The Chambers

What we get up to….

Photo taken while staying at the wonderful Sausage Tree Camp, Zambia. Here we are fishing on the banks of the Zambezi, one eye on the River on the lookout for Alligators, another on the lookout for Hippos, another on the lookout for Lions, another on the lookout for Elephants :)

Category Archives: us holiday

Bring in the photos….

We’ve been back a week now and after a technology scare, during which I thought we had lost ALL our photos, we are happy to say that the photo’s are starting to make their way on line!

Forget the old link in the blog navigation, I’m setting up pictures in a much better way and will be posting links here as the photos come on line.

The new photo albums allow you to view the pictures in a whole stack of different ways. When the photos are online, I will post a link here on the blog and you can then click that link and go to the photos. Once the page loads, you can view the photo’s as a slide show or a couple of different ways. I recommend clicking into “Grid” style (which will be bottom left of the screen) and then clicking the first photo which will enlarge the first photo and then navigate the album by clicking the left and right arrows.

Any comments on th pictures should be posted here on the blog. Please do register and leave your comments – remember everyone who visits the blog can read your comments – but we want people to talk back to us too, not just us post our stuff here and have no-one talk back to us!

As a teaser to the rest of the photos, here are some snaps of us in Brisbane, before we left

We will post photos in the flow of our trip, so next up are LA, then New York, etc etc.

Chris, Kylie and Jackson

more on the usa….

Well…. We’re back in oz, Kylie and I are back at work and Jackson is back to spending time with his grandma’s and grandpa’s… The holiday is over, but the memories will not die!!

We haven’t written much of our time in San Francisco and Hawaii – which I will do. We’ve started to sort through all the photos and there are some great ones there. I promise to start posting some over the coming weekend!

San Francisco was lovely – we had a great time there! It is a beautiful city, but it is bloody hilly!

Some of my memories from there are:

hills! hills like this =

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that might be a little bit of exaggeration – but the hills were pretty steep!

The cable cars were great to ride to get over the hills and we had a couple rides on the cable car, but the cars do not hold a large number of people and they were very popular, which meant that the wait would sometimes be up to half an hour or so for a cable car you could get on. The cable cars definitely are not a mass transit method and are most suited to the terry-tourists. I had a turn at holding on to the railing and hanging off the side of the car, which was cold!

Another memory of SF is “black Friday”. Black Friday is what they call the “sale season” which kicks off on the day after Thanksgiving Day. Most of the stores go on sale and offer major discounts to entice you to spend your hard earned cash in the lead up to Christmas. Think the boxing day sales on steroids. There were people – many, many people out and about looking for bargains. The shops opened up early, with some stores staying open from the day before, others opening at early morning hours and Macy’s (a big US dept store) opened up at 6am. We shopped for a while, until there were too many people. We spent more time in Macy’s and in the SF Westfield shopping ctr. Macy’s had big discounts on basically everything in the shop – we bought some more luggage and Kylie got some new diamonds – at 71% off the ticket price! Macy’s had their Christmas window displays set up and theirs included live & adoptable kittens from the RSPCA.

We did a couple of tours in San Francisco.

One was a city tour was in a bus built to look like a cable car, which stopped in at some of the main sights and included a double crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge. They sold this as a major benefit of the tour, but I did wonder how they expected us to get back to the tour starting point if we didnt re-cross the bridge?? This tour also included an unexpected stop at a World War II memorial, when the bus we were riding broke down! We were there for nearly an hour, Jackson spent the hour running around in the park and rolling down the hill… he loved it!

Another tour we did was a similar tour of San Francisco in a 1950′s Mack Fire Engine. This one and a half hour tour was a highlight of the whole trip to the USA! The tour kicked off in the area near Fisherman’s Wharf and crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge and through a couple of scenic areas nearby. The tour hosts were a married couple & the fire engine was the pride and joy of the guy and the tour hostess who did most of the narration was an ex-tap dancer (she told us this quite a few times). The narration was entertaining and took the form of tunes being sung about the sites we were taking in by our hostess Mary-anne (i think that was her name). To check out the fire engine, have a look at their web site: http://www.fireenginetours.com. We got some great photos of this tour, including some of us in our fire man jackets!

The dining in San Fran was great. I have already spoke of our Thanksgiving dinner, which was great – but we also had dinner in China Town twice at a couple of good Chinese restaurants. Jackson loved his green tea!

We also had lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf. Lunch was fish & chips for Jackson and Kylie and I had a Seafood platter of fried goodies, which was very nice. The table we were seated at had a lovely view out over the pier which unfortunately housed the near to whole San Francisco fishing fleet which had been forced to stay docked while the San Francisco bay was being cleaned up after the oil spill which had happened the week before. I saw a sea lion swimming past and am sure I said something about it out aloud – but Kylie & Jackson claim to not have heard me and they didnt see it… but I did!

There were lots of seagulls hanging around outside. They reminded Jackson of the seagulls in “finding nemo” and started to eat his chips and say “mine, mine, mine!” just like the seagulls in finding nemo. very funny!

San Francisco was great – we really enjoyed it, but by the end of our time there we were very definitely ready for a rest on the beaches of Hawaii….

cc, kc and jacko

vegas and thanksgiving

A bit of a wrap up of Vegas first….

We did a walk up and down the strip on the Wednesday. There are a lot of interesting things to take in on a walk up and down the strip and we went into quite a lot of casino’s and walked through them to have a look at the slot machines and gaming tables and we went into their stores (some have malls!) and the special attractions they have. Yes – we took Jackson through the casino’s, but I only let him play the one cent machines – I JOKE!! But we did walk him through the casinos, we had to so that we could get to the shops and attractions. Jackson, for some reason, thinks the poker machines are coke machines. I can’t remember why – so as we’d walk through and past the machines, Jackson would ask me if I was going to get a can of coke? Some of the special attractions we saw were real live Lions at the MGM, M&M World and real live M&M characters for Jackson to get his photo with, we went to see the dolphins at one, but the line was long and the admission charge high, we saw large aquariums, we saw dozens of people on street corners handing out “business cards” for *ahem* ladies of the “night”, or day apparently, coke (as in the beverage) world, we also saw the eiffel tower, lots on construction being done on new casino’s, robotic statues fighting over atlantis, a pirate ship being renovated, rode a tram, a monorail and a gondola down a venetian canal and saw bits of Paris, New York, Monte Carlo, Italy and ancient Rome. It was a long day and our feet were tired from the walk – we’d set off at 730am or so and got back to the hotel about 11 or 12 hours later…. room service dinner at our table with a view of the strip and an early night…. a very interesting day

Our stay in Las Vegas ended on Thursday, as we checked out to head to San Francisco. We did a bunch of amazing stuff in Las Vegas and I didn’t really get warmed up on the gambling front. During our walk around on the day before, I had spent some time in a few of the casino’s on reconnaissance missions to find just the right poker machine for a last minute raid on the floors before we checked out of Vegas. So, while Kylie and Jackson were sleeping I headed off to my meeting with the multi-hand blackjack machine – what a lovely little poker machine it was. I played it for about an hour or so with reasonable success, except for the one game when I pressed bet maximum instead of deal and bet $70 on one hand and lost it all… grrrrr. Kylie wants to get the casino video of the second I realised I’d pressed the wrong button, I just want to forget it and move on. dumb machines. I also found a star wars poker machine, which game me back some of my losses from my wrong button pressing mistake.

Back to the hotel and we checked out and headed to the airport. The guy who picked us up from the hotel for our transfer told us that we probably wouldnt get around the excess luggage charges on our bags unless we looked after the guy at curbside check-in. That sounded like a challenge to me. So, when we got to the airport and all our luggage was on the curbside, I got in line to see what we could do about this excess luggage problem and considering I hadnt made our fortunes on the casino floor we needed to minimise the excess luggage charges. The charges by the way are $100 for each bag of the size and weight we are travelling with, so we’d have been looking at $300 in excess luggage charges. Anyways… after some discussions about how nice a place Australia is, and the guy seeing my poor helpless son and the bag he’d have to carry to the check in counter if we couldnt do curbside and me letting him now we’d look after him, we were able to check in curbside and avoid the excess luggage costs! yippee! it did cost us $2 per bag and a $60 tip – but it still saved us a couple of hundred dollars, which I was happy about.

We passed through the security checks in a breeze and our flight was uneventful and we were in San Francisco by mid afternoon.

This was Thanksgiving Day and I had arranged for us to go to a nice restaurant for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Jackson was very well behaved and we were able to enjoy a lovely traditional US Thanksgiving dinner of Turkey and deserts were ice cream for Jackson, Pumpkin Pie for Kylie and I had warm bread and butter pudding – all of this washed down with a lovely pinot from carlton, oregon!

The hotel we are staying at in San Fran is perched on top of the main hill – Nob Hill – and has excellent views towards the bay and of San Francisco. We can see a slither of Alcatraz from our room. The hotel is well positioned, but next time I think we’ll stay down in Union Square – it’s where most of the action is, shops, cable cars start there and restaurants too.

The hill we had to walk up after dinner would have burned off some of the bread and butter pudding….

vroom vroom

On one of our vegas days, I had organised a Ford Mustang rental through Hertz. The plan was to get the car and do a drive through the desert and check out the scenery and sights and stop in at an outlet store shopping centre outside of Vegas. This turned out to be a fantastic day out. We all got in a cab at about 8am to go out and get the car. The cab driver we had tried to scam us into a big tip with a sob story on this and that and a whole raft of bs, which he wasnt very good at telling and he was a bit disappointed (and told me so) when I didnt give him the tip he was expecting. ah well….

The car rental place in Vegas is massive. You dont just pick your car up at the airport, they have a whole other “terminal” for car picks up and all the major car rental companies have a presence there and the parking garage must hold thousands of cars – hertz alone had over 700 parks there.

We had hired a mustang, but they had a Shelby GT available, which was a little more $ wise, but a much nicer “zoomer car” as Jackson likes to say. The Shelby is a convertible, which was very nice!! We took the upgrade and I am glad we did. What an awesome car and it was a lot of fun to drive out on the highways they have there. I even got to slow right down to a near complete stop and plant it and accelerate very quickly (up to the speed limit – i promise)! Jackson said he thought the car was Lightning McQueen when I did this… so, you see when I was doing this I was making my son happy (and me too)

We drove out of Vegas headed for a little town called Searchlight. We had to detour off the highway for an accident – which got us a bit turned around and lost and back onto the highway heading in the wrong direction (oops), but we got back in the right direction and headed along the highway. The scenery was made by the large mountains / hills which were a few miles off the highway, the scenery nearby the highway was tumbleweeds and cacti. The folk at Energex will be really interested with the photos kylie took of the very low hanging power lines and the incredibly large solar power station we drove by (these photos will go nicely with the pictures Kylie had me take of the nuclear power station we drove by in Florida).

We found searchlight and realised calling it a town was a bit generous, it was more a construction site – I presume they were building a by-pass…..

We turned onto the Joshua Tree Highway towards a township called Nipton. The Joshua Tree Highway is aptly named as the highway is lined by literally thousands of Joshua trees, we only saw 4 or 5 cars on this highway and it was a nice straight open road. This road was good for lots of doing whatever you do wen you hire a convertible zoomer car and you have miles of straight highway, with literally no other cars around…. (tige, you would love it…)

We then turned Northish onto the interstate 15 highway for Vegas and our stop in at the outlet stores. This was another succesful shopping venture, with Jackson picking up a couple of fighter jets, I got a nice die-cast model of a Shelby as a momento of the car and we all got (what felt like) another suitcase worth of clothes…. These outlets stores were really good and are worth the trip out – you can catch a bus for $15 return from the MGM in Vegas to them, or you can hire a “zoomer car” and have a lot more fun.

We left the outlets mid afternoon and headed back to Vegas. We arrived back into Vegas near to sunset, so we decided to drop our shopping off at the hotel and do some laps of the strip. We drove up and down the strip a couple of times, once with the top up and then a couple with the top down and the car in convertible mode. This was a lot of fun!

All in all this was a top day! I only got lost once, I NEVER ONCE drove on the wrong side of the road but I did manage to turn the windscreen wipers on instead of the indicators quite a few times…..

I have added one picture, from the hertz website, of the car. We have about 150 photos from this day, so we’ll post them when we get home.

cc, kc and jacko

Helicopter tour to the grand canyon

While we were in Vegas we did a helicopter tour to the grand canyon. I’ve only been on a helicopter once before. It was a while ago and this tour was very different and was amazing, I think everyone should come over here to do it! It was without doubt a highlight and I know Kylie and I will remember it for a long time, Jackson might not because he’s obviously not going to recall a lot of the stuff we’re doing now – but we took lots of photos and videos of this.

The tour picked us up at 110pm or so and took us out to their base for a briefing on the tour. The company we went with is Maverick helicopters and they run an excellent operation – right from the pick up from the hotel to the touchdown inside the Grand Canyon and the trip back. They were running 7 or 8 helicopters, with 7 passengers on each flight and they are apparently fully booked for months. This same company runs tours out of a few different cities to the Canyon and they will have 50 helicopters running by this time next year. Talk about demand for a product!

The tour was actually 3 flights. One from Vegas to the Grand Canyon of 40 minutes, another to their re-fuelling station (10 minutes) and then another back into Vegas (30 minutes). We were lucky to sit in the front on the flight out from Vegas to the Grand Canyon and we had a great view out the front of the cockpit and the viewing panel in the front lower section of the cockpit. We flew over the Lake Mead and Hoover Dam area on the way to the Grand Canyon, past (lower than) the Native American owned sky walkway and then landed on the Canyon floor, for some champa’s and cheese and crackers.

On the way out to the canyon Jackson even managed to doze off for about 10 minutes! He was very excited about the flight and was enjoying it and was definitely mesmerised by the view below and around us, then he just dropped off to sleep. unbelievable…. anyways, it turned out this quick power nap recharged his batteries and he was ready to rock again once we landed and he had his energy back.

The size of the Grand Canyon is near impossible to describe – it is miles deep and miles wide. The river which flows through the canyon seemed as wide as the Brisbane River near Friday’s / Riverside and looked to be moving very quickly.

The spot we landed in was pretty quiet, in that we were one of four or five choppers landed in the one section of the canyon we landed at. The canyon is a bit like a helicopter highway, the number of chopper tours going out there, just from Vegas, on a per day basis must exceed 100. There were many, many flights which flew over us while we were there.

The scenery is fantastic – with massive cliff faces, rock formations and colours, as well as many different shaped cacti (all very spiky) and of course the river too (which was as Brown as the Brisbane River).

We all had our own individual headsets and microphones and on the way back Jackson started to feel a bit more comfortable about the people and being on the helicopter and rattled off a few “5 – 4 – 3- 2 – 1, blastoff!” and some other phrases from the thunderbirds, even an “FAB Scott” – which in Thunderbirds talk is “Fully Acknowledge Broadcast” and Scott is one of the characters from the show.

Our flight back was timed to co-incide with sunset and we flew basically right over the strip. The lights coming on and all the traffic and looking at the casino’s light up was a great way to end the tour. The handy cam ran out of battery power right as we were coming in to land, that means I had the camera turned on for 3 hours of a just over 4 hour trip….

This trip was amazing and I would definitely do it again when /if we come back to Vegas. At the end of the day I asked Jackson which he liked most – the stretch hummer or the helicopter. He answered “Both!”. No amount of re-phrasing the question could get him to pick one, he enjoyed both so much! I would take the chopper tour in a heart beat – this was a great day out. The company we went with is Maverick helicopters, their website is: http://www.maverickhelicopter.com/

Las Vegas is awesome

Our “transfer” from Port Canaveral to Las Vegas was a LONG day! Everyone is told they should be off the ship by 8:30am’ish – our breakfast sitting was at 645am. We had our carry-on baggage with us and trundled off to breakfast, leaving the cabin for the last time. After breakfast and expecting lengthy waits in customs and airport check-in lines, we decided to get the day started and were off the boat by 730am. We sailed through customs in about 5 minutes, found our bright lime green luggage grouped in an orderly way in about 5 minutes and were very happy to find porters who would help us haul our luggage out to the bus! Things only got better from there as there were airline check-in counters at the port terminal!! awesome! So, we checked in there and they took our luggage for us and put it on its own special luggage transfer bus out to the airport where it was checked all the way through to Las Vegas – all without us having to carry it one step! Another plus to this is they didn’t weigh our luggage, which means we sidestepped excess charges on these legs of our trip.

The downside of all this efficiency is that we were WAY ahead of our schedule and our flight was not due to leave Orlando, for Miami for a connection to Vegas until 1pm. This left us with a long wait at the Orlando Airport. meh, the price you pay I guess.

Our flights were ok. Jackson dozed off on the Orlando to Miami flight, which was only 40 minutes long and would not then sleep on the Miami to Vegas flight, so he was a bit painful on this flight – asking to go to the toilet 3 times on a 5 hour flight and being rowdy and rambunctious for a lot of the flight.

Our arrival into Vegas made it all worthwhile…

We had hired a stretch hummer to transfer us from the airport to our hotel. This was very cool and we all had a great time riding in it. We got to do a bit of a tour of the strip and stopped in front of the “welcome to vegas” sign for a couple of pics. This car was amazingly long and spacey inside, with a few lounge like chairs and led lights in the roof. Very funky and fun, though afterwards I did feel a bit dirty (environmentally wise) and as though we should look to offset the carbon emissions of the trip somehow…. lots of pics of this

The hotel we are in is awesome! The Signature at MGM is part of the MGM Casino, but set back a block from the strip and is connected to the casino by a covered walkway inclusive of travel walkways (flat escalators) to help move you to the slot machines faster. We have an apartment style room, which is great for the space and a room which overlooks the strip and we can see from the New York New York casino and hotel right the way down to Wynn at the other end – we are up on the 27th floor and basically look right out at the “Eiffel Tower” at the Paris Casino. The staff here are amazingly helpful (tips please) and we’re loving our time here.

Monday morning I woke up at about 4am or so (time zone change – I swear) and while Kylie and Jackson were sleeping I headed over to the Casino at the MGM for a look around. I found a few poker machines which didnt pay out – coxy, you will be glad to know I did the free spin dance for you (only once though). I found a great game the punters club would enjoy, which I will try to get a photo of today, it looks like it was built in the 1950′s and is a mechanical horse racing game where the horses do a lap of the circuit and your challenge is to bet on what the quinella will be. Lots of fun! The sportsbook (where you bet on sports) was massive and they had was seemed like about 50 big TV’s showing highlights of all the sports being played around the country.

I went back to the hotel by 7 and we headed off to look around the strip. We did the monorail up and down the strip, which was good.

We went into the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace and did some scouting around. Kylie is by far streets ahead of me in the shoe shopping department (who needs dozens of pairs of black shoes anyway) but I think I am holding up my own in terms of general shopping capabilities. Those who know us well will know that I’ve changed a little (size wise) since Kylie and I got married. My wedding ring hasnt fit on my wedding ring finger for a while, so there was this jewellery store which we had seen in Nassau in the forum shops and they had a ring there which I liked, so I now have a wedding ring on my wedding ring finger again.

We dropped into the FAO Schwarz toy shop and they have a store inside that store called FAOSchweetz. We bought Jackson a chocolate milshake and the guy serving us warned us of how big it was – he wasnt half wrong – this thing was the biggest milkshake I have ever seen. I would have been at least a litre of milk – at least! Jackson, Kylie and I had to tackle it…. again – we have photos.

Later Monday we did our helicopter tour to the Grand Canyon. More on this to come soon, but needless to say this was amazing!

Tuesday we did a drive out through the desert, more on this to come soon too.

We’re still having mountains of fun! Hope all is well back home.

Chris, Kylie and Jackson

Cruisin’ with Disney

On Thursday we checked out of the Polynesian Resort and headed off on our Disney Cruise. Disney make the process of transferring from the resort to the chip very easy. We’d packed up our bags the night before and had them tagged and inside our room by 8am – went off for breakfast and when we came back they had taken them off to transfer them to the ship. We did not have to haul them to reception, or over to Port Canaveral – they looked after all of this for us,


We travelled by bus from the Polynesian Resort to Port Canaveral, which is the port of departure for Disney Cruises. The bus trip took about an hour and a half and Jackson fell asleep literally as we rolled into the port area. After clearing through security, customs and checking in, we were on board the ship and in our cabin by 1:45pm. I could see one challenge in front of us already….. How would we fit all our bags in our cabin?! Our cabin is much nicer than the last cabin we were in on a cruise boat (the Fairstar 14 or so years ago). The cabin has a balcony / verandah which is nice to sit out on and watch the waves go by – or the US Naval ship which is “parked” beside us in Nassau, the Bahamas. The cabin is roomy (for a cruise ship cabin) and has a Queen sized bed and a fold out sofa bed for Jackson.

After everyone was on board, there was a mandatory evacuation drill and then a “sail away” party. After the main part of the party, we were able to find a quiet spot on one of the decks and watch the port slip away.

Returning to our cabin we were confronted by a mountain of fat lime green suitcases blocking our doorway and part of our next door neighbours. Oops. First we hauled all the bags in to the cabin and then we looked for places where we could hide the luggage. The first place I always hide excess stuff in my bedroom is under the bed!! Unfortunately, the bags wouldn’t fit here, so the next spot is the cupboard and basically all the bags were able to fit in there!

We watched the waves slip by for a while and then went off to dinner. For each dinner meal we moved trough each of the ship’s three main restaurants and were seated with the same people on each night. We shared a table with a family of three from Pennsylvania, they are probably a couple of years older than Kylie and I and have a son named Zach who is 6. The two boys hit it off and they are a nice couple, thankfully.

Our second day on board the ship was spent docked in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. We planned on spending most of the day on the ship and taking in a movie and relaxing after a busy week of theme parks. There wasn’t much which interested us on the list of tours you can do from Nassau and in the research we did before the cruise, Nassau itself didn’t appeal all that much.

As you can imagine, on a Disney cruise they are well equipped to look after kids. There is a kids club, which Jackson basically spent all Friday in – mostly by his own choice. Kylie and I had a nice lunch, which was enjoyed at our own pace and not Jackson’s and we watched a movie ‘Evan Almighty’ and relaxed. We did go for a walk through Nassau. I bought myself a few Cuban cigars – real Cubans (apparently)! Nassau is apparently famous for its diamonds, but the shops we looked in mostly looked like they opened last week and were run by “dodgy brothers inc”, so no more diamonds for kylie…

Dinner Friday night was in a restaurant called Animator’s Palate, where the walls start as black and white cartoon outlines and end the meal very colourfully illustrated images from Disney cartoons and movies.

Castaway Cay is a Disney owned island which is available exclusively for Disney cruise guests. We spent Saturday docked here. It is a great set up and we enjoyed our morning here immensely! We had a tip to get off the ship as early as possible today and to go and enjoy the island before the throngs arrived and it turned out to be a great tip. We were amongst the first off the ship and onto the beach. Arriving at the beach there were thousands of deck chairs lined out on the beach, but we were one of only a few dozen people there, so we had our pick of the chairs and took up a prime position on a couple of hammocks nestled under some palm trees. It was great to lie there and listen to the wind rustle through the palm trees (with a little bit of Jackson screeching in the back ground).

We had a swim, we had a cocktail, we had a rest in a hammock and got to relax for a few hours and then we looked up and the place was crowded with people from the ship. It was hard to see it as the same place, there were people EVERYWHERE! Most of them were vacationing Americans (who’d have thought that on a cruise out of America?), so you can imagine the din and what had happened to the peace and tranquility and the wind rustling through the palm fronds… ( hi to all my American readers, I’m sure you know what I mean :) ). At this point we elected for lunch and to head back to the ship.

We decided to take Jackson to his first cinema movie experience. Ratatouile (or however you damn well spell it) was showing. The ship has a 300 seat cinema in which they play recently released Disney movies. Jackson has seen this movie advertised, but not seen it, so was keen to go along and watch. It was an interesting experience. At times he was almost begging to leave as he was a bit frightened – but (being the kind and loving parents we are) told him we couldn’t leave as the doors to the cinema were locked (or something like that) and we were able to make it through the movie. Afterwards Jackson was very proud of himself for having sat through the movie and he told us he loved the movie, except for a few mildly frightening bits.

After dinner we retreated to the cabin to pack our bags and prepare to travel to Vegas….

The cruise was fantastic – we met some nice people on board and Jackson LOVED the on board child care and being able to play with kids. Kylie and I think he is missing playing with kids (no comments about my maturity please) and he enjoyed the child care a lot, while we enjoyed no being pestered and had a nice peaceful lunch. The entertainment on board was good and the staff were all very helpful and geared to looking after kids – an example of this is Galina (our dining room server) would cut up Jackson’s dinner for him and fed him his breakfast pancakes on the last morning of the cruise! I think 4 days of cruising was enough for us and we could have skipped Nassau, but then we would have just cruised from Port Canaveral to Castaway Cay and there would not have been much cruising going on.

Walt Disney World: the final scene

We all had a great time at Disney World! The resort was great and the parks were a lot fun. We think daily updates might get a bit boring, so we’re going to do a few different posts on some of the things we’ve enjoyed about our holiday here at Walt Disney World.

Theme Parks

Magic Kingdom

We spent most of our time at this park. I have lots to write about, but will come back to do this bit of our holiday later, as well as a couple of special things we did here, which need pictures to accompany the update.

Epcot

Epcot’s an interesting park, with a real mix of attractions. The park is basically split into two parts, with one part being focused on the future and the other part being “World Showcase”, which is like a World Expo.

Some of the ride highlights of Epcot were;

Soarin’ – this is a great ride and we ended up doing it twice. It’s very hard to describe…. You fly over iconic American locations as though you are on a hand glider, the scenes you look at include snow fields, cities, ocean, flying behind jet fighters and a NAVY chopper and more. During the ride different scents, which correlate to the scenery you are enjoying, are pumped into the ride – including a pine scent for the snow scenes and orange for when you fly over a citrus farm. Thankfully, no off prawns for the ocean scenes!

Nemo and Friends was ok, a bit of talk about the Great Barrier Reef. Turtle Talk with Crush (a turtle from the Nemo movie) was great – all the kids sat down the front of the cinema and Crush appeared on a screen and interacted in real time with the audience – even fielding questions from the kids! Test Track is a General Motors sponsored ride which puts you in a GM vehicle and you then move through a series of tests which they put their new model cars through, including breaking tests, tests on the suspension (very bumpy spots), heat / cold / corrosion tests and others – the climax of the ride is you go on a speed test, where you reach speeds up to 70 miles per hour (about 100 km h) and corner at high speed – great fun!!

We had lunch at a Teppanyaki restaurant – communal seating, which Jackson enjoyed, because he ended up being the centre of attention. Jackson got his meal served in a plate shaped like the bullet train. We then had dinner at Le Cellier, which is a Canadian steak house. Our appetizer (entrée) was a cheddar cheese soup – outstanding!!

We even got to enjoy a few (not quite quiet) cold beverages towards the end of the day in “France” – champa’s for big K and a nice red for me.

Disney MGM Studios

As with the Magic Kingdom, we had a great time here and did a couple of special things, I would like to come back and do this update once we have some pictures to put online.

Animal Kingdom

We spent ¾ of a day here and enjoyed the park immensely. The highlights were the Kilimanjaro Safari’s, during which you sit in a truck and do a tour through a few different “African” eco-systems and see animals – a unique type of zoo basically. Kylie particularly enjoyed this as we got VERY close to a giraffe – she could have reached out of the truck to touch it and we also saw Hippo’s, Gorilla’s, Rhino’s, Warthogs and a bunch more of animals through the rest of the park including a great fish tank (like the Polar Bear set up at SeaWorld) which you could the above and underneath the waterline and a waterfall which some ducks were using as a waterslide! A funny story from the Safari ride was that as we come into the giraffe “zone” there were 4 or 5 giraffes in total, with a couple on each side of the road and they were eating from the trees. It turns out that the trees have feed dishes in them and they are loaded up with food to get the giraffes to be on either side of the trucks. That’s the extent to which things are done here to make sure everyone has as great an experience as possible.

We saw a brilliant show, based on the Lion King, which featured great costumes, singing, dancing and aerobatics. (see an earlier post for more info on this) Jackson was telling us he didn’t want to see this show, but he loved it (except for the fire twirler)!

We also rode a few rides and met some Disney characters.

Downtown Disney

Downtown Disney isn’t a theme park per se, it’s more of an entertainment precinct (read another place to get the hard earned out of your wallet and into the pockets of Disney shareholders).

There were some great stores here. The favourites of the Chambers clan were (in no particular order);

The Lego Shop had a few large lego constructed statues outside the store, including a dragon / loch ness monster in the (real) lake, a 2 mtr tall dinosaur (with a real life squirrel clambering all over it’s back) and some sharks and other animals. We also enjoyed walking through the world’s largest Disney store (50,000 square feet of stuff), a store chockers with Christmas goods and chattels (such as Christmas tree ornaments, wreaths, etc), a store full of scrap booking things (Nicole, you would have loved it) and an ESPN store. We had lunch at the Rainforest Café, which Jackson enjoyed. This restaurant had a jungle theme to it and included many mechanical gorilla’s and elephants. One of the gorillas was perched right above our table and every 10 minutes or so the gorilla would come to life and start waving his arms and grunting – Jackson must have thought it was pretty realistic, because each time the gorilla started, he would move his drink a bit closer to himself because he thought the gorilla was going to drink it. Of course, I would then move it back closer to the gorilla so that the next time it started up, Jackson would think that the gorilla was going to take his drink again.

Polynesian Resort

The resort has been great. It’s got great amenities, including a couple of good restaurants, access to all modes of Disney transport, the staff here have been very friendly and helpful and we’ve had nice views of the lagoon and the Magic Kingdom fireworks.

Rides at the parks

Goofy’s barnstormer was Jackson’s first roller coaster, we rode it once at day (with Chris) and another time at night (with Kylie). It’s a coaster built just for kids with a couple of tight turns, but no corkscrew loop-di-loops or such.

Buzz Lightyear. We ended up riding this 4 or 5 times. Jackson says the best bit about this ride was shooting zurg!

Tower of Terror was fantastic, I explained a fair bit of this one earlier. Who knew bouncing like a yo-yo in a haunted lift shaft would be so much fun?

Kilimanjaro safaris was great for all of us and a tour of African

Turtle talk with Crush was good fun.

Soarin’ was excellent! Loved it!

Up and down rides. These were definitely amongst Jackson’s favourite rides, up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down…. Dumbo and Aladdin and Dino.

Dining

The food here has been pretty good. We’ve enjoyed a cooked breakfast most mornings and Jackson has had Fruit Loops or something like that (what are holidays for!!).

There are some restaurants here which are incredibly popular and we wanted to make sure we got to eat at them. For those restaurants you can (and in some cases have to) book up to 180 days in advance – yes 180 days in advance, to be assured of getting a table… thankfully we didn’t book any restaurants and then not feel like that type of food on the day.

Jackson enjoyed Pizzafari at the Animal Kingdom. Cheese Pizza has been a regular meal for Jackson here and we now joke with him about him turning into a piece of cheese pizza.

Our (Chris and Kylie’s) favourites have been “Le Cellier” – which was the Canadian Steakhouse and dinner at “Chef Mickeys”, which was more traditional US food of cornbread and the like and had characters come around to the table to say hi and pose for photos.

The character dining restaurants have been great – they’re mainly buffet restaurants and the characters move around and go to each table and get their photos taken with people (the kids mainly) at the tables.

We’ve also had our share of burgers and chips, pizza, doughnuts and ice creams and waffles shaped like Mickey Mouse….

Characters

The benefit of writing the blog updates is that I am the writer and editor… it’s hard for Kylie to edit my posts and I can say things like “I am not sure who enjoyed the character meetings more, Kylie or Jackson”. Character meetings are exactly that – you line up to meet characters from Disney shows / movies and get your photo taken with them and get their autograph.

I won’t list out all of the characters Jackson (and Kylie) met, but it was a LOT! It might be easier to list off those they did not meet.

The ham…. When Jackson gets to the front of the character greeting line, he hands the photopass over to the photographer and then runs in and gives the character a big hug and turns around, strikes a pose and smiles for the photo. He then shakes the characters hand (or gives them five) and then runs back to Kylie.

Sheesh….

All in all, we’ve had a great time here at Disney. We’ve got a whole bunch of photos (hundreds and hundreds) which we will post here to the bog when we get time.