Disney Vacation - Part 1

So there you have it. I've officially gone from troll to noob. Yay. My
over/under for first real visitor is, let's say, 94 days. Jan 7 2008.
Truthfully, though, smart money would be on the over.

Me - from my first blog entry

So my little spec of dust of a blog is now 94 days old. And guess what? I even lost the prop bet I made with myself. The Riverchasers head honcho evidently found me via a Google search on his own company (you egomaniac :) ), and confirmed his visit via comment. Thanks for stopping by, Jim. I guess I'm now officially part of the club now as exactly one blog has a link to me. Yay me!

Anyway, my family just got home yesterday from our week long jaunt to Central Florida where we made a massive deposit into the Bank of Disney. I'm so incredibly tired that I just want to sleep for 2 straight days, but here I am right back at work Monday morning. I'll do my best to recap the trip but, for me, I can pretty much summarize every day as:

1. Wake up
2. Eat
3. Get on bus and go somewhere
4. Walk a lot and take pictures of kids having a boatload of fun
5. Repeat steps 2-4 one or more times, in varying orders
6. Go to bed

The trip was a bit unusual for me in that we were a larger group than just my wife and girls. You see, my wife's brother and sister-in-law are Disney freaks and when they heard that we wanted to do a vacation there, they wanted in. Oh, and they planned the whole thing. Feel free, knock yourselves out. Then, my wife decided that she would invite her parents to also tag along, but that we would be giving them their trip as a Christmas gift. That's some really expensive built-in baby sitting. But wait, it gets more surreal. After hearing that my in-laws were going, my wife's sister-in-law decides to invite HER parents to go too. YIKES! Our little family vacation is now 10 people strong across 4 adjoining rooms. I'm exhausted just recalling the details.

Now, being the statistics geek that I am, I will represent my family using a simple regression line, y = β₀ + β₁x + ε. My two daughters, who are currently 6-1/2 and 3, will be the β's, which leaves ε for my wife. There. Anonymity preserved.

Monday

Our flight from Philly to Orlando was at 1:45 PM so, never having flown with small children before, we left the house around 10:00. Since we didn't really want to lug all the bags plus the kids from long term parking to the terminal, we stopped at curbside check-in (the single best thing at any airport), checked the big bags and got our boarding passes. Then, we made our way to the lot and found a spot less than 30 feet in. Things were looking promising. Hopped the shuttle back to the terminal, breezed through security and made our way to the gate for a 90 minute wait before boarding. Well, we almost breezed. ε's dad had a hip replacement recently that the metal detectors had a problem with, but the delay was minimal. They were upgrading coach tickets for $100 apiece. Under different circumstances, this would have been a no brainer, but I wasn't shelling out for 6 of them. Lunch, drink at the bar, latte, and it was boarding time. And we left on schedule. Amazing. Plus, the girls did amazingly well for their first time on a plane.

We arrived in Orlando a little after 4:00 PM, picked up the luggage and the rental car, installed the car seats and off we went. Since there was going to be enough money spent on, well, everything, and we weren't going to be spending that much time in the room anyway, we decided on one of the value priced Disney resorts (around $82/night). It took about 30 minutes to get from the airport to the hotel, and we were all checked in to Disney's All-Star Movies and relaxing in our room by 5:30. It really reminded me of a college campus. There were 10 buildings of rooms and a centrally located "food court" which I kept referring to as the dining hall. We were on the dining plan, so all we needed to do was swipe our room key and the appropriate number of meal vouchers would be deducted. This was actually a cool feature that could be used at just about every restaurant that Disney owned, whether in one of the resorts or one of the parks. Even the ice cream carts had the little machine so that we could use our snack credits.

After dinner, the girls wanted to go swimming. I took β₁ to the kiddie pool so she could splash around for a while. ε's brother took β₀ into the main pool since she's a better swimmer, but not strong enough to be left alone. We finally had to forcibly remove them from the water around 9:00 to try to get some decent sleep in preparation of the chaos with which we would meet the next day.

In the next installment... Tuesday, Magic Kingdom.