Hi everyone! Disney hasn’t had the free wireless which we had in New York, so the updates haven’t been as frequent from here. Besides that, if we thought New York was very busy, Disney World has not provided much let up!

We are having an absolute blast here at Disney – the weather has been very kind to us, with maximums around 26 or so and the evenings the temp drops down to about 10 – 13′ish. Much more civilised than New York.

We’ve been jotting down our daily happenings in an offline note – but getting time to post the updates here has been a challenge – we’re knackered at the end of the days… I’ll try to catch up on the postings… I promise!

We have STACKS of photos. Up to this point in the trip we hadn’t been able to get photos off one of the cameras, so we’d just been deleting the bad ones as we go. I was able to work out why it was doing that and get all the folders into one place and we have taken 661 photos / videos while we’ve been away. That’s a lot of photos for us; we are not noted photo takers. After looking through them, I can report we have elected for quantity over quality…. We take average photos! This number doesn’t include those taken on our tour of New York, or those taken by Disney photographers…. Man – that slideshow night is going to be amazing! Who wants an invite??

Happy Birthday to my sister Nicole, who turned 21 again on the 11th of November. Hope you had a great day Nicole!

Thursday 8^th November

Today we left New York. We left Manhattan at about 7am, we used the same car service we’d booked for our arrival into New York and the same driver we had on arrival was waiting outside, catching a few z’s while he waited for us.

We had to pay excess luggage charges leaving New York!! Our bags are already over the limit, with still more than half our trip in front of us. We are able to have up to two bags each – but I was hoping to limit the number of checked luggage bags to 3 large bags… not that I am carrying the bags very many places – just that we don’t want to have to hire a semi trailer to get us from the airports to our hotels…. Damn shoe shopping. Admittedly, we haven’t packed everything properly yet, so we can still fit more in, but we’ll just buy another bag somewhere and spread the load out a bit more.

We flew Jet Blue from New York City to Orlando. They were outstanding! I highly recommend them, the leg room was amazing, they had the TV’s in the seat backs just like Virgin Blue do (but it was free) and the service from the hosties was good. They pride themselves on providing the most leg room in coach service, and I thank them for that.

We arrived in Orlando right on schedule. Disney has a great service, called “Magical Express”. They provide you with luggage tags for your bags and you put them on your bags before you check in at your departing airport. Then when you arrive in Orlando, they get your bags and transfer them to your room. This means, I (we) didn’t have to worry about seeking out those fat lime green bags we’ve got and hauling them through the airport and to the hotel. I thank Disney for that.

Caught the Disney bus from the airport to the hotel and arrived at about 2pm and though check-in was not until 3pm, our room was ready! We are staying at the Polynesian Resort (the resort is disney style – south pacific themed) and we have a fantastic room, right on the Disney built “Seven Seas Lagoon”, with a view towards one of Disney’s Parks – the Magical Kingdom. We can see the Disney Castle and have a nice view of the nightly fireworks.

A quick freshen up and we headed off to the Magic Kingdom. I guess this is the park most people think of when they thing of Disney. This park it has the big castle (cinderella’s??) and the spinning Teacup and Dumbo rides.

From the resort we are staying at you can get to the Magic Kingdom by bus, monorail or boat. The transportation from the resorts to the parks is very efficient and comfortable and is another great aspect of a Disney holiday. The boat is the quickest between our resort and the Magic Kingdom and the one we ended up catching the most often to that park.

A great use of technology by Disney is their “keys to the kingdom”. This is our room key, but they also allow you to use that to charge back almost anything to your room from anywhere on property (including the theme parks), it is also our entry tickets to the parks we’re visiting and we pre-purchased a dining plan so we give this key to the server at the restaurants instead of handing over cash / credit card to pay for meals. When you enter your first park, they scan your finger and store that away somewhere or rather and then each time you enter a park you need to scan the same finger again to get into the park (which caught me out, because one of the days we went to a park, I couldn’t remember which finger I had scanned the first day) . I am sure civil libertarians somewhere or rather would take umbrage to that, but I bet it helps Disney cut down on fraudulent entry to the parks.

Jackson was VERY excited to be at Disney! He was skipping and jumping and singing and wanted to do everything THAT second. Within the Magic Kingdom there is a lot for us to do, this park and Disney’s MGM Studios are the ones we thought we would enjoy the most.

Inside the Magic Kingdom, they have a great LPG powered “steam” railroad which does a full loop of the park. The first thing we did was ride the railroad a full loop so we could see what the park was like. This park is divided into different “world’s” or themed areas, so the railroad was great for getting a look at the different areas of the park and seeing what was there to do.

After the train we walked up the main boulevard and towards the castle. Another great Disney use of technology is called the “photopass”. Disney has photographers all over the theme parks, mostly in spots where great photos can be taken. These photographers will take your photo and then scan your photopass – which is a credit card sized card with a unique code, so all your photos can be stored in one place for purchase at the end of your stay. You get them on a CD and they add some special effects (like Disney characters) in to some of the photos. We pre-purchased this and got a great discount on the cost – no matter how many photo’s you get taken the cost is the same. So, we’ve got more photos taken by someone else, so there should be SOME good quality photos amongst that lot.

We got our photo taken in front of the castle and kept walking around towards “Frontierland”.

We stopped at the castle because there was a crowd and we assumed something was going to be happening soon and sure enough about 10 minutes later Mickey, Minnie, Donald Duck, Goofy and some of their other friends came out and did a show. I have a great photo of Jackson’s face during this show. In the photo he is basically gobsmacked; his eye’s have a trance like look to them, his jaw has dropped a little and he just can’t believe what is on stage before him. After so much planning and travelling, it made Kylie and I very happy to see that look. We’ve since seen that look quite a few times!

After the show we kept on walking and came to a ride called Aladdin’s Magic Carpets. This is a kids ride, which Kylie took Jackson on, basically you sit in a carriage designed to look like a magic carpet and you are able to make the “carpet” fly up and down by moving a lever in the carriage. There are a few of this style of ride here in Disney and it has since been (imaginatively) labelled by Jackson as the “Up and down ride. You go up and down and up and down and up and down.” It has accompanying hand signals, I am sure you get the drift. Jackson loved his first ride at Disney and came off the ride balling, because he did not want to get off he wanted to stay on!

We had dinner at “Peco Bills”, which served up “fine” Mexican fare. Disney uses technology very well. In some restaurants there are touch screen kiosks you can use to order your whole meal, you then take the receipt the kiosk prints out for you to the counter and pick up your meal. Very clever! (I have photos….)

After dinner we went back to the up and down and up and down and up and down ride, so that I could have a turn with Jackson. The line was much longer, but still moved pretty quickly.

After dinner we went to find a spot to sit down and watch the night-time parade. The parade is called “SpectroMagic” and they turn off most of the lighting along the parade path and the parade consists of floats light up by tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of bulbs. Jackson made friends with another family and managed to squeeze his way to a front row seat sitting on the curb. This parade is amazing – it happens twice nightly (at the moment) and nightly throughout the rest of the year and the floats are like the floats we use to see in Warana. We all enjoyed the parade a lot.

After the parade we jumped on the boat back to the resort and went to our room to watch the fireworks, which started at 900pm. There is also a nightly electric water pageant, which is “floats on boats”, this went straight by our window… nice room!

Best night sleep since LA!

That was our first day at Disney – we’ve since had 3 more full-on days like it and we’re having a great time.

I’ll try and get some photo’s up into the slide show

Bye for now

cc, kc and jackson