A brief history of time spent in Orlando

Funny how you go away for a week and when you come back you have a new president-elect that's the first African-American to achieve the honor. I wish I had a dime every time that's happened to me. The last time I did a travel log on a trip I took it ended up being a series of the most boring blog posts I ever seen, let alone created. But, alas, I do have some things to say. While I will spare you a 5 part post on my family vacation/business trip, I will give a somewhat brief summary of my experiences in the Magic Kingdom and trade show.

One of the most apparent things during our trip was the astounding amount of people that we saw that were wearing Phillies' championship T-shirts and hats. I actually packed a bunch of my own shirts and hats to wear whilst down there as I wished to tease the nearby Tampa Rays fans. It appeared that there were much more Phillies' fans in the parks and surrounding areas. Often, as you'd pass a fan by you'd hear them shout, "Go Phillies!!" or "Number 1!!" It was nice to see and feel some Phillies excitement despite the fact I was in another state.

The trip overall was fun with a few exceptions. The two things that really bummed me out during the trip was the fact that trade shows suck the life out of you and destroy your feet because you're standing for hours and the realization that my children are huge whiny brats. The feet pain I'm used to as I've done countless trade shows by now. The main difference this time is that I had to walk all over the theme parks after destroying my feet making them feel even worse. The whiny brat thing didn't really catch me off guard as I know that my kids can be a real pain at times, it was just dumbfounding in the fact that we were in Disney World, having boatloads of fun and they still managed to find things to complain about. (lots of things!)

My younger son, Gabriel, is a shop-a-holic and didn't want to do anything but shop in gift stores. We gave the kids $60 each and told them that they had to budget what they bought as souvenirs. As a result my older son, Jonathan, was terrified to buy anything as he would lose his budget and Gabriel, who has no foresight whatsoever, would have blown all the money in the 1st hour, had we let him. Nevertheless, we had a few a blow ups along the way but eventually found our stride and had fun at the parks.

The Tower of Terror was great as usual and the new Everest ride was great and surprising. For Disney the crowds were actually very low and I think the longest we waited for a ride was 40 minutes. Most lines were 30 minutes at the most and we used the fast pass option well. I did get to meet up with an old high school friend for an hour at the hotel pool as in a weird coincidence she was also at the same resort.

Aside from the Disney parks, we did go out and see Medieval Times for dinner one night. Although very touristy, it had a nice schmaltzy charm to it and the sword play and pretend jousts were fun to watch. Imagine the WWE with sword play and with out the managers. A funny aside was that my wife purchased a 32 dollar foo-foo drink in a HUGE margarita glass. The type of glass that you could safely house 6 goldfish and a water turtle in. We managed to get the sucker home as a carry-on item on the plane and it now sits proudly on my bar in the basement.

The trip was great but now I am at work and have too much to do and add the fact that I've put off doing it to blog about this.

I need a vacation for my vacation.