Florida - Part 1

I don't know how I'm going to spread this out, so there's no telling how many days you'll get out of this. But let's just jump in.

I'm gonna throw this out there: I don't like flying. This made traveling feel reeeallly looooong. We flew out of San Francisco at around 6 in the morning on Saturday. We weren't about to use vacation money on a hotel, so we just decided to leave our house at an ungodly hour. Making the travel day even longer. But we got to the airport, made both our flights, and got to Florida. Step one, check.

This has been on Tad's calendar for months. I love that it's his handwriting. And yes, it's HIS calendar, not mine. It happens to be a Cars calendar, courtesy of grandma.

We got in with Tim's sister and her family first. Mom and step-dad and the kids didn't get in until late. Once Tad got there he informed me he was sleeping in our room. :) I love that boy.

Sunday was Universal Studios day. It was warm. Seriously warm. Actually it was the humidity that killed. Yuck. I'll try to make that the extent of the weather-related complaining I write here.

Most of you probably don't know, but Tad has a small collection of pressed pennies. He keeps them in a little wooden treasure chest. We have them from Disneyland, Pismo, Arizona (thanks mom), Sea World... and now we've added 38 from Universal and Disney parks. There was a lot of this on the trip. The kid has a good eye for penny machines.

We did rides of course. Mom and step-dad took turns sitting out with the kids that couldn't do it. The rides were pretty uneventful, except for Jaws.

Tad totally knows what Jaws is. The kid used to put on his shark socks and shuffle into the room singing, "Dun dun, dun dun." I wasn't sure which side of the boat Jaws would come up on, but I put Tad and Cole (our oldest nephew) on the side that I hoped it would be.

I was totally right. (cue evil laugh here)

They're having a good time, and then we spot a fin. Cole started to hide behind Tad a little (chicken). Then when the shark came out of the water, Tad jumped up out of his seat and tried to fly across my lap. I've never seen the kid move so fast and I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. I sat him down and he was fine. No tears, and he handled the shark coming back at the boat pretty well. Our younger nephew did not.

It was a fun ride.

See? Tad was fine. He even posed after the ride. He asked later if we could do it again.


There was a Simpsons ride, complete with a Kwik-E-Mart outside. Guess what hubby's favorite thing of the day was?


Universal has a pretty decent kid area. Hubby and I ran off to do an insane roller coaster and the kids all hung out in a water area. When we got back we played with them and did some rides. Tad and I hopped on the Woody Woodpecker ride. He loves little rollercoasters. He's even willing to try out the bigger ones, which scares me a little.


Universal also had a show at night that was pretty worth watching. It was a late night, but since it was our first day we didn't feel too tired. It caught up with us later in the week.

And there's your brief rundown of day one. I'm trying to keep these short. I figure you don't want a list of every ride or anything, right? Tomorrow, day two at Epcot.