Month: April 2020

Beach And Moan

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

It has become clear to me now that each week I shall just be papping on about our upcoming holiday and doing big baby wah wahs about the fact that it might not happen.

I’m sure you came to that realisation more quickly than I did.

Just a few short weeks ago I was very bullishly saying that there was no way that stuff would be locked down at the end of August. At the time, that was five months away. Now, as we round the corner of four months away, my hope is receding more quickly than my hairline did.

As I said a couple of weeks ago it’s the uncertainty that I don’t deal well with. For someone who revels in planning eating choices 180 days in advance all this “up in the air” stuff doesn’t sit well.

Right now my thinking is this. I think there is a 60/40 chance that non-essential travel to the US will be allowed. I think the parks will be open to some extent and crucially restaurants will be open with social distancing restrictions.

The parks seem to be gearing up for some sort of June opening, but it may be for Florida residents initially, then US guests and finally international ones, and I have no clue as to how quickly or slowly those changes will come.

However, there are a million things to consider.

  1. Even if travel by plane is allowed, considering I seem to get a cold every time I fly, do I really want to have us stuck in a metal tube of people for eight hours?
  2. Even if the parks are open, they may not be for international visitors.
  3. If they are, capacity may be very reduced, wait times very high and generally the experience may not be a good one.

It turns out there were three things to consider. I suppose the other thing to consider more generally is that I and nobody else really has a clue what the state of play will be in four months time.

With each passing day and more importantly Trump press conference, the US may have been wiped out by one his medical recommendations long before we have to worry if the Olive Garden is open.

One scenario I have percolating is where flights are operational and that removes our option to get a refund or a free move to new dates and therefore we (concerns about infectious metal tubes aside) would still need to fly or lose the cash, but the parks, for one reason or another aren’t doable.

What would we do then? Well, we’d save a heap of cash on theme park tickets and staying on-site at Universal for a start. My thinking is that we’d probably do a trip similar to the one we did in (I think) 2011. It was a road trip of sorts, starting in the Keys, then Naples, Vero and ending up in Orlando. Another twist on this winding road is that Universal “could” be open to on-site guests and that would include us, so we might still be able to do that. Complex, innit?

Should we need to do a different, non-park based trip then I am, semi-consciously constructing an itinerary. It is very early days, but to break up the trip I am thinking multiple locations, in a higher standard of accommodation than we may usually enjoy due to the savings mentioned before. Maybe both coasts? I don’t think we would venture south…..(not in the Alan Partridge sense) for a couple of reasons –

  1. It’s a long drive for us all but especially Freddie
  2. Miami and the south of Florida seems to be suffering more than other parts right now.

Vero may be an option so if anyone reading this has DVC points this wish to rent, stand by your beds, and the other side of the state anywhere from Clearwater down to Siesta Key would be the other option.

You know what’s coming now don’t you? For those of you that have done more of this beach stuff than we have, let me have your thoughts and recommendations, please. It may of course not happen, either because we don’t go at all, or we go and the parks are viable. Just typing that range of options gives me anxiety. Oh, certainty where art thou?

The other serious consideration for the non-park version of a trip may seem silly but, if you’ve followed any of our trips over the years it shouldn’t be. The only thing that stops us returning from holiday looking like this….

is the fact that we do a lot of steps most days around the parks. Should our days be based around the beach instead then I really fear for my weight gain capabilities. For the sake of my wardrobe, health and the person sat next to me on the flight home, if it comes to it, there will need to be some serious exertion during the days to counter this. Just being in lockdown is doing nothing for my waistline other than expanding it so the struggle is always real for me in that regard.

Beach holidays are not my first choice. You may have spotted this over the years as we tend to go to WDW! However, Louise loves it, and after being locked down for so long just being able to be together would be lovely and as much as Tom might be bored quite quickly, with Freddie to play with even his tolerance for doing not a lot may be raised.

If the season is still going we could take in a baseball game. Are there any other sporting events we might consider?

We’ve had some of our most lovely times in Florida during “beachy times” so this option would not be the disaster my big baby whinging is perhaps indicating I think it might be. We are of course lucky to be able to take these trips and a holiday in this form would be lovely, relaxing and one which would create a whole load of lovely memories.

In all the struggles currently ongoing, this isn’t one worthy of however many words I have just wasted on it, but, I spend the rest of the week concerning myself with all the other stuff as my tweeting testifies, so on Sundays, on my blog, I allow myself some self-indulgence.

I’d love to hear your current thinking on your upcoming trip, especially if you’re due to go at a similar time to us and what plans you are formulating if the parks are not the option they usually are.

Stay safe and stay indoors….

Till the next time…..

New Dates and Doubts

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

In the recent scheme of inactivity, this week has been a right old hive of occurrences with some things actually happening outside of work, dog walking and going to the recycling bins 412 times a day.

The week began with Louise having a high temperature on Monday night, along with aches and general unwellness. This meant of course that she had to stay home from work as they have enough unwell people in the hospital already apparently. The symptoms were mild but the rules are the rules. By Wednesday she had been contacted to attend a COVID-19 test at a local health centre, which she did on Thursday. Yesterday she had the call to say that the result was thankfully negative and she will be back in work tomorrow. She feels better now so clearly it was just a “run of the mill” bout of illness and that test has saved her having to spend another seven days away from work.

In other COVID related news, after much thought and deliberation, Rebecca and Tom have decided to postpone their wedding until 2021. They had moved it already from late May until early July this year, but they felt that was still too risky, and the countdown to the date would be dominated with talk of the lockdown, with lots of stress and worry attached. Hopefully, 2021 will behave itself a lot better than 2020 is doing and they will have a trouble-free time before their big day.

I think it’s the right thing to do, for what it’s worth. The lockdown may well be a little more relaxed by early July this year but there is absolutely no guarantee that wedding venues would be open by then and with a good number of more mature guests the last thing they would want is for anyone to be concerned about attending their celebrations. Dates for next year were, as you can imagine, being snapped up very quickly with lots of couples in the same position no doubt so to bag a prime July Saturday was good going and a small positive to take from what is a rubbish situation.

With the important stuff done, thoughts and this post can turn to more trivial stuff. On the subject of our late August holiday, my thinking veers from certainty of it going ahead to dark realisation that there isn’t a chance. At the moment I am definitely in the latter camp, thinking that there is so much that needs to change in order for it to be unaffected that there is little chance.

Watching what appears to be a car crash happening in slow motion in the US right now, I am finding it hard to be positive about our chances. I was looking at pictures of Florida beaches re-opening on the same day that the state recorded it’s highest number of new cases in a day with my jaw sitting on the floor at the sheer stupidity of it all. If this sort of things continue I’m not too sure there will be much of a state or country to visit by August.

I am already formulating rough plans for what new dates we might try to reschedule for. We are lucky in a way that we are not confined to school holidays so should we need to the hopefully quieter autumn/early winter dates might be the best option. In fact, the compulsive planner in me has November in mind so that we can experience the Christmas stuff in the parks without encountering the seasonal crowds. Of course, that is assuming things will be “normal” even by that time.

Maybe I’m just being too pessimistic and you can remind me of that when we’re sat at the airport in late August. I hope you can.

On a more pleasant note, our voracious appetite for stuff to watch lead us to an unforeseen gem this week. Disney+ provided us with a night of escapism in the shape of Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings.

It is, of course, a very long advert for Disney’s wedding services, but if you like to see the Disney parks and lose yourself for a bit then this is for you. At one point Louise was googling how we could apply for a vow renewal, assuming that if you get on the programme such things are funded by the programme-makers. I suspect we are not quite glamorous enough for their selection criteria. Well, I certainly am not.

We continue to miss folks we can’t be with, and with at least another three weeks of this stuff to go, it’s becoming harder. It’s lovely then to see photos and videos from Rebecca and the latest seem to suggest that Freddie has become a teenager since all this started.

I hope you are all finding ways to muddle through this as best you can and that these weekly ramblings provide a few seconds of distraction, if only by marvelling at its very low quality and lack of any value whatsoever.

Till the next time…….

Ramblings From A Glass Case Of Emotion

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Everyone OK? If you’re anything like me you may be starting to feel a bit odd. At the risk of making this all about me, I do feel a little strange. See how I asked how you were just so I could launch into a rant about me and how I feel?

I’m a weird human cocktail of intermittent lethargy, anger, worry, bouts of industrious activity and frustration. At the same time, I have to admit to preferring working from home, at least for now. I guess as time goes on this groundhog day thing may become a bit of a thing. I suppose you could say….

Physically too, I feel pretty useless. All I see online and on our road is an endless stream of sweaty people exercising and working out, whereas I take the dogs on a thirty-minute stroll and I need a lie-down. I’ve been doing the odd ten minutes here and there on the rowing machine kidding myself that this will burn off my isolation diet.

I am eating well, but “well” in that sentence has the same meaning it does when someone tells you that you “look well”. We all know that means you’ve packed some timber on and my diet is currently delivering on that count.

If the internet is reading this, I’ve seen enough work out videos now, thank you.

As evidence of my distance from normality, I regrouted our shower floor on Friday. I had to order the kit I needed online several days earlier, watch some YouTube videos on how the hell you do it and then inevitably still do it wrong. These are strange times indeed if I am seeking out DIY tasks.

My worries are many and varied, and in no particular order and only focussing on my immediate domestic ones, include Emily, who is incredibly fed up with being stuck at home with us and not being able to see her boyfriend, whilst at the same time shouting at folks through the window who are out and about, who she knows are potentially lengthening the lockdown. I worry about Rebecca, Tom and Freddie, more out of missing them, and not having a hands-on relationship with Freddie is heartbreaking when he is too young to have any clue why we aren’t with him a couple of times a week as we normally are. The selfish worry that he might “forget us” is real.

I worry a lot about Louise working in hospital every day and of course the more elderly members of our family who must be lonely and bored out of their minds.

I know countless others have many more worries in both number and magnitude, but I’m playing the deck I was dealt for better or worse.

At the very bottom of my worry list is, of course, our trip in August. Sure, it’s trivial and not at all important in the scheme of things, but I’m allowed to give it some thought. Will it go ahead? If it does, what restrictions and procedures will be in place? If it doesn’t go ahead can we re-book without losing the family fortune (about £7.50) on dates that we can all do?

My anger, well, I won’t go into that here. Have a look at my Twitter feed if you want to get a feel for that. I’m losing followers there more quickly than Boris Johnson is getting through Sudoku puzzles, but I need to vent and Twitter is getting it.

With no end in sight to the lockdown (for all the right reasons), I suppose it is easy to fall into a bit of a mental tizzy, but as we have ten Hillsborough tragedies happening every day currently, plus all the care home deaths not being reported, feeling a bit weird is a small price to pay as we live through a proper real-world catastrophe. This far into a lockdown might be the time that people really get fed up of the strictness, as evidenced on my dog walk yesterday when the local school playing fields looked like a Saturday afternoon at Glastonbury, but hopefully, in the coming weeks, the benefits of what we’re doing now will start to show. We need it to, as currently, our stats are the worst in Europe, which normally only happens once a year at Eurovision.

I really don’t want these posts to become a place of negativity and preaching, but please remember, those poor souls dying today were infected around three weeks ago. I do wonder why government sources are starting to talk about curves being flattened and infection rates slowing. That is not the message people need to hear. Things will still get worse before they get better and as much as we might need to hear some positive news as a reward for our (lack of) actions, please don’t get complacent.

I hope my binge list helped a bit last week. Do go back and read the comments on both Facebook and the blog itself as others threw in their own suggestions. We’re burning through box sets more quickly than NHS staff are going through PPE if they are lucky enough to have any. As an example, on Friday we stumbled across Brassic (Sky One on demand), enjoyed it, and boshed the whole first series in a night.

It seems that the Sky Movie channels are running all of the Star Wars films on an endless loop and I’ve watched a lot of those in bits and pieces. Similarly, there’s a channel showing all the Harry Potter films. There are hours to be spent right there.

Yesterday felt more like a Sunday than every other Sunday ever didn’t it? Our Saturday that felt like a Sunday was brightened immeasurably by a socially distant visit from Rebecca, Tom and Freddie. They were out on their daily walk and spent a little while sat at the end of our front path whilst Freddie played with the fine collection of stones in our front garden. Having only seen him via video recently, of course, as children of his age do, he had seemingly grown up relatively speaking, with new words in his expanding speech repertoire. It was lovely to engage with him at least visually and from a safe distance and get the chance to make him laugh and him us. We miss him a lot.

So we stumble to the end of a blog post seemingly without theme or point, and nothing is new there, right? I suppose the best I can rescue from the wreckage of the previous few paragraphs is that it’s probably OK to feel a bit odd, low, lonely, worried, angry or lost. For those of you like me, who thrive on certainty, plans, structure and order, having very little of all of that is not an easy adjustment to make.

My response seems to be that unlike 99% of the internet, I’m not exercising for 23 hours a day, cooking, learning a language or crafting an extension on the back of the house out of spit and cat hair. I’m just sitting around, trying to remember what it’s like to wear a pair of jeans and wondering if my car will start whenever I drive it again. I hope you are finding ways to get through this as best you can.

Stay safe, stay at home and see you next week.

Till the next time…….

Binge Baby Binge

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Let’s get my sanctimonious, unqualified preaching out of the way first.

As this lockdown continues it’s going to get really hard to keep to the rules. The weather will improve, the boredom will increase and the temptation to soften the adherence will be huge. I don’t want to bring any unwanted negativity to your Sunday, but all I will say is that based on the very few snippets Louise has shared about what is going on in hospital right now, please gird your loins, embrace the tedium and stay at home. It’s hard to see a tangible benefit of doing so, as we’ll never know who didn’t die because you did the right thing, so just do it and believe that will happen.

It’s easy to become numb to the numbers you hear on the news when at other times any event which killed hundreds in a day would be seen quite rightly as a catastrophe. Again, not wanting to darken anyone’s mood, those numbers will, in reality, be higher than those reported, as deaths in care homes (as an example) aren’t being included in those figures. Sorry, just stay at home.

We are fairly big bingers in normal times, and that has increased as other options have been removed so let me try to help with some suggestions of stuff to watch. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, so you may be aware, but here we go –

We have just finished series 3 of Ozark. That is excellent and has got better with each series so do try that. It stars and is directed by Jason Bateman, and on that subject, Arrested Development is a cracker too.

We are long time Breaking Bad superfans, so we are of course currently watching Better Call Saul, an excellent spin-off and one with a different style and pace to most other Netflix stuff.

Other things that you may have missed from the recent past include The Umbrella Academy, Daybreak, Goliath (Amazon Prime), Inside Number 9 and Schitt’s Creek. However, if you have got to today and still haven’t watched what was probably the first “binge-worthy” series, Breaking Bad, then now is that time. We have never experienced anything that demanded you watched the next episode at the expense of sleep and real-life happening like this did. It is perfect lockdown viewing.

If you really want to mop up some time, then you could treat yourself to The West Wing.

That one isn’t on Netflix but is on Amazon Prime, and I think you need to pay for it. A cheaper solution would be to just buy the box set off Amazon or eBay. You will find a second-hand box set for not very much money. Just wipe it down when it arrives. You will fall in love with Martin Sheen and wish that you were watching reality rather than fiction. It oozes class, quality and superb acting.

For something along similar lines, but less serious, The Thick Of It is glorious and Malcolm Tucker will become your new hero. That one has some spectacular language in it, so that’s one for when the kids are in bed.

We have followed the herd and started to watch Tiger King. It is gloriously weird and almost unbelievable but entertaining nonetheless. It reminds me in a way of Making A Murderer, which is another Netflix series to get into.

I have now watched all three of the available Imagineering Story on Disney+ and cannot recommend that enough. The Mandalorian is on our list to watch when a viewing slot crops up in our busy schedule.

There will be others I have forgotten, but I will offer those up in the weeks to come as they return to my memory. You might need them. Of course, if you have some suggestions, leave them in the comments for the benefit of others too. It can be a virtual library of stuff to occupy ourselves with.

Don’t worry that all this watching will affect my athletic frame. I am also finding time to do some rowing (we have a machine, not a lake) and I walk the dogs every day too so my six-pack is safe. We also played a game of virtual bingo last night on Zoom with friends and family.

I hate bingo, driven by the years I sat through it when Louise was a club singer and more recently on the odd occasion that Mustard do one of those clubs, but it was lovely to see some familiar faces again and it passed a couple of hours.

Emily is missing her boyfriend a lot which is understandable, and despite regular video contact, to say we are missing Rebecca, Tom and Freddie is an understatement. It’s very hard not to have them here on a regular basis and watch Freddie continue to grow, develop and more importantly make us smile as he always does.

I have trimmed my own hair this week. Not an onerous task as you might imagine, but still, the fear of running those clippers over my head was real, but thankfully, nothing disastrous happened and my reverse Mohican remains in fine fettle.

Another highlight of the week was trying to unblock one of Louise’s Mum’s outside drains. Getting elbow deep in unpleasant stuff passed another hour. It wasn’t successful so I assume there is a dead body, hopefully, animal, or some huge stone so far down the pipe that it cannot be reached and it will need proper attention when possible. It comes to something when DIY tasks are seen as a decent way to spend some time.

I hope you are all well and continue to be so. The best way to increase those odds is, yep, stay at home.

Till the next time…….