Back From Vacation Part 2

In Part 1, I covered the first four days of our trip to Orlando with niece Peggy and her kids, Natasha & Bruce.

After another quiet day following Universal Studios, we headed to Disney World. I'll admit right upfront that I'm not the biggest Disney fan on the planet, or probably even in the Top 1,000,000,000 of that category. My impression from previous journeys to the Florida theme park when Tammy was a kid was that it was crowded, overhyped and underwhelming. I'd say this year's experience didn't do much to change that opinion.


Of course, Disney World's really supposed to be for the kids, and the two we had with us seemed to enjoy it well enough. We went on Splash Mountain a couple of times (once with a 45-minute wait, and once with a FastPass that allowed us to bypass the line and get right on), Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Manor, a paddleboat ride, and Space Mountain. I do like how clean they manage to keep the place, but that's about all it had going for it as far as I was concerned. It was a scorching hot day when we were there, and yet we still managed to spend about 8 hours there, which I thought was impressive.


We followed that up with another pool-day, and then used our last full day in Orlando to visit a Dave & Baxter's arcade for Natasha's 17th birthday (one day early). All of us were blown away by the selection of games there, as they had just about every variety imaginable. Vicki and Peggy were even referring to it as "Las Vegas for kids", which seemed like an apt description. Several hours of fun there were followed by dinner out at a fancy Italian restaurant, and then it was home to pack up for the drive home.

Thanks to a couple of clever detours engineered by navigator Vicki, and the fact that we were driving on Saturday and Sunday of Easter Weekend, we had a much, much nicer time getting home. We probably spent at least three hours less driving time, and really the only downside over the two days was Bruce not feeling well and throwing up several times in the back seat. His mom was always quick with the sickness bag, but we still all felt extremely bad for the little guy.

Eventually, though, we were all home again! I'd driven just over 2,000 kms in the two days, so I was happy to let Vicki do the honours for the final short leg, from Peggy's house to ours.

The next day we retrieved Lucy from her "vacation home" at Julie's, shown here checking out one of her three housemates. Julie kept Lucy safely tucked away from Coops and Finley most of the time that we were gone, but would occasionally let them interact under her watchful eye. Julie actually got some quality Lucy-time over that period, which is more than she's ever gotten in all the dozens of visits she's paid to our home.

And that was our 2012 Orlando trip!