not trusting the wake-up call, which had been late twice, I set my phone alarm to get us up with the lark.

Showered and coffeed, we packed our cases, and for some reason this was a really quick exercise, only taking us just over an hour – it normally takes us much longer than that!

We said a fond farewell to our room, and drove to the airline check-in desk. We had been quite relaxed and happy up to this point, sad to be leaving Florida but looking forward to seeing my brother and his family, and the next leg of our adventure. However, this is the point where things went rather wrong – it seemed that two out of our 3 bags were overweight, by considerable amounts according to the porter. He said that the only solution would be to buy another case, which would give us a cheaper option of paying for a 4th case rather than the much higher ‘overweight’ fees. We knew we didn’t have time to go offsite to buy a case, so I had to just run into the resort store to get one. I ended up paying a shocking price for a small, hard-shelled Mickey case, (which got EXTREMELY marked and scuffed during all the flights), but we didn’t really have much choice. We had to unpack virtually everything onto the pavement and repack to balance the weights of the cases out. We ended up putting a lot of the heavier stuff into the hand luggage cases, and having to wear some extra jumpers, joggers etc.

Eventually, using a notepad and pen to work out the weight of stuff we were moving and therefore hoping that we had done this right, we handed the cases back to the porter. He didn’t weigh them again, he just put them in the back of the van, and we were able to check-in for our flight with American Airlines and pick up our boarding passes.

As we were about to move away, hot, hassled, and now 30 mins late for our dining reservation at the Rainforest Café at Downtown, the porter suddenly came over and stood in front of us. He told us that he would ‘take care’ of our bags now, emphasising those words. We thanked him, and made to move off. He moved in front of us again, stuck out his hand, palm upwards, towards us and repeated what he had said. He then added, “did you hear what I said?” We would have probably forgotten to tip him anyway as we were feeling very stressed at this point, but I was shocked by his blatant ‘begging’ gesture! I scowled at him, as he hadn’t been at all helpful or friendly during the check-in process, (merely laughingly telling us our bags were very overweight), and would have walked away at that point, but DH just grabbed all the single dollars out of his wallet and handed them to him ($8). I don’t mind voluntarily leaving tips, but hate being asked for them!

We drove as quickly as we could over to Downtown, where we discovered that the Festival of the Masters event was taking place, and the car park was HEAVING! DH dropped me off near the top end of the Market Place, and went off to try and find somewhere to park. The crowds of people were horrendous, I had to fight my way through to the Rainforest Café, and the queue for the restaurant was massive. I bypassed the queue, and went up to the podium to check whether we had missed our reservation entirely. A very nice young lady told me it would be fine once I explained the situation to her, and so I joined the queue to check in. It only took about 10 mins for me to get to the front of the queue, I checked in , explained that I would have to wait for DH to get back to me, and waited to one side for him.

About 5 mins later, my name was called, so I once again had to explain that I was still waiting for DH. I was told that if we couldn’t be seated soon, we would have to go to the back of the waiting list. I couldn’t go ahead and be seated inside, as DH wouldn’t have known where I was (I had a mobile phone, but he didn’t). I waited for about another 5 mins and fortunately he then turned up, red-faced and puffing. He had had to park at the very far end of the car park, beyond Cirque de Soleil, and then he had had to fight his way through the stalls and crowds to get to the Café!

We went back to the podium and luckily they were able to then seat us straightaway. The menu looked really good, we hadn’t been to this restaurant before, and this was the first time they had taken the Dining Plan too. We really loved the themeing of the Café, the animatronics were lovely, and the rainstorm was fun!

DH had a Rainforest Burger with cheese and bacon, fries, and a Sprite. I got the Canopy burger with cheese, bacon and mushrooms, fries, and a Sprite. The food came out quite slowly, but was really delicious. For dessert DH chose cheesecake, and I had the mango sorbet, which was delightful but enormous! He just about finished his dessert, but neither of us could finish mine too! We used our last table service credits to ‘pay’ for this meal, and left a tip.

We next went to Goofy’s Candy Company to pick up some cookies with our remaining snack credits. (We knew we still had some QS credits left at this point, but unlike last year when we were allowed to spend them in Earl of Sandwich on brownies & cupcakes to bring home with us, we could not have carried anything else ANYWHERE in our luggage, so we had to just lose them this time).

We walked round to Ghirardelli’s to check out the chocolate button situation, (although I have no idea how we would have got them home if we could have bought any), but they were still out of stock, so we began the very long walk back to the car. The Festival of the Masters event looked really good, but we didn’t have time to browse around the stalls this time.

We finally got back to the car, drove to the airport stopping to pick up $10 worth of gas on the way just to make sure we got there, and returned the hire car with no problems.

We checked out our flight time, and in typical (for us, anyway) American Airlines fashion, the flight was delayed by an hour. We had a quick look around the NASA store, picking up a couple of mission patches to sew onto a denim jacket I have at home, then I left DH drinking coffee and guarding the bags while I went for a quick look around Lush. This is one of my favourite stores in the UK, and I always get quite excited when I see a branch somewhere else in the world! There wasn’t anything in there that I couldn’t get at home though, so I left and went back to DH.

We went through to the gate, only to discover that the flight would now be delayed by 1½ hours! I sent my brother a text to let him know this, as he was collecting us from Dallas airport. We sat around at the gate with no information being given to us, frustratingly, and finally began to board at the time we should have been landing! The flight went quite smoothly though, and soon we were walking through to baggage collection and my brother was there waiting for us! It was so wonderful to see him again.

He drove us back to his place in Heath, and as it was quite late at this point, my sister in law and their two boys were already in bed. DSIL had left us some sandwiches and nibbles, and we had these, a glass of wine/beer, and finally got to bed at 1.00 a.m. (At one point, my brother informed us that they wouldn’t be able to join us in Austin for the F1 as he had left it too late to get tickets, and the event was sold out. This was a shame, as we had been looking forward to spending the event with him and the boys, but it couldn’t be helped).



THIS IS THE END OF THE DISNEY SECTION – NEXT UP IS THE DALLAS/AUSTIN SECTION



DAY SIXTEEN – SUNDAY 11 NOVEMBER
Plan – Whatever the day brings
Actual – Last night my brother had asked whether we wished to go to church with him today, but we declined in favour of a bit of extra sleep! We slept in until around 9.00 a.m., then got up, showered, made coffee and toast, and relaxed outside by the pool until everyone returned. It was cooler in Dallas than it had been in Florida, but it was still warm and sunny.

We welcomed everyone back, then my oldest nephew (DN1) disappeared off in his car, while my brother drove the rest of us to Firewheel, a local outdoor shopping mall. DN2 got us searching round for a Geo-Cache spot that he found, he had just got into Geo-Caching and when we found the treasure, we all signed the little piece of paper in there! We had lunch at Potbelly’s; DH had a chicken, bacon & cheese sub, and I had a beef, mushroom & cheese sub. We also got chips and drinks, and DSIL insisted on paying! The food was really good.

We had a good look round the stores next, visiting Barnes & Noble (we were in there for ages, we couldn’t stop picking up books and reading bits!), a candy store, and an electronic gadget store, where I picked up some clip-on LED torches for stocking fillers.

We eventually drove back to bro’s, and sat outside by the firepit with glasses of wine and beer. It was lovely, we could have stayed there all evening chatting, and DB was burning some dead rosemary bushes which smelt amazing. We all finally realised we were hungry though, so we collected up the kids and drove down to the Harbourside, where we went to a fantastic Mexican restaurant called Gloria’s for dinner. I had beef tacos, DB got chicken enchiladas, and we had Sprite. Once again, DSIL paid and wouldn’t let me contribute!

We had had a wonderful day, and bed was very welcoming that night.

DAY SEVENTEEN – MONDAY 12 NOVEMBER
Plan – Whatever the day brings
Actual – We slept really well last night, and again didn’t get up until late. I think the Florida part of the holiday was catching up with us! We relaxed with coffee and home-made choc chip pancakes (DSIL left me the mix and taught me how to use her electronic skillet, before she went into her office (she and my brother work for their own company, from home)). We borrowed DB’s Suburban and drove to the nearest Best Buy to pick up an iPad, which cost almost half the price I would pay in the UK. I had wanted one for ages, and was very happy to get this! I immediately popped it into the gorgeous, pink leather-effect iPad cover with Mickey on it that I had bought in World of Disney last week.

We then drove to Wal-Mart to pick up some supplies for the F1 trip – water, cookies, croissants, chips, bite-sized donuts, peanut butter crackers, cheese crackers, and some mini peanut butter Snickers bars. I also got some more credit for my phone. While we were in there, we picked up lunch from Subway of foot-long BLT (DH) and 6” cheesesteak (me), Cheetos, and orange soda.

We went back to bro’s, and I rang my daughter for a chat, before setting up the iPad and playing on it for a little while. Once DB had finished work, we got changed into warmer clothing and headed out to Taco Casa for a quick bite to eat (DH = super burrito, cinnamon chips, Sprite, me = 2 x Super Tacos), before going to a local high school football stadium to watch DN2 play in a football game. He was number 10, and only got to play once, but it was very fun to watch, being our first American football game! We didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, but the whole event was very social, with lots of friendly people around. DSIL had given us a big fleecy blanket to borrow, and we were glad of it – it was FREEZING in the stadium! We were amazed at the sheer size of the stadium, it was huge! We really enjoyed the game, once DB had explained the rules to us, but DN2’s team lost 1-0. The Cheerleaders for both teams were very entertaining, and there was a half-time dance show by the Drill Team, which was fun to watch.

Eventually, we went back to bro’s, had some hot chocolate, and went to bed. Another wonderful day.

DAY EIGHTEEN – TUESDAY 13 NOVEMBER
Plan – Whatever the day brings
Actual – A very quiet and relaxing day today. After the commando-style 2 weeks in Florida, this time in Dallas was just what we needed, as we were free to sleep in, watch TV, lay by the pool, and generally potter about, relaxing. We slept well again last night, and after coffee and toast, sat out by the pool, reading. The weather was again sunny but a little cool.

Around 11.30 a.m., DB appeared out of his office and said that if we wanted to borrow his car, there was a Denny’s nearby that we could go to, if we fancied it. He gave us directions, and we set out. Well, we drove around for ages looking for it, convinced we had misheard the directions, and eventually gave up and went to an IHOP. DH had never been to one before, and he really loved it. We both had scrambled eggs with cheese, hash browns, and bacon (DH had sausage), with a 2-stack of pancakes – DH = double blueberry, me = New York cheesecake with strawberries. It was all really delicious!

We drove back, parked the Suburban, and went for a long walk around the estate where DB & DSIL lives, which was lovely – it really is a pretty area, with some lovely houses.

DB finished working around 5, and asked how Denny’s was. We told him we couldn’t find it so had gone to IHOP instead – he looked confused and then sheepish, and admitted that he had meant to say IHOP all along, as there isn’t a Denny’s! Ah well, we enjoyed it anyway.

When DB was a little boy, our dad used to take him to see the new James Bond movie as soon as it came out at the local cinema. DB has continued this tradition with his boys, and so tonight was movie night. We drove to the Harbourside, via another Geo-Cache site, and went first of all to Campisi’s Pizza for a quick dinner. DH got a cheese pizza with mushrooms, and I got a cheeseburger pizza, both of which were absolutely fab! Really good pizza, hot and tasty. DN1 brought his girlfriend along, who was very sweet, and DSIL decided to join us at the last minute, (she was off to a 3 day conference the next day, and should have been at home, packing).

After dinner, we walked round to the Cinemark cinema to watch Skyfall, the very latest James Bond. The film was great fun, we all really enjoyed it. The salted popcorn with butter was just as good as the film! When it was all over, we drove back to DB’s, and had a glass of wine and relaxed, chatting a lot, before bed at midnight.

(Small side story – on our return to bro’s, we walked into the kitchen and saw a small Disney gift bag on the floor, containing a rice krispie treat that I was taking home with us. We thought it was odd, as the last place it had been was in the open suitcase in our bedroom. Then on the floor of the lounge, we found the wrapper from a Disney cookie, minus cookie …… ROCKY! BAD DOG! We kept the cases shut and zippered up after that).

DAY NINETEEN – WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER
Plan – Whatever the day brings
Actual – another splendid night of sleep. DB and SIL were at their conference today, so we spent the day relaxing by the pool, and then repacked all the cases to ensure even weight distribution! We also packed a small case to take to Austin with us. We watched TV, surfed the internet, and read until DB came home around 6.15 p.m. He drove us to Panda Express to get takeout for dinner, where we picked up fried rice, honey walnut shrimp, and orange chicken. It was all really delicious, and so cheap! (We detoured to Taco Bell to get my daughter a bag of Cinnamon Twists – she had asked that I take some back for her, as she LOVES these, but I was highly doubtful as to how they would survive the journey back! However, we packed them in a Ziploc bag, and they were apparently still crunchy 6,000 miles and a week later!) TV, bed.

DAY TWENTY – THURSDAY 15 NOVEMBER
Plan – Collect RV, drive to Austin
Actual – we were up very early this morning, had a bowl of cereal, and then DB drove us to McKinney to collect the RV we had rented. He had lent us some folding camp chairs, pillows, towels, disposable plates and spoons, and a big fluffy blanket, which turned out to be much needed! We also took our Disney refillable mugs, and the water and food we had picked up from Wal-Mart earlier in the week.

The rental paperwork took quite some time, and there was a slight hiatus with the credit card I had put aside to cover the deposit on the vehicle, which resulted in DB having to put his card details on the rental instead. The lady who dealt with us was very kind, understanding, and patient! She also threw in a coffee machine for free, when we had been prepared to pay to rent one from them.

DB had prepared us a route to drive to Austin, which we followed diligently. It was such an easy route, we basically only had to follow 3 different roads for the entire trip! It felt a bit hairy driving through Downtown Dallas, as vehicles were coming at us from all directions, and it was very un-nerving being passed ON BOTH SIDES by huge trucks, so we were nervous wrecks by the time we got to Waco. We stopped at a McDonalds for a quick and easy dinner. Poor DH was exhausted, the RV drove like a tank, really heavy to steer and we were both terrified something would broadside us and DB would lose his deposit!

We eventually found the campsite, after having driven past it twice as it wasn’t very well signposted in the dark. It was 8.00 p.m. by the time we pulled onto the site, and the guy running it was very welcoming and friendly. He pointed out our particular camping spot, showed us where the toilets and showers were, and told us that breakfast would be available in the marquee the next morning. We were both very tired by then, so just had some coffee and snacks before falling into bed around 10.00 p.m.

DAY TWENTY ONE – FRIDAY 16 NOVEMBER
Plan – Formula 1 : Practice
Actual – after a restless night (it was very cold during the night!), we got up and had coffee, croissants, and mini donuts for breakfast. The shuttle bus that was taking us to the F1 circuit was 30 mins late picking us up, so we missed the start of the practice sessions. However, the driver parked the bus at the circuit very close to an entrance gate, so we were able to grab our chairs and bottles of water, and walk a short distance to the grassy viewing area at turn 11.

It was a really great practice day, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves! The weather was hotter and sunnier than we had been led to believe it would be, with temperatures reaching around 80 degrees F, so we got a little burnt. We picked up really good cheeseburgers for lunch, which were pricey at $9 each, but they were very fresh, hot, and there were loads of help-yourself toppings available. For a first event at this new circuit, it had been very well organised, with the exception of the merchandise stands – items were badly displayed, and the stands themselves were extremely tiny with only one entrance and exit, which meant the queues were HUGE and it took DH over an hour to buy one t-shirt! However, the toilets were exceptionally good – lots and lots of portaloos, which were frequently serviced by small groups of people who were assigned just a handful of loos each, so the cubicles were always clean with plenty of paper and hand sanitizer available. Very impressive. The staff and volunteers at the track were also very good – again, lots of staff around, very friendly and chatty, and very helpful too.

When the day’s racing had finished, we walked back over to the bus, and at the appointed time we were driven back to the campsite. We had snacks for dinner again, before retiring quite early as we were shattered! There was a live band playing in the marquee on the campsite, they were very good and finished their sets by 10.00 p.m. so they didn’t disturb anyone. Obviously, we didn’t see what they looked like, we only heard them as we were in bed! There was also a big campfire, we could hear people chatting around it but they also quietened down by 10. (The campsite wasn’t very busy, it was quite big but there were only about 8 camper vans and a handful of tents).

DAY TWENTY TWO – SATURDAY 17 NOVEMBER
Plan – Formula 1 : Qualifying
Actual – I spent all night absolutely FREEZING cold, and again it kept me awake a lot during the night. I therefore woke up to the alarm this morning cold and tired. Whilst putting the coffee machine on to brew, I was fiddling with what looked like a temperature controller on the wall by the bed, and realised that it controlled a fan heater! A bit more investigation followed, which resulted in the discovery that there was indeed a heater, which ran off the LPG tank and not off the generator! Grrrr. I had been reluctant to run the generator for very long each day, as I thought it would use up all our fuel and I remembered being told that if the fuel dropped below ¼ of a tank, nothing would run. However, we had a full tank of LPG and this meant that I could now run the heater to my heart’s content! To be fair, I think we had been told this at the initial briefing when we collected the vehicle, but I didn’t remember anything about it and DH said it never occurred to him to tell me, despite my spending 2 nights in a row shivering and blue!!

Anyway, we had coffee and croissants with the heater blaring out until we couldn’t breathe properly for the heat in there – bliss.

The shuttle bus turned up on time today, and we set off on the 1 mile journey to the race track, parking in the same place as yesterday and therefore sitting ourselves in more or less the same spot. In contrast to the night-time weather, it was again gloriously hot and sunny, and I so regretted not bringing the sunblock lotion with me. (I had left it in Dallas, not expecting the weather to be this hot – the weather forecast had said cloudy and less than 60 degrees every day). I wore DH’s sunblock t-shirt and used my umbrella a bit to shade me from the sun. DH had another sunblock t-shirt and a hat, so he was pretty much okay, although he had one burnt arm and knee!

We watched the 3rd F1 practice race, then a really exciting race of Historic F1 cars from the 1960s to the ‘80s. I loved the cute little white Brabham, and the 6-wheeled Tyrroll – great fun! I had snuck in some packets of peanut butter crackers and cheese cracker snacks in the front pocket of my sweatshirt, as we had been told in advance that you weren’t allowed to take food into the track, but we did see other people with bags of picnic food, so obviously the race track staff were letting them in with more food than we had been told. We repeated the cheeseburger lunch again, as it was really good yesterday. Between races we walked partway around the track side, up a hill, to explore a bit more of the site, which was fun.

At the end of the race day, we went back to the campsite, although it took us quite a while and we had to take various detours along the way. The roads around the race track had been extended and rebuilt, but they still got very snarled up with the sheer volume of traffic trying to get offsite at the end of the day.

We read a little, had some snacks and coffee, and went to bed a lot warmer than last night! Tonight’s band in the marquee were called the Sticky Notes, and we really liked the sound of them, although again, we didn’t see what they looked like!

DAY TWENTY THREE – SUNDAY 18 NOVEMBER
Plan – Formula 1 : Race Day; drive back to Dallas
Actual – Up early, and today was going to be a very long day. We packed up our clothes etc and secured everything in the RV storage areas so that we could just take off at the end of the race day. Then we had coffee and the last of the croissants, slipped more crackers into my sweatshirt pocket, and set off for the circuit.

The race day was absolutely brilliant, we had a really great time! Lewis Hamilton won the race, and of course because he is British, we went nuts! I had taken a small Union Jack flag, which I waved like a lunatic all through the race. We had some more Brits set up next to us to watch the race, and we chatted to them for the whole day – they were lovely, and let us share their suntan lotion all day. They were living in Houston and said that they loved it so much, they were happy to stay in the USA (the husbands of both families were working in the USA).

We had cheeseburgers yet again, (because we loved them!), and pretty soon it was time to leave. We were taken back to the campsite, where we bade farewell to the guy running the site, and began our long drive back to Heath.

We made very good time, and our helpful SatNav, (which we bought in Wal-Mart last year), took us back along a slightly different route, which missed out Downtown Dallas to our relief! We were back at bro’s after around 3 hours. N1 and N2 came out to have a look at the RV, and were very impressed! Even SIL liked the look of it, and they began avidly discussing hiring one for a touring trip in the near future!

We had a final glass of wine with the family, before finishing up the final bit of packing, having showers, and hitting bed around midnight.

DAY TWENTY FOUR – MONDAY 1 NOVEMBER
Plan – Return RV, fly Dallas to Orlando, fly Orlando to UK
Actual – We were up at 6 this morning, had a quick wash and got dressed, said our goodbyes to our lovely family, (leaving the Union Jack for the boys to keep!), and then drove the RV back to the hire depot in McKinney, via a gas station to fill her up. They checked it over and all was good. We had to pay an extra $5 for mileage, which wasn’t bad as I had guessed the number of miles to purchase in the first place and was only 15 miles out!

A lovely lady from the hire depot shuttled us to Dallas airport, and we checked in at a podium in the parking garage, which was novel! One of our suitcases was 4lb overweight, and one was 8lb underweight, but just as we were about to begin the whole horrible shuffling stuff about thing again, the guy checking us in just waved the cases away and said not to worry about it. Phew!

We went through customs quite quickly, and found our gate with 3 hours to spare! And I had been worried about being late. My main worry today though was that American Airlines would do their usual (to us) trick of being late taking off – we had a 2 hour window between landing in Orlando and taking off again for the UK, which included time to collect our luggage and then check it in again with a different airline. However, all was looking good, so we relaxed a bit, had some coffee from Starbucks, bought some Peppermint Mocha Via sachets (which are not available in the UK!), and had a look round a tiny “Texas” store, which was fun. I picked up a t-shirt for DH as a Christmas surprise, and a pink sparkly bracelet for myself. We also got a small, resin armadillo with a clip attached to it (for a photo?) because it was a fun item.

We began boarding eventually and took off only 10 mins late, which was a relief. The flight went quickly and soon we were landing at MCO, and riding the monorail again. Our luggage was amongst the first to come out, so we picked it up and headed for the Virgin Atlantic check-in desk. The luggage weights were fine, and once we had checked in, we went straight to the Disney “Earport” Store for a quick look round. DB got an Epcot pin that he liked, and I was able to get a Lightning McQueen cookie for my daughter as a Christmas gift, (replacement for the one that Rocky ate!), and an Ariel cookie for DH – she is his favourite character, *spit*. I was really impressed with the Store, it had loads of really great stuff in there, and we had never had time to explore it before.

After this we headed for our departure gate, where I sat DH down with the hand luggage and went to a nearby Burger King to pick up a couple of burgers and some water, as we knew it would be quite some time before we were given any food on the flight. The flight left on time and was okay, but seemed to take forever. It was a night flight, and neither of us slept very much, so we were very tired. We watched a film together, Ted, but were too tired to concentrate on another one so just played video games for several hours.

DAY TWENTY FIVE – TUESDAY 20 NOVEMBER
Plan – Arrive Manchester airport, drive home
Actual – We landed a little late, collected our luggage again, and then began the drive home. Fortunately it only took us just under an hour and a half to get home, and then we had to try and stay awake all day to attempt to get our body clocks used to UK time again!

SUMMARY

Halloween parade music – I never did find this. But then I was talking to my family about it a few days later, and it turned out that my sister bought a CD last year of WDW event music, so I was able to copy this from her, to my delight.

Photopass photos – as this was our honeymoon, we loved having the opportunity to get lots of photos of the two of us. Normally, our holiday pictures are lovely, but don’t usually have both of us in them! We checked our Photopass pictures on our return, and there were over 250 of them! We found it a little confusing as to how to order them on a CD though, until I actually went back and read the front of the box it all arrived in - oops. This explained exactly what to do. We had several ‘special’ pictures taken, with Stitch appearing in a couple of them, and the Halloween party ones with the hitchhiking ghosts were really funny!

Overall, we had a thoroughly splendid time in the USA, and we loved having some down time in Dallas after the madness that was Orlando.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Coming next : Old Key West in November 2013!