Florida holiday

At the end of April, James and I flew down to Orlando for a five-day weekend. Well, for me it was a five-day weekend, for James, who had a conference Monday through Wednesday, it was a three-day weekend. It was awesome to have a mini-vacation that we hadn't planned on (the conference and the award came up rather suddenly).

We worked a half day on Thursday and flew down that afternoon. For our first two nights, we stayed at the Wyndham Resort in Orlando; for the rest of the vacation we stayed at the Contemporary Resort in Disney World, because Raytheon was paying for that. (The rate for the Contemporary? $285 a night. And that would be why we'll never be staying in a high-end Disney resort ever again.)(Unless Raytheon wants to pay for it again!) The first night we just rented our car and went to the hotel. We got room service for dinner - we split one entree because I'd packed snacks for the plane, so we weren't starving, but we needed something. We got the cedar plank salmon, and oh. my. god. That was the most delicious salmon I've ever tasted. The fish is grilled right on the plank, infusing it with a surprisingly tasty smokey-woody flavor, plus it was smothered in a miraculous glaze of soy sauce and maple syrup. And the roasted veggies were awesome too.

On Friday, we went to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. It was about an hour's drive from our hotel. James had a ball - it was the highlight of the trip for him. I'd been there once before so while it was cool to see, I wasn't all that excited about it either. But I'm so glad James got to see it, he was so blown away by all the rockets and things.

After getting our fill of space stuff, we drove back to Orlando to hit up Disney World. Our plan was to go to the Magic Kingdom for the evening, to see the night time parade and the fireworks. Unfortunately, when we got to the gate at 5pm, the guy who takes your money for parking told us that there was no charge for parking because the park was closing in two hours. It was grad night, and the park was off-limits to anyone who wasn't a high school senior. Harumph. So rather than only have two hours in the park, we decided to go to Epcot where at least we'd get a full evening. But still: bah humbug. The highlight of our first night in Disney World was dinner at the Moroccan restaurant. We got an appetizer of goat cheese and crispy bread, which turned out to be cracker-like wedges stuck in round balls of goat cheese. There was a yummy roasted red pepper sauce drizzled over top the cheese. Our entree (which we split) was beef couscous, cous cous being the national dish of Morocco. It was delicious! The beef was perfectly cooked, tender and falling apart.

The next day, Saturday, we returned our rental car to the airport, then took the free Disney World shuttle from the airport back to the Contemporary resort to check in. This sounds simple enough and I thought it wouldn't take too long, but it was after noon before we were finally able to go to a park. So we got on the monorail that goes right through the lobby of our hotel, but then we thought we were going the wrong direction so we got off at the transportation center (or whatever it's called) to get an express to the Magic Kingdom, we ended up waiting FOREVER for a train. Something must've been wrong with the trains, because our little turnaround ended up taking an HOUR. What. The HECK. I was pretty annoyed at how late we were getting to the Magic Kingdom, and then when we got there, we found out that it was closing at 7pm AGAIN. Wait a minute, ANOTHER grad night?? Boooooo. Still, we got to enjoy the park for a few hours, we road Space Mountain, we got stuck on the Carousel of Progress, which I thought was going to be the train ride through Tomorrowland, then we took the train through Tomorrowland... I forget what else we did. We left the park around 4:30 because we had reservations at the Italian restaurant in Epcot, so we went over there and had a fabulous dinner. Back at the hotel that night, we watched the fireworks from the hallway in front of our room, in our pjs.

On Sunday we got into the Magic Kingdom fairly early - not right at the opening as I'd hoped, but still early enough to beat most of the crowds. Liberty Square and Adventureland and those areas in the back of the park were pretty vacant, which was nice. We went on Pirates of the Caribbean and Splash Mountain without hardly a wait, and got fastpasses for Big Thunder Mountain. We saw the Hall of Presidents show, which I'd never seen before (somehow on all my previous visits - all two of them - I totally missed the Libery Square area). Between Saturday and Sunday, we hit all the major rides. That evening, our plan was to go back to Epcot for dinner in Mexico, then go back to the Magic Kingdom for the parade and fireworks. Unfortunately, right as we went in to dinner at Mexico, the skies opened up and a nasty thunderstom swept in. We had a nice dinner in Mexico, and walked around a bit in Epcot afterwards despite the weather. It wasn't raining too hard, but the sky was lighting up from time to time with some impressive lighting. We made our way back to the Magic Kingdom only to find that they delayed the parade until after the fireworks, and then announcements kept coming over the loudspeakers that the fireworks were being delayed. It was raining pretty steadily by then and we weren't dressed for it, and the cheerful message about the fireworks being delayed kept coming up, so we decided to just go back to the hotel. The weather wasn't going to change for the better anytime soon, so rather than get soaked and wait in the cold for a long time only to not get the fireworks anyway, we just bailed and went back to the hotel. Of course as soon as we got back to our room, we saw that the fireworks were starting up. We watched from the fire escape this time, and they actually had the music piped in out there, so we got more of the experience. Still, the next night was James' award dinner, so that was our last chance to see the parade and fireworks, so that was a bummer.

The next day, the special extra park hours that Disney grants to the resort guests was at the Animal Kingdom. They were opening that park at 8am, so we decided to go there until 2 or so, then go back to the hotel to get ready for James' dinner. Unfortunately, James realized that the dinner that evening would necessitate a tie and a business coat, which he didn't even own let alone pack one for Florida. He had only packed regular workday-type clothes: khakis and button-down cotton shirts. And the CEO of the company was going to be there. So we had to go on a coat-gettin' adventure. We took the Disney shuttle to Downtown Disney, which is the closest point to the Disney World complex entrance that we could get. There were lots of taxis there, so we grabbed one and went to some outlets that were only maybe a mile away. We went to a Ralph Lauren outlet and found a pompous-looking sport coat that was awfully pricey for an outlet, then we went to a Van Huesen outlet that had more reasonably-priced clothing. We found a nice sport coat on sale, and a tie, and then we decided to get a new shirt because we wanted to be sure the tie would match. Then I told him to get new pants too, to be sure that those would match too. So we got him a whole new outfit, but it ended up being less than the price of that Ralph Lauren coat, so we felt pretty good about that. And he looked FANTASTIC in his new clothes.

Sadly though, by the time we got back to the hotel and got all his new clothes ironed, it was too late to go to Animal Kingdom. Waah. So we went down to the hotel pool and relaxed, swam and even played on the water slide a bit. It was a good time, and very refreshing after our crazy morning! Then James had to go to start his conference, and I hung out in the hotel until it was time to join him for dinner. I got all gussied up in one of my favorite dresses (a strapless white cotton one with brown flowers, which I wore to our engagement party) and joined him for dinner. It was pretty boring and business-y (the guy next to us only wanted to talk business, blah!) but the food was good and it was so exciting to see my sweetie get his award.

The next morning I had to be up early to catch my bus back to the airport. I joined James at his conference breakfast, which was nice! Then he saw me off to my shuttle, which whisked me back to the airport. It was strange to fly without him, but luckily the flight was an easy one!

Updates.

Yesterday was our eleven monthiversary!

So what's been going on in the past month? I can't believe my last post was all the way back at Easter - that seems like forever ago.

Well first up, Florida! I can't believe I haven't posted about that yet... what a slacker. We had an awesome mini-vacay that was semi-sponsored by work because James had to go to Orlando for an award. It was a great time. I think I'll dedicate a whole post to that, though, because I don't want to forget the details but I also don't want to make this post enormously long.

Last month, we spent a long time looking for a reputable dog breeder in New England. I did a lot of research, we decided on a breed - Havanese - and even went as far as to email back and forth with a breeder for a bit. And I was ridiculously, over-the-moon excited at the thought of owning a puppy. But something didn't feel right - it was the timing, really. We have a lot of trips planned for the next couple of years, and while a bunch of them are short weekend jaunts, they wouldn't neccessarily be easy to bring a dog along, and we couldn't leave a puppy home along for more than a few hours (depending on the age), so we'd be putting the puppy in a kennel a lot more than I felt comfortable with. There was a lot of back and forth, where I'd say "That's it! We're not getting a dog yet!" and then I'd be back to searching for a breeder the next day. Then, suddenly, a few weeks ago, we decided once and for all: no puppy. Not yet. It just wouldn't be fair to the pooch to do all this travelling, and there's no way we'd give up on those trips - we want to see a lot before we get into the baby stage.

So we decided that instead of a puppy, we'd get a bunny: unlike a dog, a rabbit could be left over the weekend with plenty of food and water and be just fine. And we already get our neighbors to look in on Lucy and Winston when we go on longer trips; asking them to look after one more low-maintenance animal shouldn't be too big of a deal. It was a pretty sudden and possibly not extremely well-thought-out idea; we decided on a Thursday I think, went looking at a local pet store that evening, then on Friday drove over to Nashua to another pet store, where we bought our bunny.

And here he is! Isn't he the cutest?

We named him Butter Bean. We've been socializing him a lot, spending lots of time with him and petting him - but also giving him space, not forcing ourselves on him either - and he's really warmed up to us. We don't let him roam freely (yet) because of the cat (who is mostly afraid of him), but when we have him out on the couch he'll hop around and then jump into our lap for a snuggle. He's pretty good!

James and I are on a health kick lately. We've always been pretty healthy about food, eating lots of veggies and avoiding fast food and junk, but we're really making an effort to be really good about it now. For breakfast, we have a hot cereal from Bob's Red Mill - 7 grain or 10 grain cereals or something. It's just the grains ground up, no sugar, no anything else. We cut out soda and snacking and an indulgence that was rare to start with but then became an everyday thing: potato chips at lunch. Sea salt and vinegar kettle chips, to be exact. They're so good but we kind of got addicted to them, and I think that's why we saw our weight creeping up. Sometimes it's really hard to see the pile of chips bags in the cafeteria and not buy one! And when the work day is stressful, I used to get a candybar in the afternoon, so I had to cut that out. Which is hard because work is still stressful! But we weigh ourselves every morning and record it on a paper, and it's worth it to skip the chocolate if I can get that number to keep going down. We're not going crazy about it though, we still have dessert after dinner - just a less of it. I'm baking a lot less, at least temporarily until we reach our goal weights. We both want to drop 20-ish pounds to reach what the internet tells us is our ideal weights. As of this morning, I've lost about 5 pounds! We're both wearing jeans today that had been hanging in our closet for a long time because we couldn't fit into them - that feels pretty great. Our goal is to be in good shape for our trip to Hawaii in September. An added bonus is that I'm feeling more trim and fit for my 5th year reunion at Lafayette.

We're also being more active. We're using our elliptical on a regular basis, and we bought a book about hikes in Massachusetts. We did one the weekend before last (James hurt his neck last week so we took it easy last weekend), and it was pretty rigorous, it took about two and a half hours and it was wonderful to get out into nature. The guide book directs us turn by turn, which is good because the path we took wasn't very well marked! The locations of the hikes aren't obvious either, like state park hiking trails: this was some obscure reservation that we never would have known about without that book. The weather's supposed to be great this weekend, so we're planning on doing another hike. I also want to get us started on a couch-to-5K program, and get a Wii workout game from Jillian Michaels, to keep things from getting boring. I think Jillian would kick our butts, which I'd really like.

I've been doing a lot of research lately for our Hawaii trip. We decided on going for two weeks in September, and we bought three Lonely Planet guidebooks that I've been poring over - one for Hawaii's Big Island, one for Kauai, and one for Oahu. It's really exciting to read about all the things we could see, and to start planning out our itinerary, although it's going to be hard to have to wait until September to actually do it!

Other adventures coming up:

My 5th year reunion at Lafayette is the first weekend in June. My sister's flying in from Norway because it's also her 10 year reunion, and my parents are coming up even though it's an off-year for my dad, so we'll have a mini family reunion. I can't wait.

We had been planning on going up to Canada this summer, but we realized that it would be more prudent to wait on that and save our pennies for Hawaii. Since we had reserved two days of vacation time for Canada, we decided to tack those on to the 4th of July weekend (we get the 5th off as a paid holiday), so we'll be going down to Jersey to spend a nice long weekend with my parents.

Two weeks later, we'll be meeting my parents in southern Mass to go camping at Wells State Park and visit Sturbridge Village. It'll only be a three-day weekend, but we'll use mod time to take Friday off so we won't have to dip into our vacation time.