walt disney world

just a warning to those who don't like to read...this is going to be a really long post with lots of pictures. i didn't include all pictures from the final cut of the disney album in this post because quite frankly, i didn't want to spend my precious time cutting and pasting hyperlinks into a blog post. i've spent long enough composing this thing and i think i've included a pretty good number of pictures, but it's only a portion of what's in the full album so if you want to see all the pictures, you can view them here...otherwise, read on and you can come back to the album later...

unfortunately, our long awaited vacation to orlando started out pretty rough--as some of you are aware, i am cursed with this horrible bad luck of missing morning flights. it all started three years ago when my company decided to send me (for the very first time) to our biggest annual event of the year, that i missed my early morning flight from irresponsibly over sleeping. to this day, i have not lived down that horrible experience, and i hold my alarm clock fully responsible. so once again, i found myself oversleeping on the morning of our flight to orlando...we frantically left the house and had to pick up mario's friend, paul, so he could drop us off at the airport and house-sit for the four days we were gone. on the way to the airport, we had to pick up my brother as well, since he was the primary reason we were going on vacation in the first place. luckily for us, we checked-in for our flight the day before and packed light enough to carry all our luggage on the plane. we arrived at the gate literally minutes before they closed the doors for take off. the flight to orlando went pretty well and the rest of our trip seemed to go fairly smooth. we spent our first afternoon walking around downtown disney and then two full days at disney world. we were able to get into all four parks--spent most of our time at epcot and magic kingdom, and a fair amount of time at animal kingdom and mgm.
our first day at disney world started off with a character breakfast buffet at the beach resort hotel just outside of epcot. we did a lot of walking and were able to get on several rides at epcot as well. then we made our way over to animal kingdom to enjoy the safari tour, took pictures, and saw one of the disney parades. the day ended with dinner at mama melrose's italian restaurant at mgm. isabelle was pretty tired that evening so we didn't do much in mgm except eat.
the next day started off a little late because a storm blew through orlando and it took a few hours for the rain to stop pouring. luckily it stopped raining in time for us to make it to our lunch reservation at the sci-fi dine-in theater at mgm. this was a rather interesting restaurant--i wish i had taken pictures of the inside just to show you how cool it was. the tables were set up as convertable cars from the 70s and everyone faced one direction at this giant movie theater screen they had set up on one side of the restaurant. they played old movie clips, and tom and jerry episodes--the whole feel of the restaurant was a drive-in movie theater and it was so neat how they had everything laid out. after we ate, we walked around mgm for a wee bit...didn't stay too long because everyone was getting ready for a parade and we didn't want to get "stuck" behind another one...so off to magic kingdom, where we spent most of our time walking around and riding rides. since it rained earlier that morning, the weather was sooo nice the rest of the afternoon...not like the day before when it was extremely humid and hot. isabelle went on several rides with us and had a chance to play in winnie the pooh's tree house.
our last day in orlando was spent at green meadows petting farm in kissimmee. i think this was my most favorite part of the trip because it was very relaxing...i didn't feel like we were rushed to see and do everything and it was quite peaceful to walk around the farm under the tall, shady trees.