Disney 2009...

As we decompress from the trip down to Florida, we thought we would take some time and share a few random pictures from our trip to Disney! Back to the food world tomorrow.

Here is where we stayed - the Beach Club resort. Beautiful location with a couple minutes walk to Epcot and a short jot to Hollywood Studios. Excellent pool and we took advantage of the movies at night time shown on the beach - too cool!

I did arrange for a special surprise when Jeff walked into the room - it seems Mickey had some extra time on his hands to come by and drop off some gifts! In addition to the items in the picture below, he also had a huge gift box with a stuffed Mickey, a Happy Birthday banner on the wall and a special light-up lanyard that let the world know it was his birthday - Jeff got a kick of all the attention he was getting from that and his birthday button! Inside the small white box was a two-tiered chocolate "cake" (and I mean literally it was just all chocolate!).
Just to make sure Jeff knew it was the mouse who came to visit, Mickey left behind some footprints...

We were lucky enough to score tickets ahead of time to go to a party!

This event - Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party - happens several times (it is held at nighttime) through the months of September and October. They "close" down Magic Kingdom and only let people who purchased the event tickets stay to enjoy the activities and rides, so it was a much smaller crowd. They even made sure to dress up the place for the occasion - also to be seen was a new parade and fireworks show.

They had all sorts of new statues out too in celebration...

Here's the castle - see what I mean by smaller crowds? We were able to get a shot without a thousand people in front of it!

Being a Halloween celebration, they encouraged anyone and everyone to grab a trick-or-treat bag and load up on the candy! We were surprised by how much candy we ended up with - just about 6 pounds worth! They did make sure to give out plenty of raisin boxes, you know, to off-set the good stuff. We even got a couple of snazzy electric toothbrushes in our bags to clean all that sugary goodness away!

In all our trips, we've never seen this guy at Magic Kingdom...

So, Jeff definitely made a point to stop and get a handshake and picture with the mayor! And before you ask, yes he wore those darn pirate ears almost the whole trip! They were even hand carried on the plane so no chance of being damaged (his birthday does fall on International Talk Like a Pirate Day after all).

I also convinced Jeff to finally check out this place... he enjoyed the show and wondered why he never wanted to go before!

They also had a celebration parade during the day where we snapped this picture.

They had everyone who was celebrating come out and dance! I tried to push Jeff out there, but he wasn't having any of that - too bad, would have been an excellent picture for black mail! Hee hee!

We went on this so many times... and each trip was just a little bit different. Never a dull moment!

Last year, they opened the new Pixar area in Hollywood studios, but we were there just before they let people in. We got to check it out this time!

There isn't a ton of stuff there, but the most popular place was this...

You can't see it, but the wait time for the game was 60 minutes... and this was an hour after they opened the park with the "fast pass" tickets almost all gone for the day by 11am!

We ate at way too many places to talk about, but I think the highlight of the trip was the birthday meal at the California Grill at the Contemporary Resort. Jeff had the Oak-fired Filet of Beef while I had the Stone Bass with hazelnut romesco, fire-roasted tomatillos, fregola pasta, madjool dates with a Serrano ham dust. No photographs because we simply devoured it too fast and thought about it afterwards. Definitely a "show stopper" type of dinner.

We ended up with just about 800 pictures, but we don't have the time or space here to talk about most of them. We may put up a link to our Flickr account like we did last year if you care to browse through the rest of them. Needless to say, it was quite the trip (10 days!) and we definitely needed the break from the daily grind. We even spied Mickey and friends taking some time off to relax!

And for those who were wondering, we haven't sold the house - while we have had a little activity, nothing promising has come along yet. We won't be buying until we get a bite on this house, so this whole process may take quite some time unlike our other moves!