Hey everyone! Nearing the end of November here, so I've got some blog catching up to do. Then there's just ONE MONTH left in 2019, crazy right?
Anyway, Asa and I have been out and about lately. It's amazing how much time you have on your hands when you don't have to work until 8 pm every night and you don't lose one weekend a month to being on call. You know what else is great? Direct deposit and not being on the ACA anymore. Anyway, Asa likes his new job, I like the perks- and there's the update there.
A couple of weekends ago, Asa and I made our way to Disney Springs to see the Christmas Tree Trail. There's a bunch of themed trees, and it even snows on you! It's also where all the little kids can see Santa. Fun fact: teh have a virtual line you can wait in too, so kids don't have to stand there for like two hours. Best idea ever, that one.
Personally, I love going to see the trees. They're so fun and so detailed. We saw the Beauty and the Beast Tree.
Sleeping Beauty, and the Princess and the Frog...
The Frozen Tree has carrots all over it, which is kind of fun.
The Mulan tree is full of cherry blossoms.
The Toy Story Tree features the Pixar Lamp and Sherriff Woody's Badge.
The Haunted Mansion Tree features the Bride.
The Villians tree has Ursala's tenticles at the top.
While Cinderella's tree features the glass slipper at the top.
Asa is partial to the Peter Pan tree with Pan's hat up top and hooks sword. While I LOVE the Tangled tree. It has frying pans, and of course the laterns on it.
The Lion King Tree is new this year, I believe. The top has Simba!
And the Mary Poppins Tree had her umbrella up top and penguins all over!
They do have a little shop with ornaments too, and I loved the Mary Poppins bag, and the dole whip one!
And of course I'm partial to anything Up themed.
For lunch we decided to swing by the Polite Pig. It had been awhile since we had been there, and even at like 11:30 we had to wait in a hefty line. But, the good news is the Polite Pig seems to be even more delicious on busy days!
We really wanted to ride the Skyliner, since we hadn't yet been on it since it opened. We decided the best way to do that was to leave Disney Springs and head on over to Carribbean Beach Resort. We hopped on the bus, and we got one of the new buses with the fancy inside (it has a "wood" floor and phone chargers at the seats!). Plus they feature fun new wraps- we got the BB8 one!
We decided to get off at the first stop at Carribbean Beach and walk over to the Skyliner so we could take a look at how the Riveria Resort is coming along. This one is set to open in just a couple weeks. I hear the food is going to be delicious. I'm really tempted to stay at Carribbean Beach again for this anniversary because we'd have the Skyliner and this new fancy hotel next door with lots of fun new places to eat.
So we made our way over to the Skyliner. It was SUPER cold that day, and the wind of the Carribbean Beach lake was something.
But the Skyliner had like no wait at all! And they even had one of those fun photo ops.
Skyliners can sit something like 10 people. They come in fun colors with fun wraps. It'll take you from Pop Century, Carribbean Beach, Hollywood Studios, and Epcot.
But there was like nobody there when we took our flight, so we got a whole gondola to ourselves. It was SO much fun, and lots more incentive to want to stay at Carribbean Beach.
We chose to ride to Hollywood Studios, though we're blacked out, we figured we could walk along the Boardwalk. It was a VERY quick ride over, I wish it would have lasted longer.
But we made our way to a nearly empty Boardwalk to grab some coffee to warm us up and check out all the Christmas decorations.
Disney decorated for Christmas is THE. BEST. It's all so detailed, and while a lot of things in Disney are starting to get generic, you'll still find decorations tailored to their location. Check out the Boardwalk Bakery's garland featuring baked goods!
Most of the resorts have ginger bread houses on display as well. I'm hoping to maybe make a monorail crawl out of the Magic Kingdom Resorts this holiday season as well. But, we did see the Boardwalk's display. It's a gingerbread house of the Boardwalk!
It is SUPER detailed, down to the decorations in the Christmas tree. Flying Fish has, well, fish, and ESPN has various sport balls.
And even the Boardwalk Bakery has the littlest tiniest desserts.
It's super fun to wander the resorts this time of year. I highly recommend it! All the displays also have a little pop up place with cookies and hot cocoa and such too.
Adding to our Disney transportation list, we hopped on the boat and headed over to Epcot.
It was really the first cool weekend day we'd had here in awhile, and the Food and Wine Festival was winding down. I expected it to be busy- but holy geez, it was SO crowded. I hadn't seen it like that in YEARS. Apparently even the Epcot parking lot was full. Lines for most of the food booths were CRAZY. Like the cue represented less than a thrid of the line. You wouldn't even know what booth the line was for when you happened upon it. We decided we would grab a few snacks if the lines weren't crazy at the booths we were hoping to go to, and just stay out of the crowds as we made our way around to the front of the park.
Luckily, like, nobody goes in the galleries around the world. Morocco just opened a new one, so we ducked in to check it out and found like two other people in there.
The whole thing mostly focuses on running this crazy marathon, but there's a lot of fun info to read and stuff on display.
Asa had really wanted to try the veggies with cheese over at the new Alps booth, so he waited in that line while I went over to Mexico and waited for some chocolate bread pudding. By the time Asa made his way up to me the cheese had kind of congeled in a weird way due to the cold, and while it was good, the texture was off. But the Chocolate bread pudding was delicious. And worth the 20 minute wait.
We also made our way over to check out the stuff for the "new" Epcot. Basically all of Future World is getting updated and redone. There's a whoel pavillion to show you all about the transformation and it's pretty cool.
And they have some cute little photo op places too.
We did walk over to teh Refreshment Port to get some Duck Confeit Poutine. It's not a booth, since the Refreshment Port is there all the time, so it generally doesn't get as crowded there. They do serve something special for the festivals though, so that's a good tip on a crowded festival day. I noticed the line for Australia was short too, so I jumped over there to grab the deconstructed pavlova. Both were delicious.
But that was about enough of the crowds for us, so Asa and I grabbed our free passholder magnet for visiting the festival and high tailed it out of there. We took a bus back to Disney Springs where we had parked and it too was SUPER crowded. We decided we had a fun day and we were cool with heading home.
I'm sure hoping I make it to Disney a few more times in the next couple weeks to take in some more Christmas Disney Magic before the crowds descend upon Central Florida. This new schedule of Asa's should be awesome for this. There are some perameters, but he basically gets to set his own schedule. He's front loading his week and the plan is to be done by noon on Thursday AND Friday. You guys, I might be able to go to Disney on a WEEKDAY again. I am VERY excited about this.
In other news, my Aunt Dawn was swinging through town, so we did breakfast with her one Sunday.
Hayden doesn't have "school" this week, but we've been plugging away at some other projects.
And we even convinced Peyton to watch Planet Earth with us.
Asa finally leveled up in Ingress, so he can submit Pokestops, so we've been doing that on our biek rides.
Ellie has been particualrily akward lately, but also super into hanging out with Etta.
While she enjoys playing with the other dogs, she does not love the cold weather.
Or Asa shutting her out of the office while he works.
Meanwhile, we ran out of Etta's No Toots, and that seems to be becoming a bit of an issue.
My watermellons, however, are doing great. They're growing really fast!
And Asa's new tomato plant from seed has sprouted.
Since it's been colder, we've been able to leave the doors open all day everyday, which everyone loves but Delano can come and go, and he seems to be a fan of that.
And we've been able to have some fires at night, which is nice.
Peyton's passport came too! It only took three weeks, which was way shorter than Calib's took, so we joked Calib is clearly more of a threat to national security.
Moes is having $5 burritos on Thursdays in Tampa for the rest of the year, so we went out to dinner with Hayden after we picked him up from Teen Creative Write Club. (Calib and Peyton were at class- they only have two left though!)
One night Calib's class was cancelled though, so we picked up Peyton and stopped by PDQ with another awesome coupon we had.
That's it from here.
Next Up: Thanksgiving 2019!
