Ah, Disneyworld. Or is that Disney World? You would think that after a week here, I would know. Au contraire – all I know is that I have been to the Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Epcot, and Disney/MGM Studios over the course of the past 5 days.

Of course, when I say “I”, I mean “we” – Anne and Alex and Leah and me, plus Helen and Tom and Isobel and Evie. And, tonight, add in Bob and Judy (aka Grandpa and Grandma). All in all, a big crew.

The Orlando / Kissimmee area is a lot of things, and one of them is the home of the “Happiest Place on Earth”. It’s amazing – as I learned this week, Disney has developed only 3 of the proposed 10 theme park areas on the “property” – approximately 35,000 acres that Disney owns in this area. That’s a lot of themes — #10 will probably be something silly like “SmallBugWorld”.

But, before I start to sound blasé about it, WDW is really a lot of fun. We’ve been planning this trip for a couple of years now (really), and we scheduled it for the beginning of February to try to take advantage of “shoulder season” – the time before and inbetween all holidays and school breaks and summer, etc. I think it worked, but lacking any sort of real empirical data, that’s just a hunch. All I know is that we had good weather, the crowds were present but not overwhelming, and the rides were fun. That is, the rides that were open – an unexpected side-effect of shoulder season is that some of the rides are closed for repairs and refurbishment. That meant no Dumbo or Small World – two of WDW’s classics. But, we survived…

In fact, on our main full day at The Magic Kingdom, we did more than survive, we ROCKED! This was all due to Tom managing to score us a full-day guide from Guest Services. Melanie was from Washington State (coincidentally), and made our day go smoother than we thought possible. Melanie took the map that we had marked up at breakfast with all the rides we wanted to go on, and, through whatever magic she used, managed to get us on everything. We hit certain rides early, others later, used the FastPass functionality to its fullest, and had a great day. She even watched all four kids while us adults rode Space Mountain (I love that ride). What a treat!

After our time at WDW had ended, we said goodbye to the Housemans and the Goodwins, and headed east to “Florida’s Space Coast”. From Orlando, we hit the “Bee Line” (yes, that’s the real name of the highway) and drove to the coast – Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. We didn’t actually go on the tour, but we could see the launch pad towers from the beach – pretty cool. We stayed two nights in Cocoa Beach, playing in the swimming pool and on the beach, and then we drove down Route 1 to West Palm Beach, looking at all of the residual hurricane damage as we went. Florida is nice, but there are no hurricanes in Seattle.

Then, two more days in the West Palm Beach / Juno Beach area, visiting with Uncle Mel and Mona. More pool time, a round of golf for Noah and Mel, a trip to the animal safari for Anne and Alex and Leah and Mona, and then a long drive back to Orlando in time to catch our flight back to Seattle. Whew!

A great 10 days, made even better in that we got to spend a lot of time together as a family. As they say, kids grow up fast, and every minute that we get to spend together is a memory that we will keep forever. Really, it sounds kind of cheesy, but it’s true. I love this family…

Categories: Family