Hello Again from Orlando Florida

Hello Again from Orlando Florida

Tuesday afternoon  June 1, 2010   (fourth travelogue of this trip).

We had two great days at the the parks in Orlando.  Before we get to that, lets talk about our transportation.  When the Bergmans (another daughter and her family) were here a few weeks ago they found a wonderful taxi driver that has a 15 passenger van.  Lisa negotiated a contract with him to drive us around this week.  That includes 5 trips to the airport, a few trips to mouseland and then a day at Cape Kennedy and Cocoa Beach.  This is a very convenient and and cost effective system.  Our driver is great and is always willing to work with us.  At the Parks, he drops us off close to the ticket booths and we get picked up in the same place.

Sunday we went to EPCOT.  Pat and I go there whenever we are in the area (perhaps every three to four years).  We love this park as it is pretty low key and has great rides and theme buildings.  It also has a large lagoon surrounded by several “countries”.  Each country has a structure representative of the architecture of that country.  Some are displays from that country (e.g. Canada has a great surround movie that displays the wonderful beauty of Canada).  Others have great restaurants  with menus representing they typical food from that country.  We always go to the German restaurant.  It has great food, wonderful beer and fun music.  Irina (our “German Shepherd” exchange student from '81/'82) often reads our blog.  I can picture her reaction to our going there {grin}.  Obviously, it is heavily slanted towards Bavaria and her very strong belief is Bavaria does not represent all of Germany {another big grin}.  However, we always think of Irina and her family when we are there.  This time it really brought back memories of her mother singing with a Bavarian entertainer when we visited Vail, CO.  We had so much fun and her mother was such a wonderful person.

Our German Lunch at EPCOT

We were very fortunate at EPCOT.  In spite of the holiday weekend, the lines were fairly short and we were able to go on all of our planned rides and a few extra.  We stayed for the 9:00 PM fabulous fireworks and laser show.  We arrived at the park at 8:30 and left at 9:45!!  One of the group had a pedometer and we walked 9 miles!  The weather was almost perfect, in spite of the predictions of rain.  It did get a bit hot and muggy in the middle of the day, but cloud cover quickly took care of that.

Monday we went to Magic Kingdom.  Again, the lines were not terrible.  With the FastPass option, we were able to ride all the rides on our list and quite a few more.  We were tired and decided to head home about 6:30 as opposed to staying for the fireworks at that park.  Again, the weather defied predictions and was favorable.  We only walked 5 miles there.  The crowds were larger at Magic Kingdom, but not what we expected for a holiday.

The group at Magic Kingdom

When we got home, we ordered in Pizza and just relaxed.  Today we are also relaxing.  Dan's brother Andrew and his friend Brian are flying home today.  We have had a ton of fun with them.

That is all for now.