Yes, I spent Valentine’s Day at DisneyWorld with my parents. Don’t judge me. Well, not the whole day, but more on that a bit later. We headed to Animal Kingdom and arrived a bit after park opening, making our way to the back of the park in a lighting misting rain. We got right in line for the Kiliminjaro Safari, where we had probably a fifteen minute wait before boarding our truck.
Wednesday marked the final day of the IRWD conference, where Neil & I took in some more great sessions on site design and user experience and ate some grape candy from the bowls conveniently located at our tables in the main room. The conference provided boxed lunches on this day, and we sat outside in the glorious Florida sunshine eating our lunch on the lawn, with a couple of fighting little lizards nearby.
Tuesday kicked off the beginning of the main parts of IRWD, which had some great sessions and an even better lunch with a new friend from Princess Auto up in Winnipeg. After the conference wrapped up for the day, I drove back to my Disneyworld hotel Port Orleans Riverside, where I wandered down to the pool and met my parents, who had driven over from Siesta Key to spend a couple days at WDW with me. We chatted for a while in the wonderful Florida sun and then headed to our rooms to get ready for our dinner and trip into the MK, with plans to watch the Main Street Electrical Parade and Wishes.
Monday morning kicked off a workshop day at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference (IRWD), about 20 minutes from Disney at the Omni hotel. My iPhone turn-by-turn voice directions got me to the show with no problem, and the SEO workshop day was pretty good. I connected with my friend and co-worker Neil, who was also attending the conference and had brought his wife and son with him for some Florida relief. At the end of the conference day, I gave Neil & family a lift to Magic Kingdom, then headed to EPCOT. I would have joined them, but I had a dinner reservation at Via Napoli that I could not cancel. As it turns out, I would not have wanted to, either.
These pictures were taken in the new Fanstasyland, during Wishes and the Main Street Electrical Parade, and a few other locations around Magic Kingdom.
After two quick days in Florida, Rachel headed home Sunday morning to return to work and motherhood, so I dropped her off at the airport before 7am and headed back towards DisneyWorld. I needed to swing by a drugstore to pick up new insoles for my shoes, so I pulled up to a CVS just outside WDW shortly after 7. There was a young woman standing outside the door, which I correctly interpreted as an ominous sign. She identified herself as an employee, but said she was waiting on the assistant manager to open the store. The reason that he was late is that the police had detained him on the way to work, according to the employee. I decided to seek out another store in the area and then headed back to Beach Club to check out.
We ventured into EPCOT shortly after the park opened and made our way to Soarin’, as that is the only appropriate way to start a morning in the park since that ride quickly backs up, similar to Toy Story Midway Mania at DHS. We had almost no wait, but the few minutes we did have to wait introduced me to a new fashion trend: Resort Formal Casual. I’m certainly no fashion maven and I got once rejected on What Not to Wear because they said there was no hope, but this was awesome:
We always wondered how far we walk in days at WDW. In the pre-kid days, we thought were were logging days with mid-to-upper teens mileage, as we hopped from park to park nearly every day we were at Disney. Thanks to technology, on this trip we figured it out definitively. I bought the iOS app Cyclemeter a few years back to track my bike rides, and I’ve been using it lately to log my camera hikes. It tracks distance, time, and pace, along with GPS route mapping that tracks everything. You can use it to create regular routes and measure your performance against historical bests and averages.
The day started with ominous promises of winter storm warnings, lake effect snow, and freezing rain. But because we’re tough Lakeshore Michiganders (yeah, that’s only the western Lakeshore, people. Ain’t no lake effect snow coming off Lake St Clair, nuh uh), we were unfazed by the hysterical predictions of icy mayhem and frozen carnage. When we want fake stuff, we come here for the polished Disney fake hype that we pay for, not the chicken-little-death-toll-stands-at-zero-damn-you-snow Wood TV sensationalism crap we could get for free.
