Florida Famcation

I’ve been away…on Famcation.  Famcation to Orlando, the ultimate tourist destination for families worldwide, for a whirlwind week away with some of my mother’s side of the family.  Specificially, my parents, myself, my mother’s sister, her wife, and their two boys my favorite cousins.

We had five day park hopper passes.  FIVE DAY.  So vacation went a little like this…TL;DR!

1. Fly into Orlando, 7pm. Pick up rental car.  Again I was not put in charge of rental car, so this process takes a good hour.  They try to sell my mother and father on insurance and I have to repeatedly tell them, “we have it covered on both our car insurance AND your AmEx card, so DON’T PAY AN EXTRA $500 FOR THEIR OVER-PRICED SCAM INSURANCE!”
2. Pick up keys to rental house. I was under the [wrong] impression we would be at rental house for entire week of vacation.  Later on, I am corrected to this incorrect assumption.
3. Go grocery shopping.  My aunt had sent a grocery list for our (apparently only five day stay) at the rental.  I have attached it to the bottom of this post for your amusement.  Grocery shopping takes approximately two hours too long.
4. Show up to rental house, 11pm. There was no actual keys, there is a code we punch into the front door.  Which doesn’t work.  Despite warnings “if you punch this in incorrectly three times you will be locked out of the house for ten minutes,” my mother punched the code in three times.  Cue her calling rental place, me pulling out my much-anticipated Publix sandwich, cracking open a warm beer on the wall of the house, and having a picnic in the driveway while waiting for some kind of handy-person to let us in the house.  Did I mention it was 40 degrees in Florida?  I’ve never known it to be so cold down there!
5. Finally get into rental house. My mom leaves immediately to go pick up the rest of our happy vacationers from the airport. My father and I settle in for some “House,” and I log into WoW on my laptop. Ahh…vacation.
6. 1am. Rest of the family shows up.  Yay! Ok, goodnight!
7. 7am the next morning. Woken up by screaming. Oh right, I forgot my cousins are never told to be quiet when they wake up in the morning. Insert earplugs, go back to sleep.
8. 8am. Despite multiple warnings that I am NEVER to be woken up by cute little boys, someone thinks it is funny to send them into my room to wake me up.  I am not amused.  If I wanted to be woken up by little kids, I would have one of my own right now.  Incidentally, waking me is akin to poking a hibernating bear with a thorny stick mid-winter. My nickname senior year in college was either “Grumpy Bear” or “Mama Bear” depending on the day.
9. 9am, head to Epcot. Bond with Aunt’s wife over need for caffeine.  Offer to buy family coffee.  While waiting in coffee line, am badgered by youngest cousin that he needs a chocolate muffin.  Aunt’s wife tells him if he’s hungry, he can eat his sandwich. We leave line and head back to group, where aunt demands, “did you buy him a muffin? No? I’ll go do it.”  Find out later from my dad that youngest cousin stomped his feet, crossed his arms, made a super angry face and said, “if I don’t get a chocolate muffin, I’m going to be a cranky boy all day long!” Emotional blackmail at its finest, people. At six, he’s already better at it than I will ever be. This starts a trend, he needs a chocolate muffin every day for the rest of vacation. When I attempted to steal a bite of said muffin, he slapped my hand away and screamed at me “NO! that’s MINE!” I don’t blame the six year old…
10. Whoever packed lunch for us forgot my sandwich.  I end up getting shitty vegetarian plate from shitty fast food service.
11. Finally, the day is over!  We go home, and on the way…pick up PIZZA!  Pizza happens to be one of the very few things my cousins will eat (the other foods they eat include and are limited to, mac&cheese, chicken nuggets with tons of ketchup, peanut butter & honey, eggo waffles, dry oatmeal, or bread with butter).  It’s also one of my least favorite foods, unless I make it at home and it’s A) cheeseless, or B) has vegan cheese.   My younger cousin, who I shall call Muffin Boy from now on, eats over half of a 14″ pizza by himself.  I’m sure if they ever did a CT scan of him they would find his arms and legs are hollow.
12. After pizza, I log onto my laptop in front of “House.” Ahh, vacation…did I mention I had my own room at the rental?  So awesome.  I was amazed I didn’t have to share with my cousins!
13. The following day we went to the Magic Kingdom.  Yo, ho, yo, ho a pirate’s life for me! It was still a weekday so the place was empty, we managed to do the following all in one day: Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, Tom Sawyer’s Island, Pirates of the Carribean (which is much changed from when I was last on that ride, it now includes Captain Jack Sparrow), Swiss Family Robinson, Jungle Cruise, It’s a Small World, Haunted Mansion, Tomorrowland Speedway, Buzz LIghtyear’s Something (my father and I skipped this in order to do), Space Mountain.  It was a busy day, and we stayed until the park closed.  I was my older cousin’s “roller coaster buddy,” and my father was Muffin Boy’s roller coaster buddy. This meant we were hanging with them all day long, and I got to know my older cousin pretty well.  He’s a pretty cool kid, for a 7 year old.
14. Next day? Animal Farm, or House, or maybe it was Kingdom. Anyway, we started off with the Safari, which was AWESOME and I wished I could walk it with my super big camera.  That didn’t happen, they can’t even bring the safari bus to a complete stop, which was very frustrating to me and seemed to defeat the purpose of a “photo safari.”  If there are actual animals to be seen, stop the damn bus and let us actually get a shot or two off. After that we went to the petting zoo for a really long time, during which I took a nap on a bench.  The boys were then off to the Dinosaur park (which probably would have fascinated me…fifteen years ago) and my father and I went on the one roller coaster they have at AK, some sort of Mt. Everest ride.  It was the best Disney roller coaster I’ve been on, and we bought our photos, so now I have two roller coaster pics of my father and I.  He’s my roller coaster buddy.  After that they wanted to do some kind of Lion King video, so my father and I went to Asia, where we saw some tigers, drank some tea, and generally chilled out for a little while.
15. After dinner, I log onto my laptop in front of “House.” Ahh, vacation…oh fuck, did I mention my laptop DIED? Yeah, total sadness, though it IS a five year old laptop.
16. The following day everyone was going to go to the Cape (Canaveral) but my mother had some sort stomach plague that involved holding a bucket while sitting on the toilet.  I felt like I was getting it too, but it just turned out to be bad eggnog (reason #28934723987 to be vegan, people).  I stayed home, and my father, cousins, and aunt went out and did stuff, possibly put-put, and shopping.  Aunt’s wife watched tv and knitted all day.  I always try to knit, and have a scarf I’ve been working on for awhile, but tend to be too OCD when I knit, trying to make every stich even, which defeats the purpose of it being an activity to reduce stress.
17. A good friend of mine from high school drove from Tampa to visit me that night.  We went to a vegan Chinese restaurant, and then to a pool hall, where much beer and billiards were enjoyed.
18. It’s now Sunday.  We have to pack up and move to….(cue drumroll please)…ANIMAL HOUSE LODGE!!!  That’s right, we leave the sanctity of our wonderful rental house (where I have my own room, a first on family vacations) to go brave staying with 983432890840329 other tourists on Disney property.  My father and I were both surprised by this development, as no one had told us we would be going there.
19. Checking in at the Lodge; they needed one person from each room to be there at check in so I was standing with my aunt when the woman tells her that the rooms she specifically requested aren’t available, which is just the beginning of a 10-minute conversation about making sure we get rooms with “a good view of the animals” (I should note, there are not many rooms WITHOUT a good view of the animals, IMO).  Then the woman checking us in tells us she has our rooms – one with 2 queen beds (for my parents and me) and one with a queen and bunk bed (for my aunts and cousins) and my aunt says, “no, that’s not what we want.  We need two bunk beds.”  Well folks, the only way to get two bunk beds there is to have A) non-adjoining rooms, B) 1 queen bed + 1 bunk bed…in each room.  I complain about B.  I’m not happy about B.  B means that me – 27 year old homeowner, hoo-ha engineer and general ADULT, will be sharing a bunk bed with a little boy. When I dared to complain about this fact, and the woman checking us in asked my aunt, again, “are you sure you wish this reservation? She does not seem happy with the arrangements,” my aunt waved her question away and told her to “ignore her, she’s not awake yet.”
20. Go to room; sit on bunk bed; reasoning for me to have bottom is so BOTH of my cousins can sleep on top bunk BOTH nights (instead of, I dunno…TRADING OFF?).  Immediately hit head, hard, on bunk bed.  Imagine that – it was made for much shorter people than myself.  Proceed to hit head about 25 more times before putting down foot and refusing to sleep on bottom bunk.  It didn’t matter anyway; my cousins were too scared to sleep away from their moms, so they didn’t end up crashing in our room with us, anyway.

The rest of vacation was kind of a blur – my dad and I spent a day at Epcot by ourselves and had a blast, and then went out for BBQ just the two of us that night.  My father and I have a love/hate relationship; we get along really well becasue we are basically the same person – unfortunately that means we butt heads quite often as well.

I have some really cool photos I need to post, but I’ll have to get around to that later.  I’ll be amazed if anyone other than my mother reads this entire post.

EDIT: I forgot to post the grocery list.  Here it is, in all its glory:

this is just for us – add what you will eat in 4-5 days

If possible, milk and meat(ckn nuggets) organic, if not don’t worry about it
1 gallon orange juice-natural with pulp if possible
1 gallon whole milk
2-3 gallon skim milk
1 package plain flour tortillas (burrito size)
4 loaves whole wheat bread – not too whole grainy/healthy looking
16 gala apples
12 pack diet coke
1/2 pound Sumatra or Gold Coast coffee, Starbucks if in supermkt
Eggo Mini-Waffles 2 packs, “Lego” kind if possible
Quaker Maple and Brown Sugar Oatmeal
2 packs bagels
butter
1big-2 small jars organic smooth peanut butter
jar honey
hard salami/sliced provolone sandwiches for lunch E & L
1 package club crackers
1 package wheat thins
Dinner stuff for boys:
4 cans Campbell’s tomato soup
Chicken nuggets, organic if possible
Digorno’s frozen pizza, 1/2 cheese, 1/2 pepperoni or 1 each
Cheddar cheese
Vanilla-flavored fat free half-and-half small container
ketchup for ckn nuggets
mustard for sandwiches
?ingredients for easy dinners: grill cheese sandwiches/tacos or
burritos/fettucini alfredo/salad etc/grilled chkn/hamburgers (there is a bbq
at the house)
?Costco dinners: frozen pizza/frozen manicotti/lasagna/frozen whole cod
fishsticks, etc.
laundry det/trash bags/tp, etc