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Disney Coasters

If you’ve been to Disney you know that there are Disney photographers everywhere.   You can ask any of them to take your photo and then later you can look them up online and see which ones you want to buy.  This year we did the MemoryMaker photopass which gave us access to all of the photos taken including those on the roller coasters.   The ride would read our wristbands and know which cart we were in and automatically add the photos to our account.   We ended up with a lot of roller coaster pictures.  Crystal started it but pretty soon everyone was trying to make some sort of face for the camera when the car streaked past.   The “bored” look was popular and I think Kai perfected it.

Enjoy the pictures!

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Disney 2014

With a week off from school and work thanks to the Eid Holiday we packed up and headed to the Magic Kingdom in Orlando.   It was a long series of flights to get there from Saudi Arabia but all of our connections went smoothly.   We all had a blast spending 6 full days in the Disney parks and even managed to spend some time with Lea Ann, Nina and Sara Post who happened to be there at the same time.  Enjoy the photos.

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Disney Vacation Video

We didn’t come away with many videos of high quality but I have stitched together a few that turned out.  In the first few we got caught up in their street dance parade where they circled the floats in the area in front of Cinderella’s castle and then invited all of the kids to join in and dance with the performers.  Kai loved it – they dance as a warm-up in PE so he had a bunch of moves ready.   The second part of the clip shows Kai teaching Nora how to swashbuckle after they picked up some gear from Pirates of the Caribbean.  I love how Nora puts her hand on her hip.

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A Dinner at Cinderella’s Table

The pièce de résistance of the entire visit (for Nora anyway) was a dinner at Cinderella’s table in the big castle.  Early planning on Crystal’s part (like the day reservations opened early in the year) led to a reservation.  When very young I believed that the castle was a real castle through and through.  Stone, staircases, secret passages and dungeons all the way through.  Pirate of the Caribbean was the same way.  I thought that the Spanish fort that you wind though in line went back far past what normal visitors could see.   As I grew older and more cynical I believed that right behind the facade of the castle it went straight to plywood and storage space for boxes of mouse ear balloons.   Turns out that there is quite a bit of “castle” in the castle.  Huge fireplaces, suites of armor, stone columns and a massive dinning room with windows overlooking Fantasyland.  Beyond that I’m sure its nothing but plywood though.

Nora’s had been looking forward to her dinner with a princess for a long time and been really good about it.  While in Legoland in California (which also has a fantasy land of sorts) she wanted to buy a princess outfit.  I told her lets wait until Disney and that (in her mind) morphed into a commitment to fully deck her our in princess gear when the time came.  She was wonderful about it and extremely patient though.  A few days earlier in Animal Kingdom she had to wait while Kai went on the Expedition Everest roller coaster 7 times since she didn’t meet the height requirement.  No problem – she was having dinner with princess in a few days!  The photo gallery below documents much of the event.  Enjoy!