For the second half of our visit to Florida, we packed everything up and headed northing to Orlando to take Bella on her first visit to Disney World. After a pretty quick drive, we got to Disney World just before lunch time.
We must have picked the right day to go, despite it being spring break for alot of families. We got a pretty decent parking spot and got in the park with no problems. I thought for sure we'd be waiting in lines for an hour for pretty much any ride at all, but the longest we ended up waiting was about 40 minutes, and that was for the Peter Pan ride!
Bella loved the Magic Kingdom of course, she got to go on the carousel a few times, then the Dumbo ride, the Magic Carpet ride, It's a Small World, the Peter Pan ride, the Pirates of the Caribbean (which freaked her out since it's pitch black dark most of the time now), the car driving ride and a monorail type ride.
Most importantly of all though, Bella went on her first roller coaster ride at Disney! She really, really wanted to go on the kid sized roller coaster that they had at the Sesame Place park we went to in August, but she was just under the height requirement. All of those months of eating mac and cheese and pizza must have paid off, she definitely made the height requirement this time around.
She made me go on with her, and we practically walked up to the ride with no line. She wasn't afraid at all, she was super excited to go on. We went on, of course the ride barely took a minute, but she was smiling and laughing through almost the whole ride. As soon as we got off the ride, the first words out of her mouth literally were "I LOVE ROLLER COASTERS!"
So I was very proud of course. We stuck around to the end of the night, for what we thought would be the big parade at the end. It turned out to only be a big fireworks show, but Bella didn't care, she had a huge smile on her face though that. You can pretty much see how happy she was by the last picture below.
After we braved the stampede out of the park, we got into the car, and by the time we got to the exit, Bella was passed out like a rock. We got to the hotel a few miles away, put Bella in bed while Grandma kept an eye on her, and we went to get a very late dinner at the
Checkers which was across the street from the hotel. The only problem with this is because of the retarded way the streets are set up there, it took us a good 15 minutes just to get across the street. Didn't matter, we don't have Checkers near us up here, so we always make the effort to go while we're in Florida and get plenty of their awesome fries.
We got up the next morning and decided to head over to SeaWorld, since Bella loves sea lions and penguins so much. We had another very good day there with excellent weather once again, Bella got to see more seals, whales and dolphins than we could shake a stick at. Michele and I even fed a bunch of sea lions at one point, which Bella enjoyed since she got to hear them all barking at us for a while.
After a trip back to the hotel, and a little time in one of the pools, we decided to have a big dinner at Maggiano's that night. "BIG" being the operative word. We did their family style dinner, had more food than I care to remember, and did a pretty good job of polishing it all off. Thank god it's getting warm up here now and I can go and run it all off again.
After one more night of good sleep, we packed everything up and headed to the airport. Once again, I don't know if we just had the luckiest time in the world, but when we got to the Orlando airport that Saturday afternoon, we walked right up to the United counter, quickly through security, and were pretty much at our gate in 20 minutes. Slight difference from O'Hare there.
It was an excellent time though, a very good warm up for Bella's big 3rd birthday week. Thanks very much again to Grandma and Grandpa G for everything.
