Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Disney To The East...I Mean West...I Mean SOUTH!!! - Orlando Day 1

Being regular travelers has gotten us a bit lax in travel preparation. Previously I would double and triple check flight times, etc etc. David told me that the flight out of Buffalo was at 10:20am. Hmmmm.....guess I should've double checked. If our flight from Buffalo to Baltimore was actually at 10:20, we would have arrived at the airport in plenty of time. But no....it was not. You guessed it, we missed our flight by only 1 minute! Luckily for us, we were able to be rescheduled on the next flight out of Buffalo which departed only a half-hour later. Instead of flying east to Baltimore for our connection we flew west to Chicago and our flight to Chicago arrived in Orlando only about an hour later than we would've.

The flights were hit or miss (yes, miss....ha ha ha, very funny...no pun intended) with Madeline. She has been going through this behavioral thing lately that is making David and me ready to pull our hair out (opppsss....David has no hair, but you know what I mean) So, we off and on struggled the whole day with a lack of listening. Plus, she has already developed a bit of an attitude that I can only imagine what it will develop into by the time her teen years roll in. We'd like to think that David and I are pretty strict and consistent....but holy crap! I was ready to take the next flight back to Buffalo and lock her in her room for a week. Yet, now she is sleeping and so darn angelic. And here David and I sit, sipping wine with dueling laptops and trying to regroup and brace ourselves for the next day. Yes.....for lack of better words, it really was a WTF kind of day!

Ok....so, I vented above. Yet, not every moment with Madeline was a battle, so below are some of the highlights. After a small rest (nooooo, I did not say nap) we headed to dinner at 1900 Park Fare in the Grand Floridian. We went to the "Cinderella's Happily Ever After Dinner". This was very enjoyable. Madeline was able to meet Cinderella, Prince Charming, the Wicked Step-mother and the two Step-Sisters (Drizella and Anastasia). We completely lucked into an awesome table for this character dining experience as we had the first table when the characters entered so Madeline was the first and last person they interacted with. There were some funny interactions. For example, when Prince Charming first arrived Madeline had just gotten her food and couldn't decide between her food or the prince. Leave it to my girl to decide to eat while talking to the prince. Also, Madeline realized that the step-sisters and the step-mother were not nice characters. She gave Anastasia the "stink eye" but then ended up taking a nice picture with her. Also, the picture with Drizella looks as though it were posed but was completely candid....thus proving Madeline's dislike for the villains of Cinderella. Aside from the characters, the food was also very good and the major bonus was that the character appearances distracted Madeline so much that she did at least behave at the restaurant.

After a very long day, we were not about to have an excursion other than the character dining (Epcot fireworks were just caught in transit from dinner back to the hotel). We are not staying on Disney property, although very close. There are shuttles from our hotel to various Disney attractions yet they do not run quite as frequent as the Disney shuttles. So, getting back to our hotel took a little longer than we had hoped.....and thus added to our already long day. So needless to say, I need to get off this computer and get to bed.

3 comments:

Margaret said...

That Prince Charming is SCARY! I would have picked the food too.

Marysia said...

Margaret, I thought the same thing. Great pictures!

Melanie @ Whimsical Creations said...

Great pictures. Someday I will get my kids to disney.