Retirement time for KennieMouse and our Orlando Trip

After starting our trip in Chicago (see our dinner at Charlie Trotter's), we headed back to Seattle and San Francisco for work. The time in Seattle itself was nice and it's always fun to get back there. We stayed with our friend Jason and while pretty busy with work, did find time to go for a fancy dinner at a nice steakhouse (El Gaucho's).

On the way "home" from our Chicago / Seattle / San Francisco trip, we spent some time in Florida. The primary reason was to celebrate Troy's mom's retirement! It's hard to imagine that there is a day when you come home from work and never have to go back - congrats to "KennieMouse"!! The family had rented out a local American Legion Hall in Tallahassee for the party.

In Florida, we also had a chance to see Walker and Noa (nephews) and of course K and Mike (parents / Troy's sister and her husband) also. It's fun seeing the kids since they seem to change so much between each time we see them. We don't get to see them TOO often (definitely at Christmas time and maybe once or twice in addition, if we're lucky). They both love running around outside, so we played quite a number of football games with them. Luckily, my ego is still intact and Troy and I managed to win. Most of the time.

British Airways doesn't fly from Tallahassee, so we had our return flight out of Orlando, which is about a 5-6 hour drive. Troy and I had arranged the trip so that we had a couple of days in Orlando - and time to say hi to Mickey if desired. Actually, I didn't care too much if we went to Disney or not. The most important thing for me was just to relax. We did decide to head to the Magic Kingdom on Friday during the day and that was so much fun - much better than I had thought it would be. Disney has a "fast track" ticket system where you can get a "place in line" ticket on certain rides, and go off to other places and come back at a specific time and get in a special line. Not every ride has that, but the ones that did have it saved us hours. I'd definitely recommend it. I'll probably forget some rides, but we did go on Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain (I was SOAKED), Winnie the Pooh, and the TeaCups.

On Saturday we headed to Sea World - another place that I didn't really care if we went to or not. Again, it was lots of fun and definitely we're glad that we went. We didn't go on any of the rides, but did see a bunch of shows with Shamu the Whale, dolphins, cats/dogs/birds/bizarre, and of course, seals and a walrus.

It is pretty expensive to go for the day to these places and I can't imagine how families with 3 or 4 kids can go for a week there. I'm sure there are discounts for a full week and multi-parks, but it was something like $75 a day for each person for each place. Whew. Love the British Pound at the moment (it was somewhere around $2.10 per each £1.00 when we were there!). We hadn't wanted to spend tons of money on a hotel in Orlando, so we had booked an inexpensive hotel - Hilton's Vacation Club on International Drive. It's the #2 rated hotel in Orlando (why!!) and was okay, but nothing spectacular. Luckily, we didn't have high expectations, so everyone was happy. When we checked in, the front desk lady looked at me like I was crazy when I asked if there was any chance of a room upgrade. I always ask, even though it rarely happens. But her reaction was so weird, I literally asked her if something was strange about my request. She claimed there wasn't. Anyway, she did tell us that the concierge desk had a welcome packet that was worth picking up. So we went there and the two guys behind the desk started the standard banter from people who usually want to sell you something. "So you down here with your wives" they asked us. "Nope, just us" we replied. After this type of back and forth about stupid things (just give me my dumb welcome packet and let me to go my room!) they started the whole wives questioning again. "So, you guys leave your wives at home for the weekend?" What was it with the wives questions? Out of patience at this point, I said in a snippy voice (not sure how to describe my voice, other than "snippy" seems to fit) something to the effect of, "no, but I'm here with my kind-of-husband." Not sure exactly how to react, they looked at Troy and said "really?" and Troy answered "well, we would be married if we could." And they (a very unlikely-looking-couple) said "oh, we would be too!" I think they thought we would be easy candidates to attend the 2-hour "come listen to why you should buy vacation property through Hilton." I'm pleased to report we escaped Orlando with no such talk.

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