Oreo had a great time at the party last night.  He had a whole yard and house in which to run around freely and two dogs to play with.  The one collie was eleven and very aged so they could not play but was very friendly and looking for attention from everyone.  It is very sad seeing a sweet dog get so old.

Dudley was there, Katie’s dog, and he and Oreo spent a lot of time running around together.  Oreo does not often get wide open space so it was a nice change for him.  They played pretty well until some kabobs were given to the dogs and some territoriality came into play.  In a surprise move, Duds, who is close to three times Oreo’s size, and a little argument with Oreo and in a flash Oreo was flipped over on his back and panicking.  We had to pull them apart pretty quickly.  That was the end of the fun night for Oreo.  After that he just wanted to be held and to relax.

We had to sleep in a bit this morning just to make up for getting in so late last night.  It was around ten thirty when we finally got out of bed.  I did a little work in the office but only a tiny bit.  Today is my last official day with a contract so I figured that I should at least do something, even if it was only symbolic.

We found out this morning that the Mazda PR5 is not going to be purchased as we had hoped.  We have been waiting for the final approval of the purchase for two weeks, or so, thinking that everything was pretty much finalized and then today, in the midst of everything else, found out that they weren’t actually interested in it.  Of course, bolstering my already hearty dislike for people’s concepts of “vacations”, we would have known this quite some time ago but people went “on vacation” and stopped communicating to the outside world – ignoring obligations because somehow some parts of society have approved the idea of a “vacation” as exempting the vacationers not only from their work obligations but from their personal ones as well.

I think that this concept is probably quite old.  When I was a child (and obviously any time before that) going on a vacation (one that involved travel, at least) meant going to a remote location where postal mail and telephones were impossible to get or unreasonably expensive for anything less than a full emergency.  But that world has past and today with the Internet, mobile phones, BlackBerries, etc. you are no less accessible while in a remote location than when sitting in your living room.  Today, having a telephone that doesn’t reach you everywhere actually costs you more, usually, than one that does not reach you everywhere.

Basically, we live in a world when the traditional concept of escapism in vacations is no longer an intrinsic feature of travel but now requires active, intentional ingnorance (in the tradition, true meaning of the word as a derivitive of the word ignore.)  You have to ignore people trying to reach you.  You have to avoid responding to people.  It is a completely different animal these days.  And this phenominon is not new.  Mobile phones have been making this shift occur since the early 1990s and the Internet has been changing it since the late 1990s.  It has been roughly eight years now, a decently long time, that there has been little to no excuse to ever be out of reach for more than half a day or less.  And now that most people use instant messaging and text messaging via mobile devices all day long any breach in ongoing communications because of a “vacation” has to be completely intentional.

I am not suggesting that people never stop working and never take a break from work.  Moreso I am saying that personal responsibilities are not curtailed in any way by a claim of “vacationing” or being out of town.  People have traditional used the idea of vacationing as a way to avoid responsibilities and communications because it was a difficult claim to dispute.  No one would be able to know if you were truly stuck in a situation without communications or not.  Today that is not true and there are so many, free or nominal cost communications modes and so little change between home, office and hotel in relation to those modes that not responding to responsibilities while away is exactly the same as not responding to them when standing face to face with someone.

If you want some sympathy from me in reference to you being helplessly out of reach you had better be backpacking through Kyrgystan and even there you will likely have intermittent phone and Internet access.  There are very, very few places left on earth where you are truly out of touch and fewer and fewer people who are comfortable being in those situations.  Most people today desperately want to keep in contact via email, phone, web, etc.  Recently I even had a conversation with my friend David while he was hanging out in a cafe in Tunisia.  He was just checking up on his email, FaceBook, etc.  It’s far more interesting, I think, vacationing in places when you can still communicate to the outside world instead of just “disappearing” for a few days and then returning with some pictures.

All of that aside, we are rather happy that we are not selling the car as we think that we will most likely want to have it once the baby arrives in November.  We need a car that can haul some things and will easily fit the baby’s car seat, Oreo, both of us and the baby’s things.  The PR5 also gets good gas mileage and has amazing snow tires.  It just had a bit of work done to it and has been sitting all summer not getting any older so its value to us is probably much higher than its street value and we had been planning on selling it at rather a bargain.  So, other than a certain desperation for cash right at the moment because of the house, we would prefer to hold on to the car.

My afternoon was spent writing a very large BASH script that will take our newly built Castile Christian Academy workstations and turn them into fully ready desktops.  It has to remove all of the unnecessary and inappropriate packages, change repositories, add in needed educational packages, change system files, detect the system’s identity and do all of our standard customizations.  It is rather involved.

I got some word, finally, from the consulting firm this afternoon but it wasn’t encouraging.  Basically, they claim that their hands are tied and they have no contracts to protect them.  It would appear that doing the “right thing” is way too much effort and so instead they see me as a scape goat and are just passing the cuts on to me… including massive monetary gains for themselves.  The original cut was just 7.5% but it escalated to 15.73% by the time that it reached me.  That means that while there was a cut (which was at their discretion and they opted to take) at the beginning I am taking more of a cut than anyone and the only person losing here is me.

In fact, everyone else is making a fortune on the deal – coming completely out of my pockets.  In addition, I took the furlough earlier in the year which was an additional 3.5% or so.  So my total cut, between March and August comes to 19.5%!!  This is insane.  And they wonder why I won’t even discuss the possibility of accepting the cut.  To make things even more stressful I have a very large amount of comp time and 401K money on the line that could very easily be taken away.  At least things look promising to have my contract moved to another pass-through vendor, but who knows what all impacts there could be along the way.  I think I need ulcer medication

For dinner we ordered in Brazilian Pizza again.  It was awesome.  We ate pizza and watched two episodes of Frasier.  We are on the third season still, I think.

The weather is cooler today than it has been in a while so we decided to open the windows and let some fresh air into the apartment.  The apartment has gotten musty and stale.  The air conditioning units did not get cleaned like they are supposed to be because our bed takes up the entire room and there was no way to clear space to do the cleaning.  Or at least we imagine that that is the reason.  Nothing was said to us so we are giving the building the benefit of the doubt that the cleaning process even occurred.  It might easily have not taken place at all.

I was doing some shopping on eBay and discovered an amazing price on a high effeciency Hewlett-Packard DL145 G3 rack mount AMD Opteron based server.  It even comes with the rack mounting kit which is nice.

Andy called and we talked for an hour or so this evening.  Then it was time to walk Oreo, wrap up SGL, do a little work for the office (in the minutes running up to the end of my contract), answer emails, update Twitter and head off for bed.

No wonder it is hard for me to ever actually make it to bed!

This coming Saturday, Dominica and I have Nadine and Clarence’s wedding to attend.  So we will be gone for most of the day.  Every moment that we are not gone I am scheduled to be working – although that is obviously in some question at this point.

We ordered in breakfast room service at a quarter till eleven. We got a nice big breakfast with eggs and toast and waffles and a continental bread basket and tea. We sat out on the balcony and ate as the weather wasn’t so muggy today. While we were eating the newlyweds that we met on Sunday evening walked by on the path under our balcony so we got to say hi to them again.

We spent the middle of the day just relaxing on the balcony and drinking tea after we had the room all packed. We checked out at one and gave our luggage to the valet services to keep for us until it was time to leave. They take care of everything for you when you use the Magical Express. You can just leave your luggage in your room and have bell services take it to the valet who have storage for it and will then load it on to your bus going to the airport for you so that you never have to do anything with it at all. Very handy.

We did some shopping for a while and spent a bit of time relaxing on the porch of the lodge where the Silver Creek runs out of the lobby and down towards the waterfall. There were several ducks playing in the creek which was very cute and relaxing to watch.

For dinner we decided to try out the Whispering Canyon Cafe which some people had told us was really good. It is right in the lobby of the Wilderness Lodge so it could not have been any handier for us. It is a full service restaurant but much more family oriented and not fancy like Artist Point.

Lunch was great. Dominica got an enchilada made with quinoa and I got whiskey maple glazed trout. The really cool piece of the meal was the bottomless milkshake that, on this particular day, was available in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, bubblegum or cotton candy! I, of course, got it in bubblegum which was awesome. The food was really good and, once again, no room for appetizers or dessert. The price was good too. We had several full, sit down meals where we were surprised by how inexpensive it is.

One thing that we definitely learned on this trip is that the Disney Dining Plan doesn’t make any sense for us. We eat fewer meals per day and more “fancy” meals (all sit down – no counter service) than the plans really account for and we don’t tend to use the drinks and often not the appetizers that come with them but often get other things, like the milkshake, that are not included. Had we done this trip on the dining plan we would have paid between slightly more and almost double for each and every meal that we ate, and from watching other people use the dining plan it seems to be a bit more hassle than just charging the room. So our way gives us better flexibility and saves us money. No upside to the dining plan that we could find.

The bus took us at four over to the airport. We were there with about two hours to kill before boarding time. I did some reading in my book while we were waiting to get on the flight. We were just early enough that Continental offered to bump us to an earlier flight but because we had checked one bag we were not able to do so. So we were stuck when we could have been home around six in the evening. We might have even been able to get Oreo if things had gone really well.

The flight went well and because the trip home was longer than the trip heading south they had a movie available for us to watch so we got to see The Spiderwick Chronicles which was pretty cool as it was a movie that we had wanted to see anyway. It was extra cool as the DVD is scheduled to release until June 24th. It was a pretty good movie too and really helped pass the time. Also helping to pass the time was the loads of free ginger ale and Scotch that they kept giving us on the half-empty flight. Dominica and I had a three seat row to ourselves and all that we could drink. They even gave me a couple Scotches to take home with me as they didn’t need anymore. We were very happy with our flight!

It was pretty late when we got home. We took a taxi back to Eleven80, picked up our packages that had arrived while we were gone and headed for bed. While we were gone the rosebush got spider mites and was dead. It had been in pretty rough shape before so that was no surprise. The mandarin and the tree by my desk seem to be doing well and the ivy seems to be okay. Neither palm seems too happy although the one near my desk is probably okay. The one by the loveseat has spider mites now too and is all but dead.

This morning we are heading to Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park which is the park with the early morning extra magic hour for the Disney resort guests so we can get in a little before the crowds descend on the park. Hollywood Studios is by far the smallest of the four major parks which causes it to be the most crowded. It is almost always “wall to wall people” and it is pretty much nothing but open concrete everywhere making it insanely hot and because of the high, close walls everywhere there is little airflow.

Our first order of business arriving at the park is to get to the new “Pixar Land” and hit Toy Story Mania which opened this weekend. We know that there are going to be crazy lines there as everyone is trying to ride that ride.

When we got to Toy Story Mania the line was about out to the door. I would guess that it was twenty to twenty five minutes long which isn’t bad considering we didn’t do a FastPass nor were we there first thing but more like eight thirty by the time we actually got to the attraction doors.

The waiting line was very well done at Toy Story Mania. Lot’s of thought was put into it and there is a huge, animated Mr. Potato Head that talks to the crows as they pass by. Sometimes Mr. Potato Head is running on automatic and sometimes there is a person controlling him and interacting with the audience. It seems to be a new theme at Disney to have people behind the scenes running things that previously were just recordings. It is a very good idea because it makes the dark recesses of the park seem alive rather than like dusty, forgotten corners and it adds a lot of interest to things that otherwise would be very boring. There was definitely a person running Mr. Potato Head when we were in line but when we went passed him and talked to him he was running on automatic for a few minutes so we didn’t get to interact with him

The ride itself, we were told, is similar to the popular, new Buzz Lightyear ride in the Magic Kingdom. It is good that they put a new ride in Hollywood Studios because DHS is very short on attractions and those that it has are all either intense thrill rides like a cheap Six Flags or really old and dated like Muppets 3D. It’s only really amazing ride is the Great Movie Ride which is awesome (like Pirates of Caribbean or Spaceship Earth) but feels like an old ride these days and could do with a refurb as well.

Toy Story Mania was really awesome. It is a lot like Buzz Lightyear in that it is two people sitting in a “car” going through the ride each with a “gun” that you use to shoot things to get points. Both are elaborate video games. In Buzz Lightyear you ride through a physical dark ride and use a laser gun to shoot physical targets located throughout the ride. In Toy Story Mania you wear 3D glasses and ride from one screen to another where you use your “gun” to participate in carnival like games on the screens. The combination of the physical ride with the stuff happening in 3D works pretty well and the games that you play are pretty fun.

TSM makes a great addition to Hollywood Studios and shows that Disney is still thinking. The downside is that Disney is running behind the times – they have never been very tech-savvy (their website has been a textbook example of what-not-to-do since the mid 90s) and they are often years or decades behind the “real world”. I think that the isolationism of the parks lends itself to them fooling themselves into thinking that they are more innovative than they really are.

The audio-animatronics were practically timeless when introduced in the 1950s. They won’t be replaced by anything in our homes for a very long time, if ever. Decades more at the very least. Easily another half century. And even then they are art on their own regardless of outside technology. They are used to tell a story in a meaningful way. But things like TSM, unfortunately, are based on technologies rapidly available to everyone at home. TSM is really nothing more than an elaborate Nintendo Wii game. Sure we can’t ride in carts like that at home but that is an incidental part of the ride – nice but if it was gone you would hardly notice. And it is just for two plays, a Wii can do it with four. With new HD displays and more and more people able to do 3D at home the TSM experience is likely to be surpassed by at-home video game systems widely available in just a few years (in many ways it is surpassed already) which makes it fun for the moment but strange that Disney would invest so much in a ride that will very quickly be used as an example of how, for the cost of admission and one night in a Disney resort, you could own this at home and play it anytime you wanted for as long as you wanted.

After TSM we rode the Great Movie Ride which, as always, is awesome. Such a good ride. When we were done it was only ten thirty and we had just over an hour to kill before our lunch reservation at the Brown Derby. We talked about doing any number of rides or attractions but, in the end, there was nothing in Hollywood Studios that was even worth the effort of walking to for us. We would have done TSM again but the line was long and nothing else appealed in the least. So we went to the ABC Commissary because it was air conditioned, bought a drink and a chocolate mousse and sat for an hour until it was time for lunch. It was cool and relaxing and almost no one was in there at that early hour so it worked out pretty well.

Our reservations at the Brown Derby were at eleven forty. We got seated pretty much immediately. Both Dominica and I had been looking forward to trying the noodle bowl with coconut fried tofu after having read the online menu at AllEarsNet. I also got an appetizer of lobster and corn bisque. Dominica couldn’t eat that much so she didn’t get any appetizer.

The atmosphere at the Brown Derby was very nice and the food was good. It wasn’t “blow you away” food like we had hoped but it was quite good. The bisque wasn’t the style that I prefer but was very good for people who prefer their bisque with more tomato and less cream. The noodle bowls were good and huge. Dominica couldn’t finish hers and it was all that I could do to finish mine. No dessert for us today! We like the Brown Derby and would eat here again when in Hollywood Studios but I don’t think that I would make a trip to the studios just to eat here.

After lunch we were out of the park right away. We grabbed the boat again and went to Epcot. It was probably around one or one thirty at the latest when we went into Epcot for the afternoon.

It was pretty hot all morning and hot going into the afternoon. Yesterday and Saturday were brutally hot and we felt awful being outside. Today wasn’t quite as hot but still up there in the nineties. A lot hotter than we wanted it to be.

To escape the heat we headed first for Spaceship Earth which only had a short line. We rode that again. Dominica had forgotten about her VIP room stuff and we decided not to bother. The VIP rooms really aren’t as interesting as they sound (I have been in the Kodak VIP room) and are only useful if you want to see what they are like or for business functions. We had wanted to see the view of the fountain from there but it wasn’t worth the effort involved for us.

Then we went to The Land where we rode Living with the Land again then took the Behind the Seeds tour. This is my third time doing the Behind the Seeds and Dominica’s second. The timing was perfect that there was a tour leaving at three forty five and by the time we signed up for the tour (it costs extra and is limited availability) it was already pushing three thirty.

The tour took until five. It was pretty warm in the greenhouses but not as warm as being outside. The Behind the Seeds tour is always fun and informative. Because it is a real, guided tour and not an automated attraction you get a lot more out of it because it is personalized each time. The first time that I took it it was with a SUNY Cortland intern giving the tour. In 2005 the tour that we took was given by the director of the research facility there at Epcot. And this time by one of the senior researchers with like fourteen years of experience in agriculture science. So we have gotten a mix of experiences on the tour between the different people and the ten year span over which I have been taking the tour. Our tour group ended up being only Dominica and I and one other couple from southern Illinois. We had a really good time.

After our tour we spent a little time hanging out in The Land’s Sunshine Seasons food court with a little bite of dessert just so that we could wait for the heat outside to dissipate a little before going back out into the think of it again. From there we could see the sky through the front windows and could see that it had become overcast during the two hours that we had been inside of The Land.

We went outside and it was indeed beginning to rain. What a relief. It had been so hot for so long that even getting wet was a welcome relief. We took a wonderful walk in the rain from The Land up to the Canadian Pavilion at the beginning of the World Showcase. The O Canada movie is newly updated so we went in and watched that. It was still a bit warm outside but improving.

The movie is a really good update to the classic O Canada movie even with Martin Short in it which they could have done without. But he managed to not ruin the film. I was quite upset when I learned that he was in it but he wasn’t all that bad. Not good, definitely not good. But not horrible. The movie itself was quite good, though.

Then on to the United Kingdom Pavilion where we put in our name as the Rose and Crown Pub for dinner. Dominica was sure that we couldn’t get seating but when we asked if there was space available they were like “of course”. The wait was only about ten minutes or so. We found ourselves a nice bench in the UK and just relaxed until it was time to be seated.

The weather had cooled off significantly so we took an outside table so that we could enjoy the rain and the wind that had now come in. We both got fish and chips and I got a Boddingtons. Lunch was good. We have eaten at the Rose and Crown before and have and have had the fish and chips before as well. The chef came out to check on things at the end of our meal and we were surprised to find that she was from Bound Brook, New Jersey – very close to my Warren office. South Bound Brook (which is all one town but on different sides of the little river there) is where Dominica and I were seriously looking at buying a condo at one point. That is the condo that Bob Winans saw when he drove down to check it out.

After dinner it was probably six thirty or maybe closer to seven. We walked around the World Showcase taking a relaxing stroll. We walked through Morocco and did some shopping all throughout the showcase. Then in Norway we stopped for dessert at the Norwegian bakery where we always get something to eat. We sat outside at the bakery for a long time relaxing as the weather was pretty nice and there was nothing more that we really wanted to do in the park.

After we were done eating we walked down to Spaceship Earth and rode one more time before leaving the park to grab a bus back to the hotel. It was eight thirty when we walked out of the gates and Epcot closes at nine. So we managed to do a pretty full day starting just thirty minutes in to the extra magic hour in the morning at Hollywood Studios and going to thirty minutes before close at Epcot. We were pretty exhausted.

It was pretty much straight to bed for us when we got back to the Wilderness Lodge. Tomorrow we get to sleep in. Our plan is to have breakfast delivered to the room and to just relax at the lodge until it is time to go to the airport. We exhausted our need to go into the parks for this trip and we know that we are supposed to be back next year with a lot more time than we had on this trip and will be looking for stuff to do so no need to tax ourselves now. Our flight leaves Orlando around seven thirty tomorrow evening. We will leave the hotel at four in the afternoon.

I was awfully tired this morning after having worked until eleven thirty last night and then having the alarm go off at four thirty this morning. I actually woke up three minutes before the alarm all on my own which at least saved me from being jolted awake by the alarm itself.

No matter how much work we do ahead of time to get ready for traveling there is always way too much to be done at the last minute like packing my CPAP, laptop, getting the plants ready, etc.

We got a taxi at six to take us to Newark-Liberty International. The went smoothly and we were at the airport with plenty of time to kill before our flight. We got through security and relaxed until it was time to fly. We grabbed a breakfast at a steak place that did big egg and cheese on sub rolls just before flying.

I starting reading “Dreaming in Code” this morning. That’s the only book that I am taking on the trip with me. That and a few back issues of Baseline that I haven’t had a chance to read yet.

We flew Continental to Orlando which was a nice change as the flight was direct and about an hour shorter overall and less expensive too. The flights went quite well. Dominica has been nervous about flying because she gets motion sickness and can’t take Dramamine anymore but she use SeaBands and they actually worked wonderfully for her (although personally I think that it is a placebo – but hey, whatever works.)

We landed in Orlando and took Disney’s Magical Express to our hotel. The Magical Express is a Disney chartered bus operated by Mears (who does all of the good Orlando area transportation) that takes you directly from the airport to the hotel and deals with everything for you. It is really a nice touch for people staying at a Disney resort and it is free which helps to mitigate the cost of a Disney resort versus staying outside of the park. It also helps to make the experience more integrated so that you feel like you are in Disney World from the moment that you step off of the plane. (From a business perspective it also allows Disney to completely cut you off from any of their competitors in the area keeping you completely focused on Disney activities and curtailing the desire to sample other parks or resorts – which is actually good, I think, because people who do that always dislike the region, in my experience – they ruin it for themselves and then confuse the cheap touristy stuff in the Orlando area with Disney stuff.)

The Magical Express dropped us at our hotel, Disney’s Wilderness Lodge, which is located in the Magic Kingdom resort area but is not on the monorail. The Wilderness Lodge is located on Bay Lake very near the Contemporary Resort but its principle access to the Magic Kingdom is via a water ferry that takes you right up to the main gates very quickly. We decided to take care of our own bags rather than to have the Magical Express check them through for us. That is a nice service that allows you to go straight to the parks without even thinking twice about your hotel stay, but most of the time we prefer to have our bags and access to them right away. If the Magical Express deals with them then they take an additional three hours to get to your room because they come on a separate bus and you don’t have access to them right away.

We got checked in and were into our room, a pool view room on the inside of the courtyard on the second floor, around one in the afternoon. We relaxed for a little while. We decided that because it is so hot today that we were going to skip going into the parks today and just take it easy and do some resort activities instead. We come to Disney more than often enough to have little drive to get in and do things in the parks themselves.

Around three we took the water ferry over to the Magic Kingdom and from there took the Animal Kingdom Lodge bus to the AKL as we had five thirty dinner reservations at Boma – which since we have started promoting it has become an insanely busy restaurant which is nearly impossible to get into anymore. Reservations are a must and if you want any choice of times you need to think about it weeks in advance even during moderately slow times of year! What used to be a niche restaurant in a niche resort is now one of the Disney hottest commodities.

As always, the bus service to the AKL took forever. Disney hasn’t figured out how to deal with the far-flung resorts that are accessible only by bus yet and it can easily take an hour to go from the Magic Kingdom to the lodge which is a major problem. Disney has started putting tons of great restaurants and activities out in their resorts – which is great – but because of this the transportation system is strained beyond capacity and getting around the parks can be a major hassle even for Disney resort guests at deluxe resorts who never leave WDW!

We weren’t too early getting to the Animal Kingdom Lodge – our timing was quite good, in fact. Dinner was awesome, as always, although several of our favourite items were not on tonight’s menu so there were several things that we were left wanting. But everything that they had was awesome. Our server was Lindsay, from Buffalo, who was also our server last May when we ate at Boma! You know that you eat at a restaurant at Disney a lot when you start knowing people.

After dinner we went outside to look at the savanna for a few minutes but it was incredibly hot and we decided not to stay for any length of time.

We took the bus over to the Disney Hollywood Studios because, again a major problem with Disney transportation, there is no direct route from the AKL to the Epcot Resort area with the Boardwalk where we wanted to go. So we went first to Hollywood Studios and then down to its boat docks where we could catch the ferry that runs between the Swan, Dolphin, Beach, Yacht, Boardwalk, Epcot and Hollywood Studios. Sounds incredibly indirect but it is the best means of which we are aware of traveling between the AKL and the Boardwalk.

On the bus ride over people were starting to talk about the large fire that could be seen not too far away. No one seemed to know what it was but there was a massive smoke cloud beginning to rise above the trees making the sky fairly dark even though it was not overcast.

We just missed the boat for the Boardwalk so we had about twenty minutes to sit and wait at the docks. From the Hollywood Studios boat launch looking due east the fire was huge and appeared to be not too far past the woods there. There was a helicopter or two circling the fire as well. The fire was so intense that even where we were the whole area was getting covered in ash as it started to fall from the sky. It was really weird. We could only barely smell smoke as the smoke itself was going far above us but the debris was coming down and was all over the ground and our clothes. Really large pieces of ash were coming down and it was constant. I have never seen anything like it. No one ever figured out where the fire was, though.

I took a careful look on Google Maps from where we were standing and the direction that we were facing it had to be somewhere around Disney’s Caribbean Beach resort, Typhoon Lagoon or Disney Downtown. The distance didn’t seem to be that far so I think that that is about as far as it could have been but it is impossible to gauge. There are many resorts right after Disney Downtown and then outside of the park that is a heavily populated area so there is a lot out there that could have been burning. We have been unable to find any news sources confirming this massive fire which is really, really strange.

The boat ride was nice and pretty quick. The captain informed us that if we rode all the way to the Boardwalk that it would take an extra ten to fifteen minutes but if we disembarked at the very first stop, the Swan and Dolphin Resorts, that the footbridge lead right onto the Boardwalk and that it would only take two to three minutes. So we chose to do that instead. In reality it appears that the Boardwalk dock should just be combined with the Swan and Dolphin as it is incredibly close. I have no idea why they bother to have the separate one unless it just isn’t clear enough how to get to this “hidden” one that lies deceptively behind the Boardwalk rather than in front of it.

We took a walk down the length of the Boardwalk. This was Dominica’s first time ever actually on the Boardwalk although she had seen it from the Yacht and Beach Club resorts across the lake in 2005 when we had taken a bus to those resorts and then walked into Epcot from the world showcase entrance. We stopped at the Boardwalk Bakery and picked up some food for tomorrow morning and then we got some ice cream at the creamery there and sat out enjoying it on the Boardwalk itself.

We didn’t stay for very long as there isn’t very much to do on the Boardwalk if you don’t feel like drinking and even then you really need to be prepared to stay out pretty late, and staying out late on the Boardwalk leaves you with the issue of how to get back home as this is a large area with no late running transportation back to the Disney resorts even though it is a prime spot for Disney nightlife. Again, a major transportation oversight with the potential to leave deluxe resort guests stranded while still on Disney property!

We hopped the boat back to the Hollywood Studios and from there caught the bus back to the Wilderness Lodge. It was quite early for going back to the hotel but our day started very early and we needed to catch up on some sleep desperately. So we just hung around the resort for the evening. We took a walk down by the geyser and along the Silver Creek that flows through the resort. There isn’t a lot to see but it is worth a walk around. We did a little window shopping at the Mercantile as well. Then off to an early bed. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.

Photos:

Flickr Photo Set for Disney 2007

Podcast:

SGL Episode 55: Day One Disney 2007

Vlog:

Videos not available until after we return and edit.

Blog:

Disney Day One 2007
Disney Day Two 2007
Disney Day Three 2007