Reason #45386 That We Are Crazy

Also known as the “Last Minute Trip to Orlando”

Sans children!

Okay, backstory. So because John spent pretty much all of his vacation days horribly sick while the rest of us were in CA, they became sick days, which meant he still had vacation days to use for actual vacation. Yay! As a consolation prize of sorts, John’s parents gave us a generous amount of money to spend on a vacation that John would be present for. ;) With my mom only having a few days left this summer to watch the kids for us, we planned a quick trip to Orlando to go to Universal Studios (pronounced HARRY POTTER WORLD!!) and Disney World for 3ish days about 2 weeks before it actually happened. Whew!

It was really fun though, even if we always seem to have unlucky things happen to us (more on that later) ;)

After almost being unable to redeem our prepaid tickets (one of those unlucky things – but we got it sorted out eventually) We spent a day at Universal and saw all the awesome Harry Potter stuff!
We had lunch at the Leaky Cauldron…
Rode on the Hogwarts Express (!!!!)
And generally basked in the gloriousness that is Harry Potter. (Okay, I was the one basking, John was probably laughing at me) ;)

So fun!

We spent day 2 at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.
We used one of our fastpasses to get prime seating for the afternoon parade (the parades are one of my favorite things about going to Disney)
We loved that Merida was riding on a giant set of bagpipes!
We rode of a couple of our favorite rides – Pirates of the Caribbean and the Jungle Cruise. We also did the Monster’s Inc. Laugh floor, which was really fun. We looked at all the shops and saw a couple of shows.
I think this is the only picture we got together. I know, we’re terrible about that…here we are waiting for the fireworks!
We also got to see a few minutes of the electrical parade before heading over to our suuuuper late ‘dinner’ reservation at the Be Our Guest restaurant at 10:40pm.
Since people are usually planning their trips to Disney months in advance, 10:40pm was the only time left if we wanted to try it out. Why not? ;) I loved it! It was so fun!
This is supposed to be snow falling outside ;)

Day 3 was Disney’s Hollywood Studios – Neither of us had ever been there, so it was fun to see some new things. It was sooooo hot that day so we spent most of the day watching shows, which were mostly in the shade or inside. We went on Toy Story Mania 3 times and Star Tours once, and that was really fun too :)

We had another late night reservations at the Sci-Fi Drive In Diner, but we forgot to get pictures. It’s styled like a drive in movie theater, so it was really dark anyway. But it was really fun, and then we finally made it back to the hotel to get some sleep before we headed home the next day.

We got to the airport to find out that our flight had been cancelled. Along with about 1,000 other flights (not an exaggeration). There had been a technology outage at Southwest and the scramble to get allllll those passengers on allll those flights rebooked was insane. We found a flight that took us to DC via St. Louis 3 hours later than our original flight, but our flight to St. Louis was delayed over an hour because we had no captain! So then we missed our connection to DC. Thankfully while in St. Louis, we managed to get onto a flight that went directly to Baltimore, but that flight was delayed probably another hour and a half. So instead of getting home at 2pm on Thursday, we got home at 1am on Friday. Whew! It was such a bummer to be delayed for so long, but we also felt really sorry for all the Southwest employees who had to deal with all the grumpy passengers and try to get everyone to their destinations.  But we made it home and back to the boys, so that’s all that matters. It was such a fun trip, thank you to our parents who made this possible! You guys are the greatest!