Vacation Day 6

Day 6

Nassau Mon!

So now I can say that I’ve traveled to 4 foreign countries (not counting layovers):

1. Philippines

2. China (Hong Kong and Macau)

3. Mexico(both south of California and Phil’s neighborhood)

4. Nassau, Bahamas

5. Canada doesn’t count

I made sure to force Susan awake today as we only had 8 or 9 hours in port and she walks slow. The first thing I noticed was that we were in a 3 boat dock. We had a Holland America boat on one side of us, and a Norwegian Cruise Line boat on the other. And it was Damn HOT down there. The Bahamas is made up of about 700 islands but most of the people only live on a few of them. New Providence (the island we were on and the capital of the Bahamas) houses about 60% of the whole population. One thing that was cool was that it was near the Atlantis hotel and casino is on Nassau. We were docked on the north side of the island and only about 15 minutes from the hotel. Phil and I saw it on TV a few years ago and they have this monster water slide that is really cool looking. The Nassau tour guide that was in the room said that it would be at least $12 each way plus tips to get to The Atlantis is technically on another island, but it has a bridge connecting it but you have to pay a toll for it. As luck would have it, we found a boat tour that would take us across for $6 per person round trip! Half the price! SCORE!

It was a short 10 minutes site seeing ride across to the other island. Club Med used to have a spot here, but the owner of the Atlantis bought them out to expand his hotel. One of the producers of Thunderball (an old James Bond movie that you will laugh your ass off watching if you’ve watched the Austin Powers movies) moved here after they filled Thunderball since he liked it so much. They point out the houses and stuff like that. When we got to the Atlantis, it was pretty cool looking. A Vegas casino needs to copy the underwater thing like here (Mandalay Bay doesn’t have anything on this place). Even though it looked just a nice as a Vegas casino (though the casino itself was a bit on the small side in terms of mega resorts), it still had that “foreign smell” to it. I can’t really describe it, but if you had kidnapped me, left me blindfolded, and walked me through the place, I could probably tell I was out of the country. I think it’s the heavy moisture in the air that causes the smell (I smell it in the Philippines too) but I’ve never smelled it in US even when I lived in Texas.

We went to the customer service booth to see how much it costs to ride the water slide. They said since I wasn’t a hotel guest, I could buy a day pass for $75. $75!?! Man I could practically get a room for that much. And that was each! Not $75 for the both of us. So I said, screw that! I wasn’t lured to the slots at all as I’m practically immune to it from living in Vegas for the last year. But when Susan played, I decided to play some too. I played Family Feud since I hadn’t played it before and on my 4^th spin, I won $80 (I was playing quarters so I spent a total of $1.25 to make $80) so I just stopped there :)

After some other site seeing, we went to….. Starbucks? Geez go all the way to the Bahamas and I’m drinking a mango tea shake from Starbucks ha ha. After that, we took the ferry back to New Providence Island and did some shopping (while sweating to death too). After that, it was back on the boat to do a little eating and swimming (to cool off!). We went and saw the show on the boat that might (of course heavily Disney themed) and then went off to dinner for the “Pirates in the
Caribbean” dinner (told you in an earlier post to remember that part!). It was dress up night so that’s why I’m wearing a tie in some of the pics. After dinner (naturally we were one of the last ones to finish ha ha) we went above deck for the continuation of the Pirates in the Caribbean night. There was dancing and music and one thing I’ve NEVER seen on a cruise boat. They had fireworks launched from the boat! That was pretty neat. After that it was another snack (hey I paid for it might as well get my moneys worth) and then off to bed. It sucked too since my throat was starting to hurt a lot from getting sick by Susan.

Vacation Day 5

Day 5

Our cruise day (we hope!)

Ok this is what confounded me on this trip. Our original itinerary was to leave the hotel at 11:45 (or 12:45 if you leave from Animal Kingdom) onboard the Disney Cruise bus (a separate bus from the buses that take you to the parks or to the airport) and get to Port Canaveral around 2 pm or so. Buuuuuut since we had to go to Port Everglades, they decide to have the bus leave at 2 pm! What’s up with that? We have to go farther so we leave later?

We went to Animal Kingdom, which is basically the zoo (it smelled like crap). We didn’t have a chance to explore everything due to time limits and it only really has 2 good rides.

1.It’s tough to be a Bug (Bug’s life, and it’s also available in California Adventure)
2. Dinosaur- a semi rollercoaster like ride where you’re in a time machine and trying to get a dinosaur out of the past before the asteroid hits.

It’s cool at the McDonald’s in the park, they have special happy meals only available there. The happy meal has Animal Kingdom stuff on it and has a postcard you can mail to people saying you were at Animal Kingdom.

We barely finished those two rides at 1:20 and were like CRAP, we have to get back to the hotel still! So we got back to the buses and waited for almost 30 minutes for the Port Orleans bus (which we also found out that they change drivers at the Animal Kingdom so we had to wait even longer). So I was really afraid we were gonna miss our bus so I even called the hotel to have them hold the bus for us. They weren’t sure if they could but they put in the notice to the cruise people. We didn’t get back to the hotel till 2:05 so we were racing to see if we missed the bus. For those of you wondering why we just didn’t take the Animal Kingdom bus (since I said earlier they pick up there), it’s because Susan had left one of her bags with the bellman at the hotel so we had to go back to get it. We saw there was a line of people when we got to the cruise desk so I knew we didn’t miss it. They told us, “Oh we called everyone to tell them that the bus wouldn’t be here till 2:45!”

Fuckers! I never got that call and I left my cell number so I knew they didn’t call. And why would they bother calling my room since they called after check out time so I wouldn’t be in there anyways! We finally got on board the bus and took the trip of forever to get to Fort Lauderdale.

We had to go to one more hotel (the Disney Swan, which is pretty nice looking) and got going around 3:15. We had to stop at around 5 for a “required pit stop” (apparently it’s state law a charter bus like this has to stop every two hours, but I think that the pit stop place we went to pays the cruise companies to do that for more business ha ha). The pit stop was 45 minutes and then we were on our way again. We got into the port around 7:40 and got all checked in so I’m sure that was a big mess for all of the people who had early seating (for those who haven’t been on a cruise before, cruise ships are huge, but they’re still not big enough to house everyone for dinner at the same time, so there are usually 2 dining rooms and 2 seating times). Luckily we had late seating at 8:30 so we dropped our bags, explored the ship some and went to eat.

The Disney Cruise boat is like walking into a cartoon. There are Disney characters or paintings or pictures everywhere. When you first walk into the atrium, there is an entrance to one of the restaurants (more on that later) that has a life size (or close to it) statue of Ariel from the Little Mermaid. The atrium was a bit small I thought considering the ship is pretty new.

There is literally Disney coursing through the entire ships veins. I don’t think you can look at anything on the ship without seeing some kind of Disney reference. Look at my pictures I’ve posted and you’ll understand.

The dining on the boat is really cool. There are 3 restaurants on the boat (and a premium one where you have to pay more to go to) as well as the buffet and food stations. Each night of your cruise, you dine in a different dining room. On a cruise you have a personal waiter and assistant waiter who serves your table. On the Disney cruise, they follow you from restaurant to restaurant. Each restaurant is different. Parrocat Cay (our first night) is Caribbean themed and is a more casual place. Triton’s was on our second night and is the formal dining. Animator’s Palette was by far the coolest and I’m glad we had that on the last night. The entire restaurant is black and white. Throughout dinner, it starts gaining color (the pictures will turn to color and lights will internally illuminate things that were formally black and white). It’s really cool and something any kid will love (like me). I took pictures.

In Parrocat Cay, it was Caribbean themed (remember that part and think of a recent Disney movie). When I’m on a cruise boat, it’s steak every night! Since I paid for everything already, why bother getting the cheap or vegetarian stuff right? We had a 6 seater table but we only had 2 table mates. It was 2 japanese ladies (too bad Leo wasn’t there ha ha). When I listened to them talk, it was like watching an anime movie (they’re eyes just weren’t big). We discovered they did speak English but they mostly just talked to each other so Susan and I didn’t say a whole lot to them. We missed the first night of entertainment due to all of the hectic moving around and transport to the boat (we got to the boat 2.5 hours after it was originally supposed to leave so that really screwed up the schedule).

There are lots of cool pictures so check them out.
photos.yahoo.com/ninja421

Vacation Day 4

Day 4

The day Susan was waiting for! TheMagic Kingdom (it’s basically Disneyland but bigger for those of you who haven’t been there) so we’ll get up early and get going fast right!?!

Ha ha I think you know the answer by now.

Susan was feeling pretty bad since she was sick so we slept in again. She was starting to run a fever off and on too. We went to Epcot (since we couldn’t fit it in the day before since we didn’t have time) to finish off the pavilions (and get a sneak peak at the recently opened Hong Kong Disney) that we hadn’t had a chance to get to, but she wasn’t feeling good so we went back to the hotel (if this was Phil and me, that’d be an unheard of travesty! He would have dragged my lifeless corpse through the park if I had died on him, that or just left my body at customer service and picked me up later). She took an hour nap back at the hotel (and I did too since I didn’t have anything else to do) and surprisingly enough I was pretty tired too. That nap felt good and I was pretty reenergized (though I got low batt later on).

I noticed that the message light on our phone was blinking so I was wondering who that could be since no one even knew what hotel we were staying at. The message was from Disney Cruise lines. So I had two thoughts crossing through my mind:

1. CRAP! The cruise has been cancelled due to a hurricane
2. CRAP! We’re gonna have to really change up the itinerary due to the hurricane.

Crap #2 was correct. Due to Tropical Storm/Hurricane Ophelia, we couldn’t leave from Port Canaveral (which is only about an hour from Disney World). Instead, we got to take a fun filled 4 hour drive to Port Everglades down inFort Lauderdale.

Man it was a good thing that I booked transport through Disney. For $98 (for the both of us) we got transport from the

Airport-Parks-Cruise-Aiport

If we had gotten transport separately, I’m sure it would have cost us way more than that (especially since we basically had to drive down to Miami!).

We had put Magic Kingdom on the last day because it was going to be open till midnight tonight (at least one park a day is either open early or closes late, but most of them were opening early and since we overslept everyday, that didn’t help out a whole lot). We had made dinner reservations at the steakhouse at the Contemporary Hotel (one of the coolest looking hotels ever, as the monorail goes through the hotel) to make sure we’d be able to get through the park in time. We got to the park around 4 and made our way through

Stitches Great Escape (set before the movie but it was just ok)
Space Mountain
Small World
Haunted Mansion
Mickey’s PhilharMagic
Tomorrowland shuttle
Pirates of the Caribbean (with no Keira Knightly to be found dammit)
Snow White’s Scary Adventures
Peter Pan’s Flight

We could have gotten through more, but it monsooned rained for about 45 minutes and then rained more off and on so that kept us from doing a lot.

We watched the fireworks show at 9. After that, we went on a few more rides and went back to the hotel (and got rained on a few times again). This time on the bus, the A/C was out and man it was HOTTTTT. The windows were starting to fog up from the condensation so that kinda sucked. We didn’t get back to the hotel till kinda late (around 11) and we still had to pack everything up since that was our last night there.

I really have to compliment and say how well Disney’s logistics team works. They cover almost everything on the backend so that you don’t have to do anything when you’re there. We had barely gotten our cruise documents in time (we got them on Thursday and we left for Disney on Saturday, but that wasn’t their fault as we had gotten it through a 3^rd party company) so I didn’t have time to check the documents to inform me that we could have tagged our luggage ID tags that would have had the Disney people pick up our bags before they even came out of the baggage claim and they would have taken them straight to our hotel! That’s cool. I’m not even sure if they do that in Vegas. On the day of your cruise (if you get the land/sea package) they pick up your bags in the early morning and delivery them straight to your stateroom (that’s what your room on a cruise boat is called) so you can go to the park on the day of your cruise and not have to worry about your luggage! The only thing that doesn’t work too well is the “buy something at the park and have it delivered to your room” service. The service itself is pretty cool, but they can’t deliver it same day though so we couldn’t take advantage of it. Another option they do have though is that you can buy something and have it held at the front for you to pick up on your way out.

We got everything packed and went to bed (I was starting to get sick too!)

Vacation Day 3

Day 3

Off to the Disney MGM studios at the crack of dawn (8 am opening instead of 9 am for Disney hotel guests).

NOT

Susan couldn’t get up (this becomes a recurring theme) but this time because her throat was really hurting. So we stayed at the hotel till about 12 and then went to the Park around then. We got to the studios about 12:45 or so and then went on the Tower ofTerror first. Ha ha, that ride scared Susan to death, but it was fun. After that we went on

Little Mermaid show
Indiana Jones show
Muppet Vision 3D
The Great Movie Ride
Animation tour
Star Wars (of course, but only since we had spare time J)

And the LIGHTS, MOTORS, ACTION! EXTREME STUNT SHOW!

That stunt show was cooooooool. It had 6 stunt cars doing all sorts of close quarter stunts and chase sequences.

On the Indiana Jones front, most of you will be shocked (and think I’m lying), but I found a Chinese guy who is WHITER than me! The announcer (Terrance Yip, still remember) was talking and first thing I said to Susan was, “Do I sound that bad!?!”

She said yes but I know I don’t. He sounded like the movie phone guy and I’d never know he was Asian if I closed my eyes.

Finally, we went to the lagoon area of the studios (near the front) for the Fantasimic show. I think this is where the 50^th anniversary show that is shown in Disneyland is from. It’s pretty cool looking as they use a solid wall of water (from jet nosals) as a screen to project a tv image on. It’s pretty cool looking. But naturally, it started raining again (which didn’t help with Susan’s sore throat) and we got drenched pretty bad trying to run out to the buses. I was pretty wet on the bus and it didn’t help that the A/C on the bus was set to like artic freeze so I’m sure some other people may have gotten sick too. It was still kinda rainy that night so we skipped swimming.

Vacation Day 2

Day 2

Woke up late :(

I was supposed to return the car by 10 and I wanted to return it at 8 so that Susan and I could go straight to Epcot. But that didn’t work as Susan couldn’t get up and then I fell asleep again after she wouldn’t get up. So I didn’t get up till 9:40 so I had to high tail it to the Double Tree to get the car dropped off. I made it at 10:10 (had to gas it up again) but the car rental booth was empty! So I had to wait for 30 minutes for the dude to get back but finally got that taken care of. But as I walked back to Downtown Disney (to take transport back to the hotel), it started raining! Man what’s up with it raining in sunny Orlando? So I had to wait in the rain (at the Downtown Disney bus stop) for about 20 minutes and then got the bus to go back to the Port Orleans. Somehow during the walk to Downtown Disney, I managed to hurt myself. I was looking at his pond with turtles in it and suddenly my neck started hurting (the kind when you sleep wrong). So that bothered me for most of the rest of the trip. I didn’t get back to the hotel till about 11:45 so we didn’t get to Epcot till about 12:50. So we had 8 hours to do 9 rides and get through the 12 country pavilions. Could we do it? Well Phil and I could have (and probably made it to another park too).

Our first stop was some pictures as Susan’s Disney vacation started here. The only ride that I can think of that is in Epcot and in Disneyland is Soarin’ (in California Adventure) so everything was new to her. Then we headed off to Spaceship Earth (the big golf ball looking thing). That ride is a bit old (and God forbid…… educational) so we had to wait for about 45 seconds to get on the ride. I haven’t been on this ride in ages (I don’t think Mark and I rode it last year) so if I didn’t ride it with Mark, the last time I rode it was back in 1994. Today’s list of rides includes:

Mission: Space (barf bags included at no extra charge)

Test Track (kick ass)

Soarin’

Journey Into Imagination (the old school one was better)

Spaceship Earth

Circle of Life

Maelstrom (in the Norway Pavilion)

El Rio del Tiempo (in the Mexico Pavilion)

China Movie at the China Pavilion (with a sneak peak at Disney Hong Kong)

All the other Pavilions

But the Living Seas ride was closed! DENIED!

Oh Mission Space is a ride a kid died on a few months ago. Last i read, they still don't know why.

After finishing up the LAND ride, we went to the Pavilions. We got through 9 of the pavilions before it got dark and we decided to stop since it was hard to see and harder to take pictures. The plan here was to come back again on Wednesday morning or on Tuesday afternoon (foreshadowing to a disaster of “It ain’t gonna happen!”)

We stopped at the German pavilion because I wanted to eat some bratwurst. I haven’t had that in ages. We discovered that there is a German restaurant there (buffet with live entertainment!) which was about $21 plus drink (not bad for a theme park) but it was 8:30, the park closed at 9 (what’s with all these early park closings?) and it was Susan and me eating ha ha ha. The buffet was ok. I had forgotten that German food is kinda bitter/sour tasting and the bratwurst wasn’t that great. We watched the fireworks (every park has fireworks every night so that’s cool) and then went home. Naturally (and almost like clockwork!) as soon as the fireworks stopped and they kicked us out of the park, it started raining again. We got back to the hotel and it had stopped raining so we went swimming again. The pool at the Port Orleans is heated so it was luke warm still so I was nice to swim in. We were in the pool for almost 2 hours and I think this got Susan sick.

Vacation Day 0/1

Ahhhhh, vacation at last!

I’ll be posting a day by day account of the trip to Orlando. It was a long and mostly fun trip but despite all of my planning many things went wrong (both within and beyond my control)

Got to sleep in and it felt great! Nothing much to do today except rest, get ready to leave and pick up Susan. Our flight isn’t till 10:45pm so we have plenty of time to do stuff. I did have to go to work for a little while today but nothing big. After I picked up Susan, I went to work and then after that we had some ice cream at Dairy Queen and did some last minute shopping at Wal-Mart.

We went to the Cortez Room at the Gold Coast for dinner. Great steak at a great price. It was just the right size (11 oz) but I felt like I could have had another one ha ha. After dinner Susan and I went back home, got packed up and then waited for Alvin to take us to the airport. I had to do something I very rarely do on a flight; check luggage! So we had to get to the airport a little sooner than usual since I had to check the bag. Since it was Saturday night, the airport was almost empty. The busy days at the Las Vegas airport are Sunday, Thursday, and Friday. Sunday and Thursday for people leaving Vegas, and Friday for people to get in and lose all their money!

The first of wackiness happened on the flight. I fell asleep with my glasses on, and then woke up and they were missing and I found my left lens in the seat next to me! I looked frantically and found that my frame was 2 rows up! Somehow after I fell asleep the glasses fell off and were either stepped on or bent or something and the left lens was popped out. On the bright side, the frame for the glasses weren’t broken, just bent, so I think it should be able to be repaired ok.

We landed at 6 am in the morning (Eastern time)! Man that was early! It was still only 3 am in Las Vegas! So we had about 4 hours of “not sleep” during the flight so Susan and I were really sleepy. We waited in the lobby for about an hour (the info said that the Disney transport didn’t start till 8 am) but we found out when we went to the check in desk that it starts at 5:30! So we could have left anytime! So we got on our shuttle to the Port Orleans Hotel French Quarter and the vacation has started! The ride was smooth and uneventful (which was a good thing) but we got to the hotel around 8:15 in the morning so nothing was open and our room wasn’t ready yet.

We checked in and left our luggage, and went down to the Doubletree Hotel (which ironically was the hotel that Mark and I stayed at last year. We got our rental car and drove off to Universal Studios. Whew it was a bit hard to drive without my glasses especially since I hadn’t had any sleep and my eyes have two different vision grades. But we managed to get to Universal with only a minimal amount of getting lost. Today was going to be our toughest day since we had to do 2 theme parks in one day (I found a special ticket to Universal that was a 2-parks for the price of 1 but you had to do both parks in the same day. I had gone over the list of the rides so I had a general idea of what to ride, but we didn’t get to the park till past 11 and the freaking park closes at 8 pm! What the hell is that? It’s the Sunday before Memorial Monday and they’re closing at 8 pm! So we had to work fast! We went on as many rides as we could, but we hadn’t had any sleep so any ride we were in that was dark (like a 3D or 4D ride) I was a falling asleep. We went on the following:

Amazing Spider Man (WAAAY COOOL)

Hulk Coaster (just me, Susan didn’t want to go)

Storm Force Accelatron (like the teapot ride at Disney world)

8^th Voyage of Sinbad (a 20 minute show, pretty cool)

Men in Black

Shrek 4D

Twister

Jaws

Jimmy Neutron’s Nicktoon Blast

It doesn’t look like a lot but when you’re waiting in line forever (even with the Fast Pass) it’s enough to take up a whole day (plus everything is so far when you’re walking across 2 parks)

After we left Universal at 8 pm we made our way down to Steak-n-Shake. I’ve always wanted to go there but wasn’t able to in KC or when I was here last year. They have pretty good food and shakes but I think I was too tired to appreciate it. After leaving I noticed that we were right by the Doubletree again! Mark and I almost could have walked there (well maybe not as it was over a mile or so from there).

After semi driving by the seat of my pants (I wasn’t quite sure where I was going since I hadn’t stayed at the Port Orleans before) we made it back (I recognized some of the landmarks from earlier in the day and from when we were in Orlando last year). Got back and went swimming for a bit (well as close to swimming as Susan can get since she can’t swim) and then went to bed!