On Jan. 12th we left for our 3rd vacation(together) to Florida for a week of fun and sun.
The flight down was relatively smooth except for a few weather related bumps—we arrived 40 minutes early though!
We stayed at the Pop Century resort in the “90’s music” area, a resort which is fairly new to disney.
Overall, Pop Century was a decent place to stay. It had nice rooms, 3 heated outdoor pools and a large accomodating common area with an enormous cafeteria, a store (of course!) and an arcade. (Chris, the big kid that he is, spent a lot of time playing one of his old favorite games, “Centipede” there. Maybe a little TOO much time :)….)
The only dissapointing thing about Pop Century was transportation. Many of the other resorts have several buses going to and from each attraction at Disney—example one for Epcot, one for the Magic Kingdom, etc…Pop Century seemed to have limited buses running to and from the attractions and therefore it was a long time to wait in between buses. Other than that Pop Century was a cute place to stay at a decent price!

Our first evening we had dinner at Downtown Disney at a place called the Earl of Sandwich. Their sandwiches and salads were surprisingly fresh and very reasonably priced for disney! We had a good dinner there after first having our favorite iced mochas at ghirardelli’s (good iced coffee+good chocolate=iced mocha heaven!). That night we went to see “Aeon Flux” at the downtown theater. In Chris’ eyes, it could have been a silent film and still been wonderful due to Charlize Theron’s wardrobe (or lack of!). He believes that the Oscar for hottest body should be given out to her 🙂 Ah well, you gotta let a guy dream once in a while!

Friday we started calculating just how many steps it takes to get to the places we usually walk to at Disney. We brought a pedometer just to see how much mileage we were clocking in by not taking a taxi to get from place to place. We were very surpised! Here is our list of usual places we walked to and the steps they accrued (this is pure geekiness, I know:) All steps are one way calculations:
Perkins restaurant—2500 steps
Indian food restaurant-6500 steps
Wendy’s-4500 steps
WaffleHouse/GiftLand-3500 steps

Seeing that we made several trips to some of these places in a given day, we really racked up the miles! We went to India Palace’s vegetarian lunch buffet on 3 days, burning off the calories in just that walk I think! We averaged 15000 steps/day.

On my birthday we walked 30,000 steps just at Epcot alone! That was 15 miles.And boy our feet were tired the next day to prove it :).

Friday and Saturday we kind of “chilled out”, walking around and enjoying the sun, catching up on reading and drinking frozen cokes (with rum).

Sunday was my birthday and the anniversary of our engagement, so we decided, same as the last time we went, to re-enact the day as much as possible by visiting the same places, even eating the same foods. In the morning we had giant cinnamon buns (see pics to believe how big!), and walked around the Magic Kingdom.
It was more crowed than usual around this time that we usually visit, mostly due to the “50th anniversary celebration” that was going on. But we were still able to ride on most of our old faves—the Haunted Mansion (“come baaaa—-aaack!”), the Pirates of the Caribbean (“Arrgggggh”!), and It’s a Small World. We could not for the life of us get on the Peter Pan ride. Lines for that, as well as a few other rides, were too long to even bother.
Later that afternoon we hopped the Monorail over to Epcot to continue the rest of our engagement day. To our dissapointment, there was an enormous religious conference going on and thousands of people from “Faith in 3d” were there. Epcot should have mentioned the conference because the lines to EVERYTHING were extra long and we were lost in a sea of red and white t-shirts. They made the line to Moroccan food in the World Showcase impossible to wait in—and that is where we went to lunch on our engagment day, AND the only place to get a really good vegetarian meal at Epcot. So needless to say we were a little miffed at them! But we waited a couple of hours and the line died down a little enough for us to get in.
The most dissapointing aspect of our day was when we went to Victoria Garden (where Chris proposed to me!) and we realized that the bench on which Chris proposed was no longer there! There were smaller wooden benches placed here and there in the garden but none like the original bench—and there was no space to sit down anyway! We did take a pic of ourselves in the garden and re-enacted the engagement anyway :).
We rode a few of our favorite tried and true Epcot rides—Spaceship Earth (3 times!), El Rio Del Tiempo, and later on when lines died down, Maelstrom in the Norway area.
Test Track was closed and we could not get on “Soarin”-the newest ride at Epcot that simulates hang gliding—we were of course dissapointed about that too!
For dinner we went to get our usual veggie burgers and fries at the Electric Umbrella, only to find they were no longer serving veggie burgers but veggie chili instead. 😦
Much later on that night we had Norweigian coffees and watched the fireworks. Overall, despite the dissapointments, it was still a magical birthday and anniversary of our engagement. After the fireworks, a little kid said to his mom, “Mom, did the fireworks shoot the earth down?”. 🙂

Monday we walked to Perkins for breakfast and took a bus from Downtown Disney to the Fort Wilderness resort, the farthest resort from the rest of the disney resorts. It really is the closest to the wilderness; nice and quiet and beautiful. There was a wonderful small beach there called Clementine Beach, which we relaxed on for several hours. There were less than 8 people on the beach (including us!) the entire time. We also were suprised to see a Ferry boat stopping and taking people from the beach over to the Magic Kingdom. We took the Ferry to go there so we could then hop a Pop Century bus back to the resort from there.

Tuesday we spent most of the day at MGM studios, the smallest of the “Main 4″ parks. We went on my personal fave, the” Muppet 3d adventure” and saw, for the first time the “Indiana Jones stunt spectacular”-which was made hilarious by the few “extras” they took from the audience, and the “Lights, Motors, Action!” stunt show, which was very impressive. To be perfectly truthful, aside from a few good rides and shows, there really isn’t much to MGM. It’s not a big enough park to spend an entire day at. So after a couple of hours we hopped a bus over to the Magic Kindgom, and there we went on the Haunted Mansion again (the Pirates of the Caribbean ride was broken), and watched the anniversary fireworks, which were beautiful. They even had veggie burgers at the Cosmic Ray restaurant which were very good. On the bus ride home, a cute little Asian girl was talking to the woman next to her about her day—she went on and on about how she met with the princesses and saw Mickey, etc…it was very cute!

Wednesday was our last full day so of course we were getting a little depressed. We spent the day walking and enjoying the sunshin. We had indian food for lunch, delivered some of our clothes home via the post office ( in order to fit our souvenirs in!) and went to see “The Producers” at the movies that night, which was hilarious (we still can’t stop singing the songs!). We ended the night with our usual snack of a giant ice cream sundae back at Pop Century!

Thursday morning we spent moping, packing, and enjoying the sun. We had one last iced mocha at downtown disney and said goodbye to sunny Florida. Our plane ride home was very smooth and it was good to be back home to see the kitties. We had some great memories on our trip, which will keep us warm through the rest of this winter!

Cute tidbits from our trip:

• Chris would often mistakenly swipe his ATM card in our room door instead of the key card!
• # of Ice cream sundaes eaten=5
• Chris’ highest Centipede game score-58000. # of times he PLAYED Centipede-about 30

Chris and I have decided to do separate write ups of the food we ate and movies we saw while we were there, giving each a rating of one to 5 broomsticks. After doing a bunch of thinking about making our own little Disney site with ratings and call it “disney geek’s”, or something to that effect we did, click here for the beginnings of our site! The food ratings have two broomstick ratings, one for value and one for quality:

MOVIES seen:

1. Aeon Flux: Chris gives it 5 because, well, Charlize Theron is in it. Need I say more? An okay action flick with some interesting fight scenes. But really it’s all about the booty!
2. Hoodwinked: A very funny movie that both kids and adults would laugh at. Has a line up of famous voices (John Belushi, Glen Close…even Xibit!) in a fairytale “whodunit” type film. Well written!
3. The Producers: Nathan Lane deserves an Oscar for his hilarious performance. Makes you want to see the Broadway performance when Lane and Broderick were on! Overall a hilarious movie, especially if you are a Mel Brooks fan. Neither of us are huge Broadway musicals fans, but this one doesn’t even seem like one, and the songs are a riot (we’re still catching ourselves singing such ditties as “The Guten tag Hop Clop”). A must-see.
4. Brokeback Mountain-Worthy of an Oscar. An excellent, touching film that is about way more than the relationship between 2 cowboys.

FOOD, Drinks and other reviews