The Beginning....and the Creation of My New Catch Phrase

We spent a week in Florida, near Disney.

May I just say that traffic around there was awful?  I felt so sorry for the people that actually live there.  Annoying tourists coming in....all....the.....time.....and mucking up their trips to work.

I was very happy that our timeshare place was only like 5 minutes away from the parks, because even that short of a drive took us a while.

We had looked on-line and found out that this week wasn't a particularly busy week at any of the parks, but they did recommend staying away from weekend days.  So, we decided to go to parks Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  (I will tell you later why that ended up being a foolish plan.)

So, Sunday (after Rainman was the only one to successfully get himself to church) was a golf day for Rainman, D-man and A-girl, while the other kids and I hung out at the activity center playing video games and watching movies and then finished off at the pool.  We finished off the night at Giordanno's Chicago pizza place.  Not a bad life.

Giordanno's had the best balloon guy (and the best part was that he was actually visiting with another table and saw that we were ready to leave and came over and found out what the kids wanted....then he went back to the other table and chatted them up while he made our kids' balloons.  Introverts dream right there, not having to awkwardly chat with a stranger just to get your kids a piece of twisted latex something or other.)

 Parrot sitting on her shoulder.  It was kind of ingenious how the little parrot legs grabbed her shirt and held on.

The Little Mermaid holding her pearl.

And Darth Vader who is using Darth Maul's double sided light saber.

No loud upstairs neighbors this night.  :)   Yay!

Monday, we went and picked up our park tickets from the discount ticket place (more to come on that later too), and played some mini golf at Pirate's Cove.

We just love Pirate's Cove mini golf and if we are ever near one we try to go.  D-man and A-girl even got t-shirts. (Souvenir number 1...of many.....)

We finished our day at what is now called Disney Springs and used to be called Downtown Disney. We had never been there, but some of my people wanted to shop in the worst way.

 This is where my family got the first taste of what would become my catch phrase for the week:

"Boy, Florida is sure hot in October".

or this crowd favorite...

"Holy cow it is hot!"


We walked and shopped, and walked some more.   And, I got my first inkling that things sure were expensive here in Disney.

But, there were good photo spots up the ying yang.  So, we were all happy.

I promise you, D-man was actually with us.  Apparently he was either off shopping for J-girl or he refused to be in my super cute photo ops!

We also got our first taste of how much walking we were about to do.

 Hey, wait....look to the far left.....it is D-man's foot!  Okay, now go back to looking at the cuteness in the middle of A-girl carrying poor worn out V-girl.

More to come.....