Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Are you sick of vacation pictures yet?

There should be 1 more post after this one and then back to regular blogging.

Wednesday was apparently the coldest day ever in the history of the world, if you go by the way the Floridians were talking. The news people kept calling it "dangerously cold" and talking about how everyone needed an electric blanket to get through.

The lowest temperature anywhere was 28F (-2 C) and it wasn't quite that cold where we were. I think the high was 50 F (10 C). Oooh, yeah, dangerously cold. Watch out for frost bite.

I realized in the light of day and soberness that the purple sock was a bit too short. Truth be told, I realized it the night before when I tried it on, but I counted it as finished anyway because I wanted to say I finished a sock in 2 days. But having made that mistake before and discovered that it makes the sock wear out faster when it's stretched on your foot, I took out the toe and re-knit it in the morning while drinking my coffee out of the thimble sized mug they provided to the condos and wishing it was warmer.

I'll admit that we weren't really prepared for that temperature, it really was the coldest day in 5 years, so jackets and gloves were procured from local tourist crap stores.

But it was a high of 14 (F, -10 C) or something back home so 50 wasn't so bad. It was warm enough for golf. I even saw people in the pool, though you wouldn't catch me in there. brrrr!
Instead we drove downtown to the Orlando Science Center where we built a triceratops puzzle (well sorta... we finished it, but there were pieces missing and it was dangerously close to falling over)



Experimented with tornadoes...
And picked oranges... This was Molly's favorite part of the place. You pick them from these trees and put them through a chute and "wash" them, then they drop down and you collect them in baskets and load them into another machine which secretly puts them back on the trees.


Apparently this is really fun. I suppose that's what other people think about my knitting.

The science center was quite fun and I recommend it as an inexpensive and indoor place to go if you're in Orlando with small children. There was also a Science of NASCAR exhibit (which was more about playing with cars than science, but Sean didn't mind).

The only thing that sucked was it took us 35 minutes to get downtown and over 2 HOURS to get home. A few inches were worked on the pants legs but mostly I was too irritated about the traffic and/or too lost on the back streets to knit.

Thursday was our day at Disney World.






















We rode rides, we ate, we were cold, we saw Mickey (and Minnie and Pluto and Goofy and Cinderella, Belle, and Aurora, and Pooh and Tigger... whew!)


Did I mention there were rides? You don't really need to see 20 pictures of my kids on It's a Small World, do you?

It was crazy busy, and when I thought about it later I realized that people all did the same thing we did and went to the parks on the cold days so they could swim on the warm days. By mid afternoon quite a lot of people had left, either to hop to other parks or because they were too cold, I don't know, but it was a lot nicer, and we spent more time inside ride buildings than out, so it was good. It was definitely cold but not as cold as a lot of people seemed to think. Mid 50's isn't really so bad for January.




One really cool thing I'll show you was the lights on the castle. This picture doesn't even do it justice. It looked like someone iced it. Or covered it with crystal. Or fairy dust. Very cool.

Not a single stitch was knit this day and I didn't mind at all.

2 comments:

  1. Hey! We Floridians are cold wimps! I kept my heat on all day that day! Thank about it this way - the norm here for now is between 60 and 72. 50 is chilly, and 28 is damned cold ;)

    Why'd it take so long to get back to your condo? 1-4 at rush hour?? If you go back, know to take some of the back streets. Call a local, we can get you around, and plenty of us are Ravelers :D

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  2. Yeah, after my move back to TX, I was sorta shocked (never mind that I spent 18 years living here) about the mania caused by ANY below-freezing temps. When it was going to be sub-32 (like 30) for more than one day, all we saw on the news for the previous several days was Winter Weather Alerts. And, we got a letter from the apt. office mandating dripping faucets....

    I'm having fun looking at all your vacation/Orlando pics! I'm at a conference in Orlando now, and likely won't leave the hotel/conference center till it's time to catch the plane home. :( On the plus side, the weather is incredible! I swear it was in the 80s earlier this afternoon.

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