Runner Girl Plays Dress Up -- Part 2

As you read in Part 1, Steph and I had to try to sleep the night before the big race, except we were too excited to sleep and we each probably got 3-4 hours of sleep total.

We got up at 2am -- YAWN! -- and was ready to meet the first bus from our hotel to the race venue.

Yawn!

Once we were dropped off, we had a long walk to the bag check.  A girl who was sitting near us on the bus was chatting with us.  And wouldn't you know it?  Her brother is a weatherman in the Air Force!  And was traveling down to Dave's squadron for some training!

Where's Kevin Bacon???

I won't bore you with the details of waiting to wait for the start of the race.
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Runner Girl Plays Dress Up, Part 1

I'm so excited to finally have time to sit down and share my experience with my first runDisney race a couple weeks ago!

Last fall I signed up to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon, whose route covers Magic Kingdom and EPCOT.  The race was on February 26th.  A neighborhood friend, Stephanie, and I made the trip together over a long weekend.  We had a wonderful trip and it was fun to be part of such a magical weekend.  There were nearly 20,000 runners.  While men are allowed to take part, they cannot win race awards.  There were about 1000 male runners.

Can you see me?  I am towards the right, just past the finish line.  Do you see the man in the light blue tutu to my right?

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Our Disney Cruise, Part 6: AquaDuck!

Today's post will be about AquaDuck, a 765-foot water slide that will only be found on the Disney Dream and Disney Fantasy (when the Fantasy is commissioned later this month).  They're the only cruise ships in the world with complete water slides on board.  I had to wait until my waterproof camera pictures were developed to do this one and I'm so excited about it!  AquaDuck starts inside the rear funnel and travels from the stern of the ship towards the bow, then goes under the bow funnel (behind the Funnel Vision screen) and then continues back toward the stern of the ship again, depositing you right at the bottom of the stairs so you can hop right back in line!
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Our Disney Cruise, Part 5: Disney Art Throughout The Ship

Disney artwork graces the passageways and staterooms of the Disney Dream. There's even a full-sized art gallery on board, where guests can purchase original and prints of Disney art. Photo by Flickr user Casajump, used with permission.

I couldn't get over the beautiful Disney storyboard and concept art throughout the Disney Dream. If you sail on a Disney Cruise Line ship, make sure you take the time to stroll around the enjoy the art.

And if you want to take some of the art home with you, pay a visit to the Vista Gallery. This is where guests can browse original Disney art and pieces related to the Disney Dream and Castaway Cay. Many of the pieces are for sale, and several are featured in a silent auction. In addition, popular prints are sold for a nominal cost and make very elegant cruise souvenirs.
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Our Disney Cruise, Part 4: Biometrics and Photography

I took many cute pictures of the boys playing at the beach at Castaway Cay. Disney shipboard professional photographers wandered the island taking pictures also. Because we were in the water, I didn't have a Key to the World card with which the photographer could associate the picture. "That's okay", he says. How can that be?

Here's what the professional photographer captured just a few minutes later.  Thanks to biometrics, this otherwise "unassociated" picture found its way into our stateroom account folio.

Some of you might say, "Wow that's really cool!" and some of you might say, "Wow, that's really creepy!"

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Our Disney Cruise, Part 3: The Animator's Palate

I had heard SO MUCH about the Animator's Palette restaurant on Disney Cruises. Boy was I in for a surprise on the Disney Dream!

Last summer, before my husband and I had booked our cruise, I had received some recent gouge on taking Disney cruises from a couple of Air Force family friends. One of the families' favorite parts of the cruise was their dinner experience at the Animator's Palate restaurant.


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Our Disney Cruise, Part 2: The Midship Detective Agency

The "Midship Detective Agency" on the Disney Dream lets the kids interact with the Enchanted Art on the ship to solve a mystery. 

One of the unique features of the Disney Dream is their 22 pieces of "Enchanted Art" scattered among all of the artwork on their fourteen decks. In a Harry Potter-esque manner, random pictures on the wall will come to life! This is fun for the kids and adults alike!

I will share more of the stunning Disney artwork in a future post.  Today I'll be discussing the Enchanted Art and the interactive game you can play with it.  Read more about how the Enchanted Art works here.  My favorite were two pictures of scenes from Peter Pan.  It's a pirate ship in one picture, a fort in the other.  The pictures hang side-by-side.  The ship is firing cannon shots from his picture and it hits the fort in the other.  Then the fort returns fire!  I'm kicking myself for not having taken pictures of it.

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Our Disney Cruise, Part 1: A List of "The Little Things"

I know most of you knew that we took a Disney cruise about 2 weeks ago.  And perhaps you were wondering why I wasn't writing about it?  It's because I had promised GeekMom.com several posts about our trip and I wanted to get those posts out there first.  It's easy enough now to translate the text over to my own blog, which I'm going to do now.  I've drafted 7 posts about the cruise, and they aren't the normal "Here's how our cruise was" type of posts.  Enjoy!

Santa brought the family a 4-night Disney cruise vacation this year! The trip happened to coincide with Timmy's birthday. In a very uncharacteristic move, Dave and I agreed to take the boys out of school for a solid week and drove out to Port Canaveral, Florida, the homeport to the Disney Dream, Disney Cruise Line's most-recently christened* ship.


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The Real Fine Print...

I found this flyer that was handed to me when I turned on the Disney World Tickets last Thursday.  I remember stuffing it into our backpack as soon as I got it, and while cleaning out the backpack yesterday I found it.  This is the no-kidding real fine print about the extension to the Disney Military Salute promotion.  I'm not finding it very well online, so here it is for you.  Note the new block out dates.  Click the image to see it full sized.

Return to Disney World!**

**I'm reminded of all those Disney reprise movies: Return to Neverland, Return from Witch Mountain, Return to Halloweentown, Return to Snowy River, etc.

Semi-impulsively, this past weekend we took a "short" trip down to Disneyworld and joined our friends Suzy and Andy's family, and along with their neighbor's family.  They flew down from Ohio for the week, while we joined them part way through the week after the boys were finished with their school year.

We took advantage of this year's Disney military salute tickets...while not as big a discount as we experienced in 2009 (when Dave and I each got 5 complimentary days), 4 days + water parks for $138 per ticket is still the best Disney deal there is!  Consider that the 2-day Florida resident ticket is $133!

On this trip we used 3 of the 4 days, we're considering a future trip combining the last Disney ticket day with Sea World and perhaps even Legoland when the weather turns cooler.

There were 12 of us (6 adults, 6 kids).  Since all 3 families had been recently, there weren't pressing needs to meet characters, search for Hidden Mickeys or ride particular rides.  I was pleased to get to ride a couple things we didn't get around to in 2009: Space Mountain, It's a Small World, and Maelstrom.

It was incredibly hot on this particular trip, which made a marked difference in the boys' behavior.  We didn't hear the whining/complaining till day 5 when we went in December '09.  On this trip, it was halfway through the 2nd day...Timmy sat himself down in the middle of the sidewalk at Hollywood Studios and refused to walk.

Instead of just giving you a random bunch of pictures, I thought I'd instead share some of the cool stuff we found out about this time around.  Enjoy!

1.) Announced in April 2011, the Disney World military promotion has been extended into 2012.  Tickets purchased in 2011 now don't expire until September 30, 2012!  There is a lot of "fine print" to this promotion change, so I'll just refer you to this website for the details.

2.) Did you know you are not restricted to that one hour window printed on your Fast Pass?  Fastpass is Disney Parks' rider management system.  Grab a Fastpass ticket for your favorite attraction and come back at the designated time for shorter wait times...or no wait at all!  The attendants are only ever checking the start time, but if you don't make it in that one hour window printed, come back anytime afterwards before the attraction closes and ride attendants are instructed to let you through anyway.  They don't advertise this, since Fastpass is designed as a ridership management tool and they need most riders to return in that one hour window for the program to work smoothly.  More information about how to maximize Fastpass can be found here.

The most popular ride in Hollywood Studios.  See the non-Fastpass wait time on the left?  People waited anyway!  Even more popular than Star Tours on a Star Wars Weekend!  They are typically out of Fastpasses by 11am!  In 2009 one of us ran to this attraction as soon as we got to Hollywood Studios to grab the Fastpass.  And it was still for about 6 hours later.

3.) Disney Dining now has a mobile website that you can use from your smartphone to make dining reservations!  While we were enjoying some air conditioned goodness at Disney Quest (see #6 below), I was able to hop onto the mobile website and make dinner reservations at House of Blues across the street at Downtown Disney.  The following day, Dave got us lunchtime seating at the German Biergarten buffet on our drive into EPCOT.

 

4.) We caught our first glimpses of the "new Fantasyland" under construction.  Suzy and I commented to each other, "It's about time Disney decided to do more with the more recent Princesses!".  However, based on the article I linked above, recent "policy shifts" in Disney's princess marketing is resulting in some last-minute changes to the original plans.  Based on the concept art, it looks like there will still be big areas dedicated to Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid.  Set to open in Fall 2012, we're excited to get to see such quick progress.  (It was also very interesting to see such huge construction areas in general...I figured Disney would have been more discreet, do you?)  A friend who was there recently said that my pictures from June 9th had so much more visible than what she saw just 8 weeks prior.

You can see Beast's castle in the upper left, and The Little Mermaid's area towards the top.

Progress so far on Beast's castle.

I love my camera's zoom!

5.) A newly-designed Star Tours 3-D attraction opened at Hollywood Studios on May 20th, in conjunction with the first of their 4 Star Wars Weekends that are held every May/June.  The ride was closed from September 2010 for the renovation.  Dave and I had been on Star Tours in 2000, and after riding it again in 2009 it all seemed the same and rather uninteresting.  But this time around, it was WAY more interesting: the ride is now in 3D and it's interactive in that a random passenger is photographed and shown as a "rebel spy" (our godson on our particular ride).  The movement in the ride is now smoother and flows with the storyline better.  To me, the coolest part is how there are now 54 permutations to the ride, by combining which storylines your "tourship" travels through.  In our case, we wound through Kashyyyk and Coruscant.  At the end, Princess Leia's holographic message thanks us for protecting the rebel spy for the Alliance.  I was impressed with whatever they did with Carrie Fisher's mouth movements to make that work...the images were straight from the original Star Wars.

I wrote about our Star Wars Weekend experience for GeekMom.

Dave looking super cool in his 3D glasses!

6.) Disney Quest: One of Walt Disney World's best-kept secrets!  After dealing with the most crowded, hottest Disney park experience in my entire life at Hollywood Studios for a Star Wars Weekend, we left mid-afternoon and enjoyed a couple hours of air conditioned goodness at Disney Quest.  This is an interactive theme park located at Downtown Disney West Side.  We bought the military promotion tickets that included Disney Quest admission, so we spent a couple hours there and enjoyed unlimited video game play.  Usually Disney Quest is very crowded in the evenings, so to go over there from 4-6pm was delightful, we had a chance to play every video game we were interested in!

School's Out -- Let the Travel Begin!

In the shade of our garage, we were able to load the car in relative comfort...OUT of the 90+ degrees  at 9am!

Not only is our summer full of travel, but we couldn't even wait for school to end before taking our first trip!  Since we're taking the SUV up to PA/WV/VT next week, we're going to use the Prius to drive down for a couple days at Walt Disney World.  We took the boys out of school a half-day early.

But to easily fit two kids, two adults and our stuff into our Prius, we loaded up our roof-top carrier.  We usually only need to use this when we're moving from one house to another, but to save us some mileage, we thought we'd use the car.

Better do it now while the weeds kids fit easily in the backseat...

Walt Disney World!!!!

From 2009 12 19 WDW Vacation Day 2

I didn't make a big deal out of this beforehand, but for Christmas the Vollmers took a vacation to Walt Disney World! We were there from December 18-23rd and the flight home on the 24th was pretty scary. Dallas-Fort Worth Airport cancelled the next flights to Omaha after ours left. We flew out around 2:40pm. Phew!

It's rare for us to take a traditional vacation like this. As a military family, we're typically pretty far from our extended families and Dave's vacation time is usually dedicated to visiting our parents...the kids' grandparents. Our last non-family vacation was 2 1/2 years ago.

But how could we resist? We were able to take advantage of Walt Disney World's 2009 military promotions, both for the hotel room and for the tickets. So all 4 of us enjoyed 5-days of Park Hopper benefits for about the price of one 5-day Park Hopper!!

We had a wonderful time this past week, the boys were very well behaved despite getting about 90 minutes less sleep per night than usual, and we managed to fit in everything we were interested in doing in all 4 of the Walt Disney World parks. We stayed at the Caribbean Beach Resort, which offered an outstanding deal for military families. Jacob and Timmy met 21 characters, we had the standard "breakfast with the characters" and I got my grown-up fix with the fantastic Spirit of Aloha dinner show on our last evening at the resort.

NOTE: We received a lot of questions about why we didn't stay at the Armed Forces Shades of Green Resort which is near the Magic Kingdom. Dave and I had stayed there before when we were younger, but this time around we didn't make the arrangements in time, so we could only get a suite for Christmas week (which we didn't need), and with Dave's rank, we'd have been paying about twice as much for the suite as what we got at the Caribbean Beach. No need for a suite, all we did in the room was sleep.

We had debated taking a trip while we were still living in NC -- we're very glad we waited, though. Timmy's now 45" tall and the break point for many of the more-thrilling rides is 44". Only two of the attractions were off-limits to Timmy: The Rockin' Roller Coaster at Hollywood Studios and the Primeval Whirl at Animal Kingdom. We definitely were able to live with that. Both boys will proclaim that the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is their favorite ride. DINOSAUR at Animal Kingdom ended up being quite frightening, Timmy was rather spooked afterwards....

We took advantage of the Disney Dining Plan during our stay. The link at the Disney World website is very vague about it, so I'll include this one that provides MUCH more detail. The pricing for 2010 is a bit more than we paid, but you get the gist. For about $102 per night of hotel stay, our family (2 adults, 2 kids) enjoyed 2 complete meals plus one set of snacks each day. Do you come out ahead? Well, if you aren't doing anything except Disney World during your visit, it's an outstanding deal. Several Downtown Disney restaurants are included in the promotion, so we even had a great dinner at Wolfgang Puck's one of our nights there. It would have been difficult for us to spend less than $100 per day on meals, so by having prepaid for the meals with the hotel payment, we didn't have to make such a big deal about what our meals would cost. It's great for budgeting the food portion of a Disney vacation.

It's also great for things like the $36-per-person buffets -- we loved the Tusker House Mediterranean/African buffet at Animal Kingdom and the boys enjoyed breakfast with the characters at Chef Mickey's -- and the $60-per-person Spirit of Aloha dinner show. With the dining plan, we could choose those types of meals and definitely come out ahead! Even the "Quick Service" fast-food style meals were rarely less than $50 for the 4 of us.

It's a LOT of food. Every quick service and table service meal (when not a buffet) included desserts for each of us, most of the time we'd save the quick service desserts for later snacks (usually cookies, fruit, or their yummy famous Mickey-ear Rice Krispy treats), thus freeing up our daily snack allowances for bagel/cereal breakfasts in the morning.

On occasion Disney World offers vacation packages that include a FREE Disney Dining Plan. They had a very generous promotion in 2009, but we didn't travel during the inclusive dates (we missed it by a day!).

Oh, one more thing -- Disney won't come right out and tell you this, but even if you pay for kids on the meal plan, we weren't restricted to the kids' menu for the Quick Service fast-food style meals. This came up at a Noodle House-style restaurant (near the Lilo and Stitch attraction at Magic Kingdom). Jacob wanted noodles, but the kids' menu was only chicken strips or macaroni and cheese. It didn't matter for the Quick Service, Jacob was allowed to order adult portions. At the more formal settings, they're a little more strict, although at buffets it didn't matter, and 4 of our 6 Table Service meals were buffets or homestyle where all 4 of us ate the same thing. I was happy about this because I wasn't looking forward to my boys eating nothing but pizza, cheeseburgers, nuggets and mac/cheese for a solid week. Other great Disney Dining Plans tips can be found here.

Which brings me to my next story. On our 2nd day at the parks, Timmy had cheese pizza and chocolate milk at Pizza Planet for lunch, Mickey Ears ice cream for a snack, then a cheese quesadilla and chocolate milk at Wolfgang Puck's for dinner. When we went to the Lego Store at Downtown Disney, all that cheese and milk caught up with him and he barfed right on the edge of the children's play area outside the Lego Store. Poor little guy. No, I didn't take any pictures, don't worry! After he got sick, he seemed fine and begged to stay and play -- he also didn't make a mess of his clothing, which was a miracle! Were it not for how, um, neatly he got sick, I probably would have packed us all up and went back to the hotel.

We found out that many of our friends were taking their Disney vacations at the same time. We were able to meet one of our Air Force friends (who I was deployed with this past year), Rose, and her fiance' Brad and his sister Wendy, at Hollywood Studios for lunch, and we also met one of Dave's former NC State classmates, Nicole, at EPCOT for dinner in Mexico. It was fun to catch up with friends!

Enjoy these photo albums from the trip. I've captioned the pictures, so they'll describe themselves.

2009 12 18 WDW Vacation Day 1

2009 12 19 WDW Vacation Day 2

2009 12 20 WDW Vacation Day 3

2009 12 21 WDW Vacation Day 4

2009 12 22 Walt Disney World Vacation Day 5

2009 12 23 Walt Disney World Vacation Day 6