October 21st- Magic Kingdom

Waiting for the monorail to take us to Magic Kingdom!

Main Street

On our way to Fantasy Land.  The park opened at 8:00 instead of 9:00 and we were able to walk on to every ride in Fantasy Land... it was awesome!  I don't think many people knew it opened earlier this day.  How lucky for us!

The Dumbo ride.  This ride line gets ridiculously long so we got it out of the way right away!

It's a Small World... I love this ride, the kids thought it was just okay, but I love it!

Abby and Elise

Getting ready for Mickey's Philhar Magic Show.  This was so fun.  It's a 3D show and as things move on the screen, water or air will come out at you.  Lauren was so funny, she stood up the whole time trying to grab things.  She was waving at Jasmine and Aladdin and trying to touch them... they seemed REALLY close.

Magic Kingdom was all decked out for fall.  It was really pretty.

The Buzz Lightyear ride was fun.  You shoot lazers throughout the ride and compete with your partner.

These are the photos they take during the ride... I didn't want to pay for them, so I took a picture of them.

Our first characters... Chip -n- Dale

Going into the Tiki Room for a show... not so great but a good place to sit for awhile.

Pinocchio was so funny.  We were the last ones to see him and he started skipping with Lauren down the street.

Our boat ride over to The Wilderness Lodge.  We ate lunch at the Whispering Canyon Cafe.  It was a nice break in the day.

We went into the "Storybook Princess" area and the girls got to meet Sleeping Beauty, Belle and Cinderella.  I don't have the posed photos with them because the photo pass people took them... I don't have those back yet.

Going into the Haunted Mansion!

We caught the end of the parade... good timing, Lauren LOVES Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl

The White Rabbit!

The Winnie The Pooh Ride

Walt Disney World Trip October 19th~29th 2011

The girls and I survived our first solo vacation this last 10 days.  Well, it wasn't quite solo, we went to Orlando with my best friend Jen Wadle and her two kids Sam and Abby.  Jen's friend Joanne came down with her two kids JJ and Jolyn as well.  We stayed at Jen's timeshare with Windham at the Bonnet Creek Resort.  It was amazing!!!  We had a 4 bedroom condo with a full kitchen, we all had our own bathrooms, a huge patio on the 15th floor (the very top) that overlooked the resort lake with a fountain and all of the pools.  I believe there were 4 or 5 different pools we could use.  The trip was so busy that we didn't really get to enjoy the resort much but what we did see was wonderful!  We are totally exhausted and the girls are sick with fevers but the trip was wonderful.  I am going to break this down into days because I have more photos than I know what to do with and these are just mine, I will be getting Jen's and Joanne's eventually too and will post those!  Here we go...

October 19th-20th

Getting ready for take off...

Lauren, Abby and Elise at the Des Moines Airport

Getting ready to ride the roller coasters!

Abby, Sam and Jennifer Wadle

We saw a beautiful sunset from the plane... of course the window was nasty so this is as good as it gets from a photo standpoint.

Lauren playing Sam's DS

We flew into Sanford Airport and we got into Orlando about 10:00 at night.  It took us forever to find our condo because it is very confusing on Disney Property, the signs are labeled for resorts not streets so about 11:00 we rolled into our condo, we planned on swimming and grocery shopping our first day anyway so we wouldn't be tired for our first day at the parks.

JJ, Jolyn, Lauren and Elise working on crafts.

The first condo we stayed in had a pirate themed pool with a big water slide.  Lauren was mad because she wasn't tall enough to go on it.

This is the tower we were in the first 2 nights, then moved to another tower for the rest of the stay.

This is one of the other pools we went to.  This one had an open water slide but it was too deep for Lauren so we went in the hot tub for a bit.

Our third stop for the day was this pool.  It had a lazy river and zero entry pool.  Both girls could touch all the way around the river and we spent the rest of the trip at this pool.  Once we moved to our 2nd condo we were in this tower so it was handy to get to.

The girls went around, and around, and around... all day!

This was really cool.  There was a tower/bridge that went over the lazy river and you could shoot people with water.  It had towers up there and looked like an old castle.

We ended our first day with a hot bubble bath in the jacuzzi in our bedroom.  The girls had a lot of fun.
We went to Wal-mart to get groceries the first day and there was a HUGE section for souvenirs so we got 2 sweatshirts and 2 t-shirts there instead of the parks... just a tad cheaper and still cute!