Happy New Year

We decided to take it easy today, post New Year, but with a pre-arranged dinner at Citrico's in the Grand Floridian, in the evening.

So this was a day for the pool and some time browsing a surprisingly busy shopping mall.

Citrico's has some great dishes, well presented!
Tag: florida

Cirque du Soleil

A New Year's Eve treat was a visit to the Cirque du Soleil. This evening included a champagne reception and a special finish to the show welcoming the new year with special light up wands which had been distributed amongst the audience. Great fun and then still time to get across to Epcot for a saunter around Italy and France before a fireworks finale as the new year was welcomed in, country by country. We stood in Canada and had a great view of everything.

Tag: florida, disney

candle light carols

The carol singing is a feature in Epcot at this time of the year, in addition to the country by country celebrations. Our plan was to do the first part of the park in an afternoon (energy, the land etc.) and then come back to visit the countries on another occasion.

Needless to say, we abandoned the plan almost immediately and revised our tactics to get onto some of the high demand rides on a separate early morning (ie Mission to Space, the crashtest and the new Soarin').

And to keep a Christmas holiday theme going, we all visited the town of Celebration and arrived just as a Florida snow storm started in the main street. Mel and John thinking its not snow as we know it!

Tag: florida, disney

Hello Hollywood

MGM Studios has a combination of interesting rides and insights to the movies. A priority ride is the Rockin' Rollercoaster, which is a limo speed across L.A. to attend a rock concert and great fun - but hold on to loose items for when the car is upside down!

Tag: florida, disney

Thursday Thirteen (V7.0)

13 florida things (V7.0) about rashbre

1. The Florida base is rashbre south. An occasional refuge from London and the Home Counties;
2 This the second Christmas in Florida. Last time it was Christmas in Florida and New Year in New York;
3. New Year, New York included Times Square and was the year Avril Lavigne played on the rooftop;
4. I have some Christmas lights for the Weston Hills house, but can't compete with the neighbours, who seem to adopt almost civil engineering levels of garden and house redevelopment;
5. The 20-25 degree Centrigrade weather is a welcome break from the 0-8 degrees around London;
6. We have a list of things to do which is way too ambitious, but will at least have a large range of options;
7. The maxi sized refrigerator is now well stocked thanks to Publix -including a proper Key Lime Pie.
8. I don't understand the difference between Coke Cola Light, Diet and Zero?
9. The pool is shimmering invitingly and I shall take a dip after completing this list;
10. I'm pleased to be able to drive around the whole area now without using maps, including all the nifty short cuts across Disney property;
11. About half our neighbours have employment in some way directly related to Disney; the people in the house behind us are involved with the Polynesian Resort - which does the fun Luau;
12. The nearby Route 27 still has plenty of orange groves, but redevelopment marches on;
13. I will want to visit House of Blues and Cirque du Soleil whilst we are here;

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1. Leanne's Thirteen!
2. Ivory Frog's Thirteen!
3. Running 2k's Thirteen!
4. Uisce's Thirteen
5. Chickadee's Thirteen!
6. Judy's Thirteen!
7. Raehan's Thirteen!

X. (leave your link in comments, I'll add you here!)


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Tag: Thursday Thirteen

cinderella

Time to visit Cinderella's castle in the Magic Kingdom, deftly avoiding the increasing numbers of people in this holiday season. Bright, warm, sunny cloudless day.

Tag: florida, disney

planning at the planet

We used a lunch stop at Planet Hollywood to plan our time. Without going mad on structure, it was evident that with New Year many places would be in great demand, both for New Year and the whole period around it.

Tag: florida, disney

warm snow

Early priority was assemble our tree and switch on the lights.

Our neighbours had ensured that our road would be well decorated and most houses had exceptionally good displays of lights, imitation snow, snowmen, animated reindeer and candy canes. We decided quickly that our road was the best in the district.

However, the real trees of the neighbourhood gave a different impression from that of snow!
Tag: florida, xmas

keeping up with Santa

Fortunately, by the time we arrived in Florida, Santa had also made the trip across the water. We finally caught up with him delivering a few presents and managed to get that elusive snapshot, here showing dogged determination to finish the task.
Tag: xmas, santa, disney

rashbre south

Off tomorrow to rashbre south for a few days, across in Weston Hills, Clermont, Florida, close to Disney. We'll be seeing the big cheese and visiting a reasonable number of the attractions. I hope the tree is still in the garage and we can make the lights work. Quite a few neighbours do elaborate lighting displays, so its fun walking around the neighbourhood. And we'll probably head over to Celebration, where the main street has regular snow falls just like a cold place. A surreal experience.

So bags packed this evening, and London Gatwick for the BA flight in the morning. Touchdown Orlando around 16:40, then drive to rashbre south, unpack bags and then across to Publix on the 192 for the first big grocery shop.

I suspect rashbre central will be off the air until I return to the UK.

New Year's Greetings to all - back around the 6th January.

season's greetings

tracking rudolph's nose

Trust NORAD to find a way to track Santa's flightpath. Rudolph's nose gives off an infrared signature, created, I envisage, by the sheer friction of high speed travel. This means satellites can detect Rudolph's bright red nose with practically no problem. With so many years of experience, NORAD has become good at tracking aircraft ot other vehicles entering North America, hence the ability to track the progress of Santa, thanks to Rudolph. The NORAD video trailer is here

The tracking is kindly made available to us all as a web tracking site.

I drove past the outside of Buckingham Palace during the early evening, on my way from Knightsbridge to Essex, and managed to get this small footage on my cameraphone, along with some disruption to my navigation system.