Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is our second full day in Disney World. We slept in until 9:30 this morning which was great. Boy was I exhausted from the past two days. I really needed the chance to do some catching up. I felt pretty refreshed by the time that I got up this morning.

We decided that going into the parks early today was totally not worth it so we instead went out and got some breakfast/lunch before attempting to do anything else. We walked from the hotel to Waffle House but when we got there discovered that they do not accept credit cards. More importantly we discovered that they do not run their air conditioning and it was way too warm inside for us to enjoy eating. So we forewent the food there which we were sad to do because we love eating there so much and instead went back to the Perkins that we had just left. Now I know that I said that I would never eat at Perkins again but it was so inconvenient to try to go to anyplace else that it seemed to be worth it. All we were doing was getting some breakfast so it could only be so bad. The only thing that was really bad about the lunch was the price. It cost just as much to eat at Perkins as it would to have eaten inside of one of the Disney Parks at a much nicer restaurant. So we weren’t very impressed. The price at this Perkins was no different than the price at Perkins restaurants in other places but they are all really expensive for what they are.

On the way back from breakfast we did a little shopping. Dominica had neglected to bring enough socks for the trip and needed to buy some. While we were shopping I also convinced her to pick up some arch supports for her shoes. After all of these years of having terrible foot cramps when she walked any distance it turns out that she has never attempted using any type of arch support. So I made her try those right away.

We got back to the hotel and got online and did some posting. SGL got its daily, Flickr got some pics, OurMedia got a video, etc. Min and I even recorded our first Podcast together. However, our Internet access turned out to be pretty flaky and we were not able to stay online long enough to be able to upload the podcast. Oh well, can’t win them all. I spent a lot of time dealing with the bad Internet access. Eventually William at the front desk said that the room’s access wasn’t any good and so they decided to move me to a different room. But Min and I were running late for getting to the shuttle to take us to EPCOT so we had to deal with the room change later in the day. This was not a good start to the day. The last thing that I need to deal with is added stress of something being wrong and not being able to stay in contact with people when I need to do so.

The shuttle turned out to be another problem. They forgot to pick us up entirely. We were supposed to be picked up at 1:30 in the afternoon. Around 1:45 Dominica called the shuttle guys and asked if we had missed them somehow. I guess that they forgot about us or something. So they finally got to the hotel to get us around 1:52 and took us to the park. So we got a later start to the day than we had planned on. Luckily we didn’t have anything scheduled or that could have been a problem.

The first thing that we did was go to The Land and sign up for their Behind the Seeds tour. The Behind the Seeds is a one hour walking tour that is hosted by the agricultural research facility located there at The Land. It is my all time favourite thing to do in Disney World. Eric, Mark and I did it in the 90’s and all of us absolutely loved it. Today was no exception to that; Dominica and I had a great time. We had ten people on our tour including two separate couple from Wisconsin, a family of four from Connecticut and us. The tour was given by the managing director of the facility which cannot be a normal thing. The last time that I went on the tour it was given by an intern from SUNY Cortland. Our tour guide today was definitely excited about giving the tour and it really showed that he loved his work. He had a lot of energy and we had a really good time. I took a lot of pictures on the tour but didn’t post those to Flickr. I didn’t think that too many people were going to be all that interested in looking at a bunch of greenhouse pictures. If you want to see them drop me an email. The tour lasted a bit more than an hour like they had said. It was probably seventy-five minutes or more. A really good value for the $12 each that we had to spend to get to take the tour. I did some figuring and figured out that they must have been paying our tour guide – considering that he was a managing director with a Ph.D. – more during the tour alone than they had collected from the ten of us. Dominica really loved the tour too and totally wants to have a greenhouse now. I told her that that would happen.

From The Land we went on to try out GM’s Test Track which is new enough that neither of us has ever ridden it. The line wasn’t too long so we figured that it was a good time to give it a try. The line area is really poorly done and quite boring but luckily we had to spend almost no time at all in that area. We just walked through it as quickly as possible. Then they have a stages waiting area where they messed up the doors and closed them on me when there wasn’t room in front of me yet to allow me to move out of the way of the doors. Talk about being pushy. They need to check that I think. Then when they released our stages waiting room they made the mistake of opening the room beside us too early and they opened onto the middle of the waiting line and no one could figure out what was going on because they couldn’t leave through the doors that had opened without budging into line so they stood there confused as to where they were supposed to go. I was confused. I had no idea what they were trying to do. The ride itself was horrible. Both of us hated it. The first long bit of it is just this super cheesy “test track” thing where they pretend to be driving you through the process of testing a car. But it is nothing like riding in a car and just feels like a cheap Disney ride but without any good theme or plot. Other Disney rides that are in a setting like that are surrounded by gorgeous artwork, great themeing, audio-animitronics that make you want to ride and ride just to prove to yourself that they aren’t real. But not this ride. There is nothing to see on the whole ride. Then they take you through a really hot room just to make you uncomfortable. Then they whip you around the “test track” at a whopping (can you smell the sarcasm?) 65 miles per hour. Yes that is fast and there is a lot of pressure on the tight turns but it is no thrill ride. It might make you whoozy but it sure won’t get you excited. The bottom line was that this ride was boring, uncomfortable and dumb.

To torture ourselves a little more we continued onto the Kodak pavilion where we rode Journey Into Imagination. This ride was pathetic when I was a kid and it is pathetic now. They did an update sometime in the 90’s and it is a little better than it was but it is still bad. Very bad. There is no point to the ride at all. I have no idea why they felt that they should have it there. After that boring ride we went on to really torture ourselves at Honey I Shrunk the Audience which is a 3D movie that should have been called Honey I Shrunk the Fun. If there is fun associated with this movie I sure wasn’t small enough to find it. This was my second time doing the movie and knew that it wasn’t good but I think that they actually lowered the level of enjoyment that you can extract from it since the last time that I saw it. They try to hide the wait for the ride by making you first line up right inside of the main doors and setting the “ride line length counter” according to the time that it takes to move from this area into the real wait area which they count as part of the show. But it isn’t. First you move into this large room with a cement floor at a heavy slant and they yell at you not to sit down. Of course, everyone wants to sit down because they are bored and uncomfortable. The floor is slanted so sitting makes perfect sense and standing makes none. Especially since the room is dark, everyone is packed in like sardines and everyone is feeling uncomfortable because it feels like something has gone wrong. Like the guy who runs the movie got the flu and called in and no one else knows what to do. The room is basically dark for a really long time and then they decide to play a title sequence on some televisions over and over again hoping that no one notices that they didn’t put as much effort into making this show as I did into my last vlog update from my handheld digital camera. And the used plasma televisions instead of LCDs so this stupid title sequence burned them out. Then, after the whole place is talking about the fact that they are just running a little meaningless title sequence that says something like “And now, inventor of the the year goes to Wayne Szilinski” over and over again and is wondering if they have forgotten about us in here, they play some sappy “kid lost his dog” video that makes everyone really sad. When that is finally over they let us into the actual film for some real punishment. The show is awful. The film quality is pathetic and everything is out of focus. I can’t believe that Kodak or Disney would be willing to put their name on this thing. But to make matters worse there is the story to consider. The show is absolutel painful to sit through. It is not entertaining at all. You hope that the movie will make up for the horrible wait but in fact it just adds insult to injury. Avoid the entire Kodak pavilion at any cost. I have been saying this to everyone going to Walt Disney World for eighteen years now and no one ever listens to me. Once upon a time there was Captain Eo and that was a really great movie. But it is long gone as Kodak wanted to make sure that there was no fun to be squeezed out of their pavilin in Disney World. If you are a Fuji employee (as Dominica now is!!!) you should visit Kodak’s Journey into Imagination and it will make you very, very proud.

We were fed up with Future World and so we high-tailed it out of there on the first thing smokin’ – or floatin’ in our case. We took the Friendship boat over to Germany and walked to Norway to get another sweet almond covered pretzel. Boy those are good. We wanted a snack to prepare us for our big upcoming dinner. The we went to China and watching their CircleVision 360 movie which is absolutely gorgeous. Dominica never got to do China before and I don’t think that I did or if I did I didn’t see this most recent revision of the movie. It was excellent and we both really enjoyed it. It isn’t as long as I would like but you can’t have everything. After the film we stopped and watched the Chinese acrobat girls for a little while. They are really amazing. I can’t believe the stuff that they do.

By the time that we were done in China it was time to get to The Land again for our dinner. It is a long walk from China to The Land so we needed to leave quite a bit early to be able to get there in time to make our reservations. We walked briskly and managed to arrive at the perfect time. We were taken right in and seated which is a real benefit to eating so late in the evening. There were a lot of empty tables and very few children. Now I was awfully wary of doing a character dinner but I have always really like this restaurant, the Garden Grill, and Dominica really wanted to do the character event so I conceded. The way that it is set up is that you get a “family style” course served to you. That means that they bring out a single large helping of everything and you share it at the table. The whole thing is all you can eat so there is no fighting over anything. And everything was amazing. First of all the restaurant itself is Disney’s only revolving restaurant and it takes you on an upper level view of the Living with the Land ride. So it is a very neat restaurant physically. Then the food. Wow was that something. We were so impressed. There wasn’t a single thing that wasn’t just incredible. The highlights were definitely the fresh vegetables grown right there in the same building hydroponically. They were amazing. And the number on thing was the potatoes au gratin. Wow. There were so good that we both decided to get extra potatoes and beans rather than getting dessert. That is extra amazing since dessert was all ready paid for in the package. But the veggies were just so amazing that we couldn’t resist. They did talk us into trying two tiny slices of dessert. But they were only bite sized. We didn’t let them bring the full dessert tray thing that they normally do. The characters were cool too. We had Farmer Mickey, Pluto, Chip and Dale. We had a really good time and got our pictures taken with the characters as well. I was thinking that this really wouldn’t be much fun for adults but it really was. And the price was great too! It was $25 for each of us for a very amazing all you could eat full service incredible fancy dinner plus a little entertainment from the characters. You can’t get a meal like that in Rochester or even Warsaw for that kind of price. The same level of food in Warsaw would be $80-$90 easily. We totally recommend the character dinner there and we are planning on trying another one now.

We got back to our room after an adventure with the shuttle again. This time they brought a small van to pick up sixteen waiting guests. But to save everyone’s evening we all just crammed into the van. It was cozy but the ride was short. Everyone got to know each other very quickly. We got back to the hotel and had to deal with changing rooms but were happy to do it since we ended up with a nicer room. So we are in there now and our Internet access is at least a tiny bit better for the time being and it looks like we will be able to keep the updates coming. There are new podcasts coming on the main channel as well as the updates throughout the day on SGL 2. I posted numerous times today to SGL 2 but unfortunately the first several appear to have been lost. The last two came through but we lost all of the updates that I did throughout the day. We are very sad about that and it is too bad because I know that a lot of people were listening to those to keep up during the days. We are going to try to post more often tomorrow in the hopes that more will get through. Thanks everyone for listening!

Here is a surpise – Tristan actually emailed me tonight. I have been emailing him for a year or more. He fell off the face of the planet but appears to be back again. We will see if he keeps responding 🙂

It is 3:00 am and I have to post. Good night everyone.

Here it is, the first update written inside of Walt Disney World! Unfortunately I do not yet know when or how this update is going to get posted so there is still some possibility that this won’t be seen for several day but if all has ended up going as I had planned then it will be posted sometime early on Wednesday morning.

Dominica and I made it out yesterday as planned. Our flight went very smoothly and we arrived in Florida just after 3:00. Our “limosine” driver was waiting for us and helped us get our luggage. Boy are we glad that we had gone with the limo service instead of the stock shuttle service. It was so much faster, easier and more convenient. It really allowed us to get right to our hotel and to get started with our vacation without all of the stress associated with dealing with those shuttle deals. Our driver was very nice. He was from Brazil and we talked for a while.

It is weird being back at the hotel that Eric, Mark and I stayed at so many years ago. It is in the process of being turned into a Holiday Inn Express so everything is torn up and under construction. We got room 100 on the ground floor right near the entrance. I think that there is hardly anybody else here right now. The place seems to be deserted. We have a king room which we had to push to be able to get even though that is what we reserved. There aren’t a whole lot of ammenities that are associated with this room but it has the basics that we need so we are quite happy. The price is definitely right.

We wasted no time in setting off for the park. There is no afternoon or evening shuttle service from our hotel into the park so we decided to hoof it since the main entrance is practically right across the street from the hotel. We set off but by the time we made it up hotel boulevard and into Downtown Disney Min’s feet were all ready starting to kill her. She had decided to go walking in sandals instead of sneakers and we had barely gotten started before the blisters started to form. We picked up our tickets at Downtown Disney and then hoped onto a bus destined for Epcot. We were determined to get a full evening of Disney fun under our belts before heading off to bed. The downside to this whole theory is that Dominica worked all night and didn’t get to go to bed at all last night and although I did get to go to bed last night I only got about three hours of total sleep and that was with a number of dog related interruptions. So neither of us had a complete sleep cycle under our belts as we headed into the park.

We walked into Epcot from the backside. The bus had dropped us off at the Yacht Club and we walked into Epcot through the back entrance that enters in the middle of the World Showcase between France and the UK. We had eaten lunch at the airport in Rochester having a few slices of Famiglia Pizza but we were both pretty hungry as we entered Epcot and our eyes instantly set upon the Famous Fish and Chips vendor in the UK so off we went. Boy was that Fish and Chips good. Totally delicious.

In addition to all of the other walking that we did today we then made the mistake of going to do some rides in Future World after all ready being in the World Showcase. We should have minimized the walking but we weren’t really thinking and immediately set off for Spaceship Earth which is about the farthest thing from the entrance that we had just entered. There was no line at all when we got there though and we got right in. I love being in Disney World in November. The entire park is your private domain. The experience for those of us who only come in the off-season is completely different from the experience of those poor people who come during the peak seasons. After Spaceship Earth we went over and did the Universe of Energy. Both rides were somewhat updated from their 1980’s programs but only slightly. Spaceship Earth now has Jeremy Irons narrating with the very final bit of the ride updated to the Internet into account. The Universe of Energy has a new program but hasn’t changed the ride itself so it is a little weird. The ride was always really good but now the ride and the movie portions don’t seem to match very well. But it is still a good ride. Like many of the Epcot rides, though, the Universe of Energy has been watered down and doesn’t deliver the level of “educational” value that it once did and is targetted towards a younger or less educated audience. EPCOT used to focus on teaching people about new technologies and history and what they thought that the future would be like. But now they are regearing so much of the park to just be another Tomorrowland with thrill rides and no content. Ho-hum. It is very sad.

We took the long walk back to the World Showcase and did the Rio del Tiempo boat ride in Mexico. Now there is a ride that needs to be updated. Nothing has changed on that ride since the park first opened. It has to be the single most out of date thing in all of EPCOT. It is ridiculous. The ride was poor when it was new but now it doesn’t fit in Disney World at all. The one thing that I really like about it is that it is a boat ride and a little bit of it goes past the San Angel Inn which is the restaurant inside of the pyramid and it is very romantic. I really like the setting and overall I think that the Mexican area is excellently done. I just can’t believe that they haven’t done something about that ride in all of this time. We ran over to Norway and did some pastry shopping (Eric and Mark should remember our daily trips to the Norwegian pastry shop) and I got a Cloudberry Horn and Dominica got a sweet almond covered pretzel. Boy was that stuff good. Then we rode the Maelstrom. I remember when that ride was brand new and the hottest thing in Disney World. Now we ride it and I wonder what I was thinking. The ride has a lot of potential but it is so short. Nothing happens at all on the ride. The whole thing lasts only a minute and I thought that they took some time to explain about the history of Norway but they really don’t and just use the ride as an excuse to have a short boat ride with a tiny water plume (tiny like ten feet) and an audio-animitronic troll that tells you to go away. That is it. That’s all. Nothing more to see here. That is really sad. That thirty seconds of ride was done really well and the Norwegian area in general is excellent with good food, architecture and the really nice Stave Church gallery. Min has never had the chance to go to the Stave Church but we were unfortunate enough to have it closed right now because there is a new exhibit coming soon. So she had to miss it again. I always really liked that exhibit. After the Maelstrom there is a short tourism promotion movie that is pretty good and we watched that.

By this time we were both really exhausted so we walked over to Germany and got I got myself a beer and Min got a glass of wine and we relaxed by the water for a little bit. We wanted to avoid the crowd during Illuminations because the show is boring and the people get super obnoxious while it is going on so we high-tailed it out of there before we got trapped.

We stopped and sat for a long time over on the west side of Future World just waiting for enough time to pass so that we could go out of the park and catch the hotel shuttle back. We had over an hour to kill so that was really poor timing on our part. We just sat around and relaxed and then walked out to the EPCOT shuttle waiting area and caught the hotel shuttle at 10:00 pm. We are apparently the first hotel on the return route so we were dropped off right away. Boy were we glad to be back in the hotel. We had no energy left at all and were ready to pass out. We were in bed and asleep by 11:00 or so. Our morning alarm is set for 7:00 so even getting to bed so early is barely enough time to get ready and to get out of the hotel in the morning. Our shuttle picks us up at 8:10 in front of the hotel. A little early but we get to beat most of the crowds this way.

Well today we were up with the 7:00 alarm and were ready and in front of the hotel by 8:00. I think that 7:15 might be better for tomorrow. We were totally exhausted this morning and had no desire to get out of bed at all. Both of us felt that we hadn’t gotten enough rest. It was destined to be a long day.

The hotel shuttle drops us at the entrance to EPCOT and from there we can use Disney transportation to get us to wherever we want to go. We hopped onto the monorail and road that all of the way out to the Magic Kingdom. The Magic Kingdom is the only way to really start a big Disney vacation. This wasn’t the first time for either of us, though, so we decided to do the park the right way and not start where everyone else starts so that we could get the most out of it. We immediately got onto the railroad that circles the park and rode that over to Frontierland were we disembarked and headed for the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Dominica didn’t know what to make of the ride without any lines. None. We could ride as fast as we could run through the “line” area. The park was so slow that they let us ride again without even getting out of our seats! Now that is an empty park. We decided to try out luck with Splash Mountain next since we were nearby. That ride always has the lines. But not today. Once again we were on as quickly as we could get through the “line” area and once again we were able to stay on the ride for a second go around without having to get out of our seats. It was awesome. There were even less people than when I came to the park in 1987 and it was raining on my first day in the Magic Kingdom.

Next up was Liberty Square and the Haunted Mansion. You guessed it: no lines. We figured that we were on a roll so we headed to Fantasyland and hit the popular kids rides that we wanted to do since they always get backed up with little kids who just want to ride them over and over. We went right into Peter Pan, Snow White and the brand new Winnie the Pooh rides. I haven’t ridden Snow White since 1987 and they have updated the ride considerably to make it a little more passable as a Disney ride but Min agreed that it was pretty weak. Pooh is an improvement over Mr. Toads Wild Ride but I wish that they would have kept some ride somewhere in the park themed after The Wind in the Willows. I love that book. Fantasyland is suffering a little which 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea being removed and having a toddler’s playground in its place. Disney definitely cheaped out on that one. Talk about saving a buck. Then they closed the Skyway to Tomorrowland completely. A Disney worker died while working on the ride just a year or two ago so they must have closed it for that reason. But they replaced it with stroller parking. Oh great. Nothing like progress.

The highlight of Fantasyland now is the brand new Mickey’s Philharmagic presented by Kodak. It is a 3D movie and it is awesome. This one has to be by far the best 3D movie in the park. It is really great. And to make it even better we had managed to time getting there just perfectly so that we were able to walk straight in which is tough in a movie based “ride” where there can be a twenty minute wait even if there isn’t any line at all to deal with.

At this point it was 11:00 on the nose and we were getting hungry. Note the time: Park opened at 9:00 and it is now 11:00. Look back at how many rides we did in just two hours! I do believe that that is ten total rides AND we walked between Frontierland, Liberty Square and Fantasyland so we were JUST riding rides. Without any waiting you can cover a lot of ground very quickly. We were starting a new ride every twelve minutes with at least one of those rides lasting more than twelve minutes.

Lunch doesn’t serve at the Liberty Tree Tavern where we wanted to eat until 11:30 so we went down to the Hall of Presidents and, believe it or not, made it to the MINUTE to walk straight into a show and those shows last for half an hour! So we watched that show and then it was perfect timing for lunch. We were the third group seated at the Liberty Tree Tavern.

The Liberty Tree Tavern is the big full service restaurant in Liberty Square and they focus on high end American cuisine. The meal was amazing. We loved it. We got the most delicious hot rolls with honey butter and I started with some New England Clam Chowder that was to die for delicious. Both Min and I got the same entree: salmon on pumpkin bread. Yummy. Then we split a caramel apple crumble for dessert. The whole meal was awesome. We couldn’t have asked for a better lunch and what better day to have such an awesome lunch than our first full day in the the Magic Kingdom when we have been able to just zip from ride to ride. We are having a great time.

We moved on to Tomorrowland and managed to do all of the attractions that we had wanted to do with no wait being over five minutes. We did the new Stitch ride which was supposed to have replaced the pathetic Alien Encounter Ride which replaced the pathetic Mission to Mars ride. Well it turns out that they just replaced the alien with Stitch and left the rest of the ride the same. Still totally crap.

Min made me to the Buzz Lightyear ride for little kids. It is like an arcade game. You ride through the ride in a little car with big plastic guns on the front and you shoot and the bad guys and it gives you points. Cute for little kids. Min scored about 28,000. I scored 152,000. 🙂 She didn’t like the ride quite and much after that. We were so excited to learn that both of our favourite Magic Kingdom ride, the Carousel of Progress, which all of the guidebooks have listed as close, was actually up and running. We were so happy to get to ride it after being so sure that it was closed. We just happened to walk by it and saw people going in. The cast members who were working there said that it hadn’t closed in the last three years and they didn’t know of it being scheduled to close. So beware of the guidebooks.

We rode the Wedway People Mover (or the Tomorrowland Transit Authority now that Walt is dead and gone and no one but me is left to complain) which we both love to ride. Then it was off to Adventureland in the hopes that we would have bypassed the crowds going in the order that we did. We would have tried to do Space Mountain but the ride closed just before we went there.

We did the Pirates of the Carribean and The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management without any lines or delays. That was awfully nice. We walked past the Jungle Cruise because it had had a really long wait. But we came back and figured that a singe twenty minute wait today wouldn’t kill us. So we joined our one and only queue for the day and rode the Jungle Cruise wrapping up the Magic Kingdom for us. It was starting to rain while we were on the Jungle Cruise and we were getting thirsty so we hid in the Dole Aloha snack tent place and had pineapple floats while we waited for the rain to die down.

Since we had done everything in the Magic Kingdom that we had wanted to do we decided that it would be a good chance to head back to EPCOT and get some more stuff done there. How is that for a productive day. We did six and a half hours in the Magic Kingdom, from 9:00 until 3:30, and managed to complete the entire park’s allottment of adult rides, had a full service sit down lunch and a light snack! Few people will ever be able to do the Magic Kingdom so quickly. In all honesty we did completely bypass the Country Bear Jamboree and the Riverboat is shut down for work and would normally be a fairly long ride.

We got to EPCOT and went straight to The Land which is my all time favourite place to go in Walt Disney World. The ride Soarin’ is there from the California Adventure in Disneyland. Josh, Andy and I did that ride while we were out there and were not very impressed. Here it is the big attraction because it is new so it has the longest lines in EPCOT. We were blessed enough to only have to wait about twenty minutes which is pretty amazing for that ride. We got through it in no time and then rode Living with the Land which is my favourite ride while we were there. No wait on that ride. While we were at The Land we stopped up on the upper level and looked into getting reservations for the awesome revolving restaurant that they have in there. They have a character dinner that they do that Dominica wants to go to. I would like to eat there again after all of these years. I ate there with my parents many years ago. Probably in 1987 but maybe in 1992. So we got reservations for tomorrow evening at 7:50. We are going to be exhausted by the time we are done tomorrow. Tomorrow is now locked in to being a fourteen hour day in the park. I am sure that on Thursday morning that we will be sleeping in big time and not going to any park until pretty close to lunch time. At least that is what I am hoping for. I need a chance to catch up on some sleep and to let my body rest a little bit.

By the time we were leaving The Land it was raining pretty hard and we ended up getting soaked through by the time we got up to the World Showcase. We got to France and needed to get out of the rain so we shot into the pastry shop there and got some snack and sat ouside eating them at a time table next to the patissere with a very small awning just barely keeping the rain off of us. We stayed there as long as we could but we were getting cold. I did a quick podcast from there and then we shot around the corner to the French tourism film that they show which takes about thirteen minuts. It is a movie in Disney World that I haven’t seen yet. In fact, I am pretty sure that I have never been into the French area of the World Showcase at all. So it was all new and neat to me. The movie was good but the air conditioning made us super cold and Dominica was dieing by the time that the movie was over.

Our last stop for the evening was the American Experience. That is an amazing and decently long show. But the place was warmer than anyplace else we had been. Thank goodness. We were so wet and cold. Dominica had never seen the American Experience so it was a real treat for her to get to see it. It is one of the real highlights of Walt Disney World.

The timing of that last ride was just perfect to allow us to swing by the UK area on the way out of EPCOT and to grab some fish and chips for dinner and to walk all the way back through Future World and out of the park to catch out 8:00 shuttle back to the hotel. Boy were we glad to be on the shuttle and headed for the hotel. We were exhausted, cold and wet. And both of us had some pretty soar feet too.

So our first two days in Disney were very successful. We have done over half of the main parts of the parks. Tomorrow is going to be the Animal Kingdom and most likely it will be our only time spent there. There really isn’t a whole lot there to do. Then we plan to spend the evening in EPCOT since we are scheduled to be having dinner there very late.

We have all ready decided that this will be our final trip to Disney without actually staying in a Disney resort on property. We are glad that we are saving money and are off property now since we wouldn’t have been able to have had this vacation otherwise. But we don’t think that with all of the hassle that we are having to go through because we are off property that it is really worth it until you are willing to do it “right”. We also are pretty sure that we won’t be returning to the park without children. Not necessarily our own. But someone’s. The park is just so much more fun through the eyes of a child. As an adult the park is starting to be rather lacking in many ways.

Today would have been my grandmother’s 90th birthday. 🙁 Happy Birthday to Euphemia Allen Miller. October 31, 1915 – October 12, 2005.

I am posting today’s daily a day ahead of time since I know that I cannot post on Monday. Here are the details that everyone needs to know:

This morning at noon Dominica and I are flying out of Rochester and will be arriving in Orlando, Florida at 3:13 in the afternoon. Dad is taking us to the airport and is watching over Oreo this week as well as checking in on Mr. Humphries. We have a car scheduled to get us from the airport and we will be staying just outside of the main gates of Walt Disney World for one week. We are returning next Monday, November 7th, early in the morning and should be arriving in Rochester at noon. So we are scheduled to be gone for one week exactly – to the minute.

To make our Disney adventure more exciting and to allow all of our friends to be involved, we have decided to turn our vacation into a multimedia extravaganza! The first order of business will be, of course, keeping the SGL Dailies flowing as usual. Beginning on Tuesday I am hoping to have updates coming out regularly again. So keep checking in all week to see how things are going. We will also be doing the SGL Podcast as a joint show by both Dominica and I hopefully every night or almost every night. The show has grown so much in popularity in the last two weeks that we are anticipating a rather sizable audience. We think that this is going to be the highlight of the trip. Dominica is really looking forward to getting some time off from her regular work and getting to be on the show. So be sure to tune in and listen to our end of day wrap up. For audio updates during the day you can go to SGL 2 where we will be updating via cell phone throughout the day even when we don’t have direct Internet access so that everyone can keep up to date at all different times. SGL 2 will also have any important updates to the whole “vacation experience” in case anyone needs technical information. We will also have a Flickr page and feed that will be updated each day with images that we have taken in the park that day. This will make it really easy for people to see our pictures as they are being taken instead of later when no one is interested any longer. Look to the SGL Navigation bar for links to the Flickr page and feed. Then to top it all of we now have a Video Blog or Vlog where we will be posting our vacation videos that we put together each day. The only camera that we are taking is a small Kodak CX7530 but it has some basic video functionality so we will be using that. We do have 1160MB of flash memory for taking pictures and videos in the park so we should be in pretty good shape.

Thanks everyone for checking in. I expect that the first update will be when we land in Florida around the end of the business day today. So hop over to SGL 2 and see how the trip is going!

At noon tomorrow Dominica and I will be on the direct AirTran flight headed for Orlando, Florida and Walt Disney World! Dominica is starting to get pretty excited about it. The ticket confirmation that I was so upset about last night did finally arrive this morning so we are going to be able to get tickets and actually go into the park. That is a relief. If that hadn’t worked I wasn’t sure what we were going to be able to do.

The SGL Podcast continues its steady climb up the charts. We are still doing decently well on the daily chart and today climbed from #84 to #75 on the all time chart. The Jedi Council Speaks moved up again to #69 or we would have caught them. We keep closing in though. We will get there.

For those of you, and there are a lot of you – myself included, who have the need to play QuickTime movies but do not want to have to install Apple’s awful QuickTime player that hogs system resources, runs at startup and displays advertising there is an alternative that I have mentioned to many of you but have never provided a link. The best way to watch QuickTime MOVies is to download QuickTime Alternative for Windows. This is a Windows only product but it is free and does not have any of the issues that the Apple product has.

I figured out how to use my Kodak CX7530 digital camera as a video camera today. Unfortunately it takes videos in the Apple QuickTime MOV format that is a real pain to deal with. I am not happy at all about that. That makes it much harder to do any video editing. But I am on a mission now to figure out a good way to do it.

I was up and moving nice and early this morning around 7:30. Not bad for not getting up to an alarm. Of course, with the time change it is always easier to get up and moving when you gain an hour. But we did stay up late last night to take advantage of the time shift. I wish that every day could have an extra hour in it. That would rock.

Dominica and I are able to make it to church this morning but instead of going to LaGrange like usual we are going over to Perry to go to Brick Presbyterian.

We took Oreo with us to church since it was a nice day with some sunlight and since he is going to be without us for an entire week (he isn’t going to like that one bit.) He was happy to sleep in the car while we were at church. It is nice getting back to Brick from time to time because I still know so many people there. Joe was not there today, however.

After church Min and I went over to Parker’s for a light lunch with the whole family. We had a good time hanging out but didn’t get to stay for very long because Dominica has to work her regular Sunday double shift tonight. The awesome news is that this is the last double that she has to work at the hotel, ever. That is such a relief for her. These sixteen hour shifts are killers. They are better than working two separate eight hour days but they are still really tough. This new position at Fuji is actually, once Min manages to phase out the hotel, going to reduce Min’s total work load a bit because it will keep her full time, fourty hour week in four days that she is doing now but it will do it in four even ten hour days that only shift by up to one hour from day to day and not one sixteen and three eight hour shifts with a full eight hours of swing between the shifts. That alone will be a huge difference. Dominica is going to feel so much better having a regular schedule that is the same from day to day with a real weekend – even if it doesn’t fall on the actual weekend. Even with her going to school one day a week, Tuesdays, she will still have two full days off once the hotel work is done and she will have three days off once she wraps up at FLCC.

Andy was supposed to be coming over to work here in Geneseo this afternoon but he called around 3:30 and said that he was pretty sure that our phone conversations over the past few days had ended up giving him enough to work on for the week and that he wouldn’t actually need to get together today and instead could get a lot of work done if he stayed home. So I ended up having the afternoon to myself to get things done around the house. That is probably for the best since I do have a lot to do going into the week away and I would not have managed to have gotten very much done had Andy been here hanging out this afternoon. I have bills to pay, banking to do online, blogging, podcasting and vlogging to do, online accounts to set up and feeds to prepare, a camera to learn how to use, shopping to do an Wally World, a hamster cage to clean, etc., etc. And none of that even takes into account any packing or my regular work. The packing is almost all complete. Dominica did most of that yesterday and there is just a little bit that I need to do tonight and a little to do in the morning. My laptop is going to be packed up tonight so there is not going to be an update to the dailies until sometime on Tuesday once I post this update tonight. All “up to the minute” updates will be posted directly to SGL 2 starting around 1:00 in the morning on Monday. There is going to be a ton going on making this the ultimate “virtual vacation” or so we hope.

I am working with some new tools this afternoon in an attempt to get our vlogging features ready for the trip. Here is a direct link to the test video that I made to see if the upload features are working. This video requires Quicktime which you can check yesterday’s post to see where you can download a nice alternative to Apple’s product to use to view these videos.

Min needed me to bring a USB Extension cable to her at work so I grabbed the camera and drove over there and filmed a quick clip so that there would be some stuff for people to download who are testing everything early. I dropped off her cable and then went over to Walmart to do some really quick shopping. I picked up a 1GB SD card for our Kodak digital camera so that we can get a whole day’s worth of action onto a single card without having to have multiple cards or go back to the hotel or anything. I also picked up a five dollar camera bag so that we don’t have to worry about the camera getting ruined from a little rain or anything. We have been needing that for a while and have never bothered to get one. I am glad that I waited because it is pretty nice and was dirt cheap.

I came home and have been working on getting video editing software. I decided to go with the least expensive and simplest option that I could find: QuickTime Pro. It is only $30. I had just started to get to a point where I could try it out when Min called and wanted me to return to the hotel. She has developed a migraine and is getting ill. She needed me to come in and bring her some Excedrin. So I packed the pooch back up and we drove back over to the hotel. While I was there I shot a short film to kick off the Disney trip. It is cute. I wanted some material to play with with QT Pro. I hung out at the hotel for about twenty minutes or so until Min started to feel a tiny bit better. Then I went across the street to Tim Horton’s and picked up some soup for her and a few donuts. I walked over to the hotel and delivered Min’s food. She was very happy. Then it was back home. There is a lot to get done tonight. That is the problem with vacations: there is SO much that needs to be taken care of just before you leave. What a pain it all is.

Susan called tonight and we got a chance to talk for a little bit. It is tough living so far from everybody. It is so seldom that you really get a chance to talk to anyone anymore. I guess that is just something that happens when you get to be around the age that we all are.

I took an hour out of the evening to clean the hamster cage. Boy is that a major undertaking when you really clean the whole thing. Mr. Humphries has two full hamster condo units to deal with and it is a pain. I put him in his ball and take everything out to the kitchen to work on it. He wasn’t in much of a mood to be in his ball tonight so he spent most of the hour just trying to get to anything that smelled like his cage or bouncing against my foot to tell me to put him back in his cage. Oreo wasn’t too thrilled that I was working with the rodent either.

One of my tasks this evening is to charge things. We have two cell phones that need to be fully charged before we head out. We also need my iPaq to be charged and ready to go. We are taking along our walkie talkies and they need to be charged and ready as well. So I am managing all of that stuff.

I had some problems posting the video that I took when I was at the hotel with Dominica. I am not sure why it didn’t work. After a few hours I finally just posted it again and this time it worked just fine. OurMedia is only in an alpha release so there is a lot of room for error there. But when I reposted it seemed to work right away so I think that everything is okay now. So now you can go check out the SGL Goes To Disney video that I shot at the hotel. I promise that the videos will get better after this. I just really wanted to make sure that this process was going to work before we were out of town and didn’t have any way to deal with things. But it looks like as long as I have some patience then we should be pretty good working with OurMedia. It really is a wonderful service so I am really happy that it is working now.

It is getting late and I need to wrap up the SGL update so that I can sync my laptop and get it packed up and ready to go. I am hoping to get a halfway decent night’s sleep tonight so that I can really enjoy the day tomorrow. There is so much to get done. It feels overwhelming. Oreo wants to get a good night’s sleep too since it is his last chance to snuggle with me for a whole week.