Month: July 2020

Birthday Bonanza

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon, Walt Disney World

This week, in an attempt to reassure my bosses that I am competent I spent most of it reciting five random words. Several of them were not even swear words. I await my pay rise with tepid anticipation.

The world has indeed gone completely bonkers and I stare, mostly at Twitter, in a catatonic state of disbelief for large parts of my day. I need to get out more…oh wait….

Today is not a day for morbid bemoaning of world events, and political incompetence, instead, it is the time to celebrate the fact that I have had a daughter for a quarter of a century and am clearly very, very old. Emily’s birthday is today and probably much like you, I cannot quite fathom how she has the gall to be 25.

If there is anything to be thankful for about that, it is that of course that we are no longer infected and inflicted with a house full of noisy kids having a sleepover where nobody, including me and Louise, ever slept. I do remember one such event “fondly” which involved me trying to make our brand new kitchen floor less sticky for a good few hours after one lovely hyper child spilt a full two-litre bottle of coke all over it. Hello to Simon, wherever you are.

Instead, Emily is, of course, spending her day with her boyfriend and we are wishing her well electronically. As ever, this is the circle of life. Happy Birthday pud!

It also means that today is Oli’s birthday too. It is spooky that they share a birthday, but of course, Oli is not yet 25. We got Oli for Emily when she passed her GCSEs and I have walked him ever since. He and I are showing signs of age now of course and the walks that we do are more of me dragging him along rather than what was the opposite for many years. Bless him. He will probably never forgive us (well it was Louise technically) for introducing Bean to his a life a few years ago. She is the annoying younger sister every elder sibling loves to have.

Right now, Oli is spending his birthday in the the only way he knows how.

Next in line for a birthday in the household is me. As you can imagine, my anticipation of it has diminished considerably of late and I am contemplating just emulating Oli’s approach to it as I cannot be in my location of choice.

In the world of holidays, not much has changed. Florida, along with most of the US, seems to be embracing the Walking Dead approach to controlling a pandemic. With each passing week and each notch of the graph over which new records are set on infections, my hopes of our March trip take a bit of a dive. I cannot make any sense of it.

With our trip some time away, and with half of me expecting that we won’t go anyway, my interest in happenings in the parks has dimmed a little, but from the small snippets I have seen online, they look quiet. Very quiet. It has to be a worry that this can’t be financially sustainable for the theme parks. I’m not sure whether they were losing more money when shut or now that they are open. Whilst infection rates soar there can surely be no chance of international visitors being allowed in, even assuming anyone wanted to, and as if 2020 hasn’t been surreal enough, it is not beyond the realms of imagination that some parks don’t survive.

I don’t think Disney is at risk of that. I don’t know of course, but surely they have enough backing and other revenue streams to survive, I hope, at least, but some of the smaller ones could be in trouble. This, of course, must be the case across multiple industries and makes the unbelievably irresponsible inaction on the whole thing in large parts of the US unfathomable.

Having said all that about being disinterested in how the parks are doing and pessimistically downplaying our chances of going in March, it has not stopped me from performing some surgery to the plan. That surgery involved me cramming more food into our trip, like an LA plastic surgeon cramming triple DDDs into their client. Like them, I think I want it, but everyone else knows it’s just a step too far. (What? I have watched the odd episode of Botched!)

Somehow, ADR permitting, Beaches & Cream now sits on our plan. I am of course curious to see what it looks like after the recent extension but more than that I want a kitchen sink for brunch. Both are at least equally important.

Maybe I need to do more of this and employ the technique of positive thinking rather than moaning about stuff? We WILL go to WDW next March, there WILL be a working vaccine in place and we won’t need to wear masks and social distance and I WILL not put on a stone in two weeks due to massively overeating. I suspect I am being too aspirational with the last one of those.

I’ll let you know how I get on with that!

Till the next time…..

Being Right & Retro

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

In a very rare turn of events it appears that I made the right decision.

This week Virgin pushed back any possibility of flying to Orlando until October at the earliest. So now as I sit here with new flights already secured, updated plans made and park reservations in the bag, it does appear that making that decision a few weeks ago has saved me a considerable amount of stress and panic right around now.

I guess we would have now been waiting for refunds, rearrangements and all that jazz along with everybody else cancelled for our original dates. It may well be a one-off occasion that I made a right call, so please allow me to wallow in it.

I have to say that although the 1st of March is so far in the future I don’t think we can still be 100% sure that we’ll definitely be going then. That may sound mad, but in a country where new records are being set every day for infections and deaths are rising again, you have governors banning cities from enforcing mask-wearing in public.

This level of stupidity cannot be comprehended and it is this sort of muppetry that may see me stressed and panicked again in the new year trying to move stuff once more.

As you will have seen on Friday when I shared an old, yet recently rediscovered photo on Facebook, we found some old photos. Emily is getting a new bed and re-doing her bedroom so she is currently trying to make her room look a little less like one of those “hoarder houses” you see on the telly.

Having gone through the photos from the box she discovered deep under her bed, I’ll share a few more now. I’ll try to keep it to those of historical interest as long as I can remember what they were.

This is from, I think 1999. It is from our only visit to date to the Liberty Tree Tavern. Rebecca is two here if it is 1999. My Dad took us and my brother and his family to Florida on his maturing endowment, which is not a euphemism.

It’s terrible that I can’t be sure of the year with a lot of these. If there is one positive from my writing of trip reports in the years that followed these early trips it is that we will always know the exact date of things we are looking at.

I think this is 2001 and the first trip we did as a foursome. This would make the girls six and four respectively which I think looks right. We stayed at the All Star Sports, paying massively over the odds for a package deal. I knew no better at this early stage in my Disney development. This was the first trip I booked as up until that point I had been with my parents or had been taken by my Dad in 1999.

This is Mickey or Minnie’s house. Both of course now a thing of the past.

Again, I am guessing but I think this is 2001 again based on Rebecca’s size and dress. This, if you can’t work it out is in France in World Showcase. The hours we spent with the girls getting those masks done. Every minute of them an absolute pleasure.

Now, this one is a bit of a rare find. This must be 1999 and the brief but glorious thing that was Tapestry of Nations. For those too young to remember this was an outstanding parade type of thing that made its way around World Showcase before ROE. Forgive the photo. I had an old steam-powered camera and it was very hot and raining.

Again from 1999, and this is my brother’s eldest son, Jack, at the time around six I think. This was when paper maps were relevant and in the Animal Kingdom, we still needed one. The park hadn’t been open that long at the time.

Again, I’m guessing that this was 2001. It’s some bizarre stage show that I have little to no recall of and I certainly have no idea what it was called. It had all those characters in that anyone from the UK only has a passing knowledge of like Rocky and Bullwinkle. I have to say, I have not mourned the passing of this show in the way I did Wishes!

This looks like 2001 again. Although Rebecca looks small for four. Maybe it’s 1999? No, I think 2001. I honestly can’t remember. See, if you think writing trip reports is for OCD idiots with nothing better to do, then, of course, you are right, but they do serve a purpose.

This was outside those silver character caravans in what was MGM at the time, near Little Mermaid and what was One Man’s Dream.

This was definitely 1999. Rebecca is two here and looking very similar to a currently two-year-old Freddie. This was taken at Busch Gardens. On top of her stroller is one of two giant stuffed toys that were won that day on the boardwalk games. We somehow got them home and they still sit in my Mum and Dad’s house. When the girls were younger and slept over at Nana and Grandad’s they had to be moved out of the bedroom as they terrified them!

And finally 2003, the first trip report year. For that reason and the fact that I remember this like it was yesterday this is outside Rock n Rollercoaster and that is Rebecca with the untamable and unfathomable hair she had at the time.

We were waiting for Louise to finish her ride before heading to The Brown Derby for our ADR. Just as Louise emerged and we set off it started with torrential rain and we got absolutely soaked. We had to get the girls a sweatshirt each from the villain’s shop on the way so they wouldn’t freeze to death in the air con whilst eating. Rebecca’s look of happiness and joy is a strong reminder of how (almost) every minute of these trips are happy memories and things to cherish as we make new ones with the new people now in our lives.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I finally got all of our old videotapes from many trips converted to a digital format and we’ve been watching those again. There are hours and hours of unedited and largely tedious ( to anyone but us) footage, so I won’t bother you with those, but if time allows I may try to share some highlights if I can master the required technology to do so.

Until I can spend some time finding out how to do it properly here’s a little clip from 2001, recorded from laptop to phone so excuse the sound quality and wobbly camera work. There are about another ten hours of this stuff…..

Till the next time…….

Reigniting The Fires Of Anticipation

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

It’s taken a while but we’ve got to a Sunday where I have no trip rearranging drama to report. All was quiet on the holiday front this week.

So now I have to think of something to write about. I think I preferred it when I was in the midst of the re-planning maelstrom. Almost. This week it appears that the something to write about is me getting angry about American people. I suppose it makes a change from me getting angry about British politicians (see Twitter).

I have been watching with interest the bizarre juxtaposition of WDW re-opening and the state of Florida letting the disease run almost completely unchecked at the same time. When Universal announced they were re-opening in early June, I along with a lot of others I imagine thought that was early but I wondered if Disney would feel pressured to follow suit.

They did not, to their credit, despite reportedly losing a million dollars a day by staying shut. Instead, they took their time, (almost) built a completely new IT system to take park bookings and, looking at some of the pictures from cast member and AP previews, also did a not-insignificant amount of work to many of the attractions. I see the likes of Jungle Cruise has new screens to help keep parties separate and protected for example.

Credit to wdwnt.com for me stealing their photo

The safari at DAK also seems to have screens in place betwen guests.

I stole this from Lionel Dore’s Facebook post

I suspect WDW are playing the long game and assuming that things may never return fully to normal and having these extra ways to keep guests from breathing all over each other will generally be a good thing regardless of this particular disease.

It does appear that the recent catastrophic increase in cases in Florida and other states led by stupid people is now leading to fuller hospitals and more dead people. Nobody could have predicted this, right?

Side Glance GIF by Reactions | Gfycat

These graphs really are grim reading.

For a while, the narrative was that a different demographic were catching the disease. That demographic was stupid people who thought it was a hoax and a piece of cloth over their mouth was a bridge too far on what they were able to tolerate. Sure cases were rising faster than my anger at Brexit, but deaths were not, so it’s all good and we can go to the bars and lick some bar stools.

It does now appear that the lag between new cases and folks dying is over with Florida’s daily COVID deaths (the ones they are admitting to anyway) doubling over recent trends.

I guess the only slim pickings of comfort in those figures is that it is making the UK’s response to the pandemic look succesful, and that’s an impressive feat in itself.

This week those in charge in Florida voted against making masks in public places mandatory. Well, stupid is as stupid does as someone once said. This makes me sad and angry that this will both kill people and in less serious news, probably affect my upcoming holiday. I can be sanctimonious and shallow at the same time, it’s no trouble.

Away from me being judgemental about people thousands of miles away, along with the theme parks, things are opening up again all over the place here too. Whilst it doesn’t particularly affect me directly, barbers and hairdressers were among those businesses to begin trading again, and Rebecca managed to get Freddie booked in as he was, in her words, starting to look like a mushroom.

Yes, you are right, during lockdown he has become a teenager. Now that he is at nursery a few days a week it is apparent that he is roughly twice the size of the other two-year-olds there, so I am looking forward to riding every single coaster in Florida with him before too long, assuming the entire state hasn’t been wiped out by its own stupidity.

Of course, we are measuring him regularly to see what he will be able to ride. He’s currently 38 inches which will see him allowed on the likes of Seven Dwarves Mine Train, Smuggler’s Run, Slinky Dog Dash and Kali River Rapids. He has around six months to grow another two inches and be able to do stuff like Soarin’, Test Track and Big Thunder.

I have to say that all the kerfuffle and concern about our next trip has sort of stripped away the ability to look forward to it. It would help if the disease was at least under some sense of control over there I suppose, but hopefully now with things rearranged and settled, we can begin to reignite the fires of anticipation, which sounds like one of those straight to DVD movies they show on those Hallmark channels.

Till the next time…….

Park Strife?

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

After all the hassle and nonsense that I have been sharing with you recently, you will not believe what happened when I tried to make all our park reservations.

It all went very smoothly.

I know this is a shocking situation but I can only tell you the truth. On Monday, my tickets turned up around mid-morning. I quickly whipped them out of the envelope and tried to link them up to the My Disney Experience app. That was pretty painless with only one (mine) refusing to link up on the app and it needed me to use their web site instead.

With that done, every day for which we wanted access to a Disney park was available and after ten minutes we were done. I don’t know what all the fuss was about!

After my diva strop last week it is only right that I bring you up to date with Floridatix. I did get a response to the email I sent them last Saturday on Tuesday of this week, asking for a little more information which I provided. I then got a call from Carly there on Thursday. She was very good, apologised and could make no excuses for what happened. She explained the delay in despatch was due to them running out of Universal tickets (the irony) and she could not understand why I had been told twice that the order had been sent.

She promised a small gesture of financial goodwill and a goody pack was heading our way as a token of apology and all in all she provided just the right amount of understanding, culpability and customer care to make me feel like I had been listened to. With there being no impact on the booking of our park reservations, I was a lot more willing to accept an apology than if that hadn’t been the case.

I stand by my emotional rant last week. It was in no way an overreaction or a sign of irrationality on my part. So there.

This coming week is a big one with WDW re-opening the first of its parks. We can all only hope that they somehow get a fecking grip on infection levels before the whole country resembles some sort of Walking Dead cosplay event.

It doesn’t look good if I am honest, with infection rates In Florida and other states seemingly completely out of control now. For the first time, I am feeling fairly comfortable that the decision to push the trip back to March was the correct one, with growing concerns that things may not be “right” even by then.

I have no doubt that Disney will do things as well as they can. It will probably be one of the safer places to go if you want to go “out”, but it certainly won’t decrease the number of infections.

I know that both of my readers love this endless stream of nonsense about a holiday they won’t be going on, but how about some other content? I could share with you the details on how I have used lockdown to relentlessly exercise, resulting in a weight loss of almost two stones. But who wants to hear about that nonsense. If I see one more work out video online my overdeveloped sense of guilt may consume me alive.

Instead, in real life news, we are currently grappling with the quandary of whether to move house or stay where we are and do some pretty extensive work to it. Both options horrify me in fairly equal measure but we do need to do one or the other. Our house doesn’t really do what we want it to as it’s very old and was built for folks with a very different way of living so it needs surgery or we need to find one that does.

We had our builder and his architect round this week to explore what we could do here and we are leaning towards that option but neither of us feels we are 100% sure either way. The plan is to remove the back of the house and re-configure it as the stereotypical “family room” with open plan kitchen and living space, rather than the traditional three-room layout that all houses of our age seem to have.

Whilst we were encouraged by the architect’s advice and guidance, we do continue to fire up Rightmove and see what’s out there too. We may end up tossing a coin in the coming weeks as it comes to the point when we need to make the decision.

So you now have the prospect of me not only pontificating and stressing about our holiday in the coming months, I will also have the stressful scenario of either major construction or a house move to throw into the mix. How will you stay away?

By the way, I haven’t lost two stone.

Till the next time……