Disney 2013

The very day after school was done we headed to Orlando, Florida to the Happiest Place on Earth!  Yes, I was VERY tired from the school year, but our district is one of the few that finish at the end of May so we try to take advantage of the lesser crowds by going right away. 

Our flight out was a bit crazy.  We were late leaving DFW because of a scheduled repair on the plane that somehow didn't get done while it waited on the tarmac for 2  1/2 hours before our flight.  :-/  Our connecting flight layover was tight--only 50 minutes.  And of course, the gates between the two flights were the absolute farthest possible distance apart---seriously.  We arrived at gate 2 and had to board the next flight at gate 28.  Ugh.  Luckily the flight crew on our first flight asked anyone who didn't have a close connection to stay seated to let the ones who did get off quickly.  I told Kendra we had to run, and knowing that she can run faster than me I sent her ahead.  She's 11, fit, and runs a mile every week in PE.  I'm not 11, not so fit, and was carrying a 20 pound backpack.  You do the math!  So she got to the gate and told them I was coming (I was only about a minute behind her, so I was proud if not very winded!!).  We made it! 

Here we are before our first flight leg

Here we are after running to our connection!

To add insult to injury, we then arrived over Florida to a massive storm which kept us in the air for an additional hour before being able to land.  We finally landed and waded through the parking lot rivers to our rental car and headed to the condo.  Neither of us had eaten since breakfast and it was after 9 at night, so we stopped to eat of course.  It continued to rain....not a good sign, I later realized.

We are grateful to friends who let us use one of their timeshare weeks---we stayed in a very nice condo for about $400 for the whole week!  It had a full kitchen, washer and dryer, and all the comforts of home.  We stayed there the last time we went, too, so we were familiar with the area for shopping and restaurants, and I knew how to get to all the parks via the "back way" from our place. 

This time we got tickets for both Disney and Universal for the week.  I'm just going to do a photo purge now, sharing our week in pictures.  Sadly, we arrived just when a tropical storm decided to come, too.  We dealt with a LOT of rain.  You expect afternoon gully-washers in Florida but they usually stop after a short bit.  This time they rarely stopped, so we probably didn't use our tickets to the maximum capacity we could have (after a while we just didn't feel like staying wet), but we still had a great time.

She's got the whole Epcot ball...in her hand!

This is my beloved Napoleon pastry from the French patisserie in Epcot.  I got this TWICE.  Sigh....

Gotta love the poncho!

We lucked on this photo op---we tend not to wait forever for character pics.  This is Kendra's favorite princess!

View of the castle from the Swiss Family tree

Hard to get pics of the castle without three million photo bombers!  :-)

Maybe someday???

It was my birthday!

Being silly and bored waiting for an evening show.  Gotta get your seats hours ahead of time.

The beautiful castle in one of our favorite shades

Enjoying a butterbeer at Harry Potter world, Universal

Probably the most disappointing day was the last day.  It was my birthday, and we planned to go to Universal for our most anticipated part of the trip===Harry Potter world!  We'd been watching the crowd and wait times via an app on my phone all week, and we discovered that the Harry Potter ride wait time was always enormous in the morning but almost nothing in the mid afternoon.  So we decided to take it easy, sleep in a bit, and headed out around 1:00.  We went straight to the HP main ride in the castle.  It had a 40 minute wait but you wait as you tour the castle.  We jumped into the queue.  The castle was very neat.  We got to the very end of the wait and there was a video of what the ride itself looked like---lots of tossing around, turning, etc.  There were warnings all through the line about motion sickness, etc.  Kendra was really going to be a trooper, but that last video did her in.  We bailed at the last minute.  Kendra felt terrible, but I told her it was more important to me that she enjoy the rest of the day and not be nauseous, and we got to see the castle so it was fine!  We then explored the rest of Diagon Alley, first getting a yummy frozen butterbeer.  Then we went into the Ollivanders Wand Shop, where Kendra was chosen from our group to be the "wand chooser".  It was really neat.  It was so dark in there that I couldn't take any pics, though.  She ended up purchasing Ginny Weasley's wand. 

There were many other neat places we wanted to see and do in Universal, but unfortunately another HUGE storm came through just after we finished in Harry Potter.  We took shelter in a big top restaurant place and had to stay there for almost an hour before it was possible to walk through the park without drowning.  We didn't bring our ponchos with us---just had a small umbrella---so we got soaked even after waiting.   Sadly, Universal is very different from Disney in that almost all their rides are outside, so everything was basically shut down, and my weather app on my phone indicated that the storm wasn't ending anytime soon.  So we decided to just leave and it ended up raining the entire rest of the day and into the night.  It was a bummer way to end our trip, but what can you do???

We realized that this might be our last Disney trip together!  We take a major trip about every three years, and there are two destinations we want to do yet.  We want to go to NYC to see a Broadway show or two, and then do something tropical like the Bahamas or maybe even Hawaii (thinking senior trip).   Then Kendra will be off to college---ugh!!!  We didn't do everything we wanted this trip, thanks to Mother Nature, but we still had a fabulous time.  I love vacationing with just my girl and me!!!