Orlando 2012

A week before I left on my cruise my mom reviewed the points for the time share she and my dad own and realized that she had a few more points that needed to be used before the end of the year. She asked me if I would want to go somewhere with her. So a week after I had gotten back from my cruise, she and I took off to Orlando!

At the airport: When my mom and I walked up to the security woman in the security line she immediately said, "Are you two related?! You look so much a like!" Traveling with my mom is always fun. She is such a cute and sweet lady and she always gets so excited and giddy about "adventures."

One of the cute things about her is that flying always makes her nervous; she's not scared of the actual flight, I think she is just afraid of missing flights and loosing baggage or not "passing" through security. It's such a cute nervous too, you can tell she's trying to play it cool but she's a bit jumpy. Getting to Florida was not an easy picnic. A huge snow storm came into Salt Lake City that afternoon and once we had boarded our flight we had to sit there for 45 minutes while the plane was sprayed down with some defrosting stuff. I was even getting nervous because we only had a 30 minute layover in Denver. When we finally took off the capatin said, "We'll do our best to make up time." (That always makes me laugh, why don't they fly extra fast everytime? Why do we have to be running late to fly faster?)

We made it to Denver, going in for landing when an annoucement was made that certain connecting flights were holding their flights for us. We were on the list; Wahoo! THEN the plane started to lift up again (I swear we were inches from the runway with the wheels out). WHAAAAAT?! Turns out a gust of wind came in just as we were going into land and it was too dangerous to land so they pulled back up.

We missed our connecting flight and had to spend the night in Denver. The next day we were re-routed to Kansas and then on to Orlando. It pretty much took a chunk out of our trip. So we decided to add on another day at the end and I just called the airline and asked them to extend our flight to a day later and to have no fees since they were the ones that re-routed us all over. They did it!

Our first actual day there we went to Universal with the sole purpose of spending as much time as we wanted at Hogwarts and going to other things if there was time. Oh my goodness... I knew I was a bit of a Harry Potter nerd but I LOVED the Harry Potter part of the park. It actually felt like I had stepped into the pages of the books. They even had Moaning Myrtle talking over the sound system in the women's bathroom! My mom talked me into buying myself a wand. Hahaha, I don't even have buyer's remorse!

 While flying to Florida I explained to my mom about how you can spell "wow" with your mouth and fingers. So when we walked into Universal and she wanted a photo, she said, "Do that "wow" thing you were telling me about."

 It's hard to see because the photo is dark but this is me when we first entered Diagon Alley. I'm pretty excited.

 Drinking Butter Beer

 Hogwarts Express

Hogwarts!

On Sunday we went to church and it was the Primary program. Score! Always a fun day at church. Afterwards we visited the temple and then went to the beach to read our books.

At the beach we found some shells and decided that we would make wishes with them and throw them back into the ocean. You can think we are dorks but we were having fun

The rest of our trip was spent at DisneyWorld! I wouldn't say my family is a crazy fanatic Disney family but we sure do have fun at the parks and always get excited about the cute details in the decorations, rides, etc.

Animal Kingdom: We only spent a half day here but for us and the time that we had that was enough. We had fun going on the Safari Ride and seeing all of the animals in a more natural environment and getting "shrunk" down to the size of bugs in the Bug's Life movie. We rode the roller coaster Expedition Twice and regretted it because it made us a little sick... too much backwards riding.

Holloywood Studios: we walked the "streets" of movie sets, spotted Santa Clause, rode the same rides multiple times and ended the night watching Fantasmic. We took advantage of people at one of the day time parades and rode Star Tours about 4 times; only because we thought it was so cool that the ride is a different scenario each time. We couldn't get enough of The Tower of Terror because the build-up was even more exciting than the one in California. Fantasmic was the perfect finale to a first "disney" day. We added a "p.s." at the end and ran over to the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster right after Fantasmic before the crowds thought to head there and rode it one more time before heading home for the night.

Epcot: probably one of my favorite places to visit. It's like getting a taste of travel. I think the other parts of Epcot are fun but my favorite is "visiting" all of the countries.

 United Kingdom

Canada

Norway

 Paris

Germany

Morocco

 Japan

Italy

Magic Kingdom: aka DisneyLand. Our favorite part about this park this time was that we got in for a sneak peak preview of the new Beauty and the Beast Castle and the Little Mermaid Castle, which wasn't opening up for another month, and we even got to eat dinner at the Be Our Guest restaurant in the Beast Castle. We also had a lot of fun in this park taking advantage of parades going on and riding the busy rides when they had no lines.

 It was cute, there was even fake snow falling behind the windows while we ate.

 Food was brought out to everyone in these cool carts. So fun!

A part of Prince Erik's Castle

It's funny, I have never really cared for the Haunted Mansion at DisneyLand but I loved the one in DisneyWorld. They're different and the one in DisneyWorld was a lot more fun for me.

Like I said before, I love traveling with my mom. This trip was no exception. We would play hard everyday and at night we would go back to the condo and make dinner and watch a movie that we would pick up from RedBox. It was the great mix of playing hard and vedging too.