Well, the Magic Kingdom was a marathon day. So to make this post as efficient as possible, I am just going to list 1. the rides we went on 2. the places we ate and 3. the pictures we took.
The rides: the carousel, Peter Pan, It’s a Small World, Haunted Mansion, Teacups, The Snow White and Seven Dwarves ride, the Magic Carpet, the Jungle Cruise, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
We ate at Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn and Cafe for lunch, Pinocchio’s for a snack, Liberty Tree Tavern for dinner (at 9:30pm), and had a lot of popcorn in between. Ammon accidentally plunged his hand into someone else’s popcorn bucket as they were refilling it. (He was confused because the buckets all looked the same.) The vendor kindly gave them a replacement bucket. (And if they hadn’t we would have.)
As follows!
Clarissa kept grabbing Abe, who was half asleep, and turning his face with her hands to look at whatever she wanted him to see in It’s a Small World. This was Clarissa and Mary’s most favorite ride, and they were looking every which way inside of there.
Fun headstone outside of the haunted mansion.
Gems in line for the Snow White ride.Ammon unknowingly cut to the front of the line and grabbed the sword. We knowingly–and quickly–snapped photos before apologizing profusely to everyone else.In line for the Jungle Cruise. I waited ahead while Abe and the kids did the Magic Carpet ride because the line for the Jungle Cruise is looooooong.
Totally candid shot. The kids were in line for the Pirates ride and were in a very affectionate, happy mood.
We passed the time waiting for dinner by making videos about our adventures so far.
At our dinner in the Liberty Tavern. Clarissa was extremely loud from excitement.
At Epcot, my favorite Disney Park EVER, we did the following:
Met Elsa and Anna. 2. Rode the Frozen ride! (It was amazing.) 3. Gran Fiest Tour 4. Listened to the Chef drummers 5. Watched some Princesses drive by 6. Spaceship Earth (my most favorite of all the theme park rides, and the whole reason I took my family to Epcot!) 7. Test Track 8. Soarin’ 9. Mission: Space 10. Watched the fireworks 11. Ate lunch at Chefs de France 12. ate dessert at Les-Halles Boulangerie-Patisserie 13. ate fish and chips and Japanese shave ice for dinner 14. Watched the China show 15. ate Norwegian school break and other snacks 16. bought the kids bubbles and fans to amuse themselves with in line. I am sad we did not do Living with the Land but I only found out about that right now while googling the names of the rides I forgot. Next time I am going to do a better job planning because Disney is waaaaaay to expensive to leave with regrets about things undone. Lesson learned.
Pictures as follows!
Frozen Ride
Abe, Mary and Clarissa’s Test Track carAmmon, Lydia and my Test Track car.Eating Norwegian school break and other goodies.
On Tuesday Abe and I got up early (very early–around 5am!) for an early morning swim, which was magical. Afterward, we packed, cleaned up the house, fed people breakfast and did a bunch of laundry. I like imagining the relief Airbnb hosts might feel when they see that their house is still intact and clean after our family of six departs. So I laundered a bunch of their towels, wiped down surfaces, swept, etc.
Our Miami Airbnb before we left. We loved staying here.One of the older girls must have taken this photo during breakfast.
We pulled out at 10 am, and originally we were going to head to the Fairchild Botanical Gardens, but we thought we would miss the Kennedy Space Center entirely if we did, so we started driving to Orlando. (In retrospect we should have done the Gardens because the Kennedy Space Center is an all-day event, but we did not realize that.)
On the way we stopped by at a state park by the beach to picnic on our leftover salads and cookies from dinner.
After our picnic we arrived (after some wrong turns) at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, but it was already almost 4pm and the center closes at 5. We quickly realized that was not nearly enough time to cover everything and decided to return on Saturday.
Then we drove to our Disney hotel, called the Art of Imagination Resort. When we pulled in the kids’ excitement level was through the roof. Ammon and Clarissa were not physically capable of walking anymore–they ran and jumped and skipped everywhere, and the older girls were equally excited (though seemed somewhat capable of regularly-paced locomotion).
Dinner at our hotel. Look at Mary’s smile!
After dinner we got settled into our room, and then Abe took the kids to the hotel arcade for two hours because it was pouring rain outside. I spent that time showering and then trying to book dining for our park days. I did not realize I should have done that months ago because finding an open restaurant for dinner in Epcot and the Magic Kingdom was impossible, and all the other meals were nearly impossible. If we ever come back I hope I remember to book meals at the time I book the tickets!
Everyone came back from the arcade smiling and/or jumping for joy. Lydia was thrilled with the pictures from the picture booth she took and the other kids were so, so happy. Abe was happy because he loves arcades and somehow didn’t seem stressed at all from having managed four kids at an arcade for two hours. I was happy because I didn’t have to do that!
Abe had to work Tuesday, so I had planned to spend the morning at the botanical gardens with the kids. When I googled directions, my phone accidentally pulled up the Miami Botanical Gardens, which were closed on Tuesday, and I didn’t realize they were the wrong gardens (we wanted to go the Fairchild Gardens–which were actually open), so I came up with plan B.
Plan B– Vizcaya. I didn’t get any pictures inside because I was very occupied pulling up the audio tour for the kids to listen to and ensuring Ammon and Clarissa didn’t break the priceless antiques that are openly displayed everywhere without barriers. At one point I was focused on finding the right segment of the audio tour for the breakfast room and looked up to see Clarissa shaking a round vase bigger than she is. I grabbed her, thanked my lucky stars she didn’t break it, and proceeded to not take a single photo inside.
We went to Vizcaya, the mansion John Deering built for himself. I am so glad we did! The kids loved seeing and learning about it (we did the audio tour on my phone), and as a bonus we got to see so many girls doing their quincenera photos on the grounds. Clarissa and Ammon thought they were princesses, and I made zero effort to disabuse them of this assumption. It was too cute to see Clarissa stare at them open-mouthed, and Ammon would call to each one, “You are so, so, So beautiful! You are a beautiful princess!” I also enjoyed watching the girls react to his compliments.
On the way home the older girls and I discussed the morality (or lack thereof) involved in building a mansion like that, and we also discussed the Gilded Age, the pros and cons of American capitalism, and the exploitation of workers under the ultra-rich Gilded Age business owners. I asked the girls to explain whether they thought the system was fair and moral, and both Lydia and Mary made excellent points.
Lydia said that people have played by the rules of their time throughout history, and the rules have sometimes been good and sometimes been bad. Mary pointed out that there is no need for one person to own a home like the one we’d just seen. I said that from clues throughout the house I assumed John Deering might have had narcissistic tendencies. That his bedroom was styled after Napoleon’s uniform was a leading clue–but the house itself was another.
After all of this serious discussion, we decided to spend the rest of the day playing in the Airbnb pool. Mary and Lydia took breaks for math and the little kids took a television break in the middle. I get worried that they are swallowing too much water–especially Clarissa, who often swallows instead of blowing bubbles while swimming. But her swimming is so amazing in spite of that! She can swim the width of the pool without help, and if she got her way she would never have taken a break from the pool at all. She has always been obsessed with water, and seeing her swim brings me so much joy. This summer I resolved that the kids would all learn to swim to the point where I felt very comfortable alone with them in pools, and my dream came true. It felt so good to spend a day enjoying the fruit of everyone’s swim-lesson labor and just have fun together in the water.
I also enjoyed a wonderful float/nap on the inflatable raft while the little kids took their break. It was a magical afternoon.
By 7:45 I had been in the pool for six hours and was ready to get out, so I ordered everyone out of the pool and into the showers. Lydia asked to wait for Abe to be done with work so she could swim with him, and when he was done they did all sorts of fun tricks like this together.
After we were done swimming, everyone got in their pajamas and we ordered salads from some local salad place and cookies from Milk Bar for dessert. We ate together on the couch while watching National Geographic specials on shark attacks, most of which seemed to happen in Florida. Abe raised some mild objections when some images were gory, but I countered that this was local culture content and had educational value. (Mostly I am interested in deterring Ammon from marching into the ocean behind my back at a beach.)
To this end, the videos were exceptionally useful. Afterward someone jokingly suggested we go to a beach and Ammon actually started crying at the thought. I’m sure purposefully planting fears in one’s children is the definition of bad parenting, but at the same time I have a vested interest in keeping Ammon–who seems programmed for self-destruction–alive. And I found National Geographic shark videos an excellent aid in that endeavor.
On Sunday I got up before 5am so that we could be on the road early for a full day in Key West. I am taking my phentermine again and one side effect is that I don’t sleep much the first week before my body adjusts, so those early morning wake times are much easier. We piled the kids in the car before the sun came up and then I drove to Key West, during which drive we listened to an Ernest Hemingway short story and also started The Old Man and the Sea. Then we arrived and had breakfast around 9:30am at a cute Key West restaurant called the Banana Cafe.
Lydia wanted French onion soup alongside her crepe for breakfast. I love Lydia’s love of food.After breakfast the kids found the most enormous cat to pet. I thought it was a pregnant female because of its monstrous belly, but turns out it was a very friendly male named “Captain.”
After breakfast we headed to Hemingway’s house to take the tour, but it is cash only and our debit card expired two weeks ago without us realizing. So there was no way for us to take a tour. That was disappointing, but the kids loved petting all of the cats in his garden. (They are descendants of Hemingway’s pet cat, Snowball.) I also peeked at his pool when various children had potty needs.
Exploring the public part of the Hemingway garden. This part smelled like cat pee, but the kids were so into the cats they didn’t seem to notice.
After this outing, I was sweating from the heat and Clarissa was melting down. Just as we were about to get into our car and drive to a different part of the keys to find a beach, a woman started talking to us and convinced us to take a snorkeling tour. Abe jumped out of the car and arranged for an afternoon on a boat, which turned out to be wonderfully fun.
We saw so many dolphins! They swam right up to the boat and we could see mother-baby (or auntie baby–after the first year the baby dolphins graduate from their mom to an auntie) pairs swimming together. It was mating season so the dolphins were in very affectionate moods. I asked if we could swim with them and the captain said that would be a terrible idea because dolphins don’t distinguish between species and you don’t want it mistaking you for a fellow dolphin during mating season.
Snorkeling was a little tricky because none of the kids had done it before. Abe took charge of Clarissa and I took charge of Ammon, and I kept positioning the mouthpiece incorrectly in his mouth in the water. Finally he said he was tired of the water and wanted to be done, right around the time both Mary and Clarissa also wanted to be done. So the four of us snorkeled for maybe…five minutes? Lydia lasted much longer, and Abe was the second to last person on the boat. So we learned that now that the kids can swim, they need to practice with snorkeling masks so that the next time we do this everyone can snorkel!
After the boat tour it was time for dinner. We drove to Mallory Square. It was very hot and humid, so we ate at the first restaurant we saw. I forget its name, but Abe said the fish sandwich was the best he had ever had.
Abe’s amazing fish sandwich
Then we headed over to Kermit’s key lime pie shop for the best key lime pie we have ever tasted. I thought that all key lime pie was basically the same, but I got a coconut key lime pie with such a light and airy curd, and the crust was not too buttery or too hard–it was a Goldilocks kind of “just right.” Soooooo yummy. Ammon and Clarissa got chocolate coated key lime pie on a stick, Mary got key lime jelly beans, Lydia got key lime fudge, and Abe got plain key lime pie. Everyone was thrilled.
After dessert we headed over to Fort Zachery Taylor State Park to swim, play in the sand, and watch the sunset.
After I turned back in terror twice, Abe encouraged me to swim to those rocks by swimming partway with me. I actually still feel my heart skip a beat looking at this picture. I thought I would get attacked by a shark, but I also wanted to overcome my fear and do something extremely uncomfortable. I have the 75 hard to thank for that mindset, and even though I put the 75 hard on hold during vacation, I think some of the mental habits might (I hope I hope I hope) be taking hold).Contemplating swimming to the rocks before attempting.
Then everyone watched a magical sunset over the Atlantic while listening to Taps from the nearby army base.
After we finished Old Man and the Sea on our drive back to Miami. It felt like an epic finish to an incredible day.
I am back blogging and we are about to go to Disney, so I am just going to throw these pictures up and blog later. This was a monster day.
Waking up to the Airbnb and scoping out the pool in the backyard.Lydia, who never naps, took three naps today. Looks like someone was jet lagged.We got the special with fried frog legs, alligator, shrimp, and catfish. Some kids opted for corn dogs, but most everyone loved the frog legs. Tastes like chicken! (Abe thought he got a frog bone caught in his throat, which was really scary. Thankfully it must have been just a scratch, but it irritated Abe’s throat for the rest of the day.)The alligators at the gator show.Waiting for the gator show.Awww! A baby alligator!!Touring the Everglades Safari National Park.
Here we are looking at a swimming gator.Checking out the alligators.We booked a private tour. At first we were ambivalent about paying for a private tour, but after experiencing what it was we think it was worth every penny. It is one of Abe and my favorite memories with our family!
Airboating was sooo fun!
Some beautiful swamp lilies. I read The Orchid Thief in college and never forgot what I learned about Florida flower enthusiasts. It was really fun to see some flowers blooming in the Everglades!Our very knowledgeable guide.Our guide showed us a plant native to the Everglades that the indigenous people used to make bandages. It feels just like gauze and has natural antiseptics. If I remember correctly, he said gauze was modeled after this plant.beautiful Everglades canal.An alligator!!After our boat tour we drove up to Big Cypress National Preserve and walked the Kirby Storter Roadside Boardwalk, a mile long hike that we got all to ourselves. There was not even another car in the parking lot!
At the end of the boardwalk there was a gator pond, a depression that hosts all sorts of wildlife. We saw a beautiful heron, a turtle, lots of fish, and plenty of mosquitoes. Ammon of course leaned over the railing and had to be hand held for the rest of the time.On our way to our car we saw this crazy bug on the outhouse!!After our hike we drove to Miami Beach. We had a desperate search for a bathroom with Clarissa, and after the kids had fun in the sand until we had dinner late at night.
slow motion
After the beach we walked to Havana 1957, a restaurant. It felt a lot like Europe with the late night restaurants, and pedestrian boulevard restaurant seating.
Even at 11pm, the kids were beyond excited to see a dog poster!
Today, Lily and the girls treated Georgia to lunch at Block restaurant. Lily told me the whole thing was so enjoyable, that it was a life highlight for her. It seems like everyone had a truly delightful time. Happy belated birthday Georgia! We love you!!
After the lunch, Lily took the girls on a mommy-daughter date to Sephora.
At home, Clarissa was dressed up very cutely.
And she and Ammon danced adorably to John Denver’s, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”:
This is how amazing the scenery is right at our Yurt site.
This morning, we woke up the sleepy kids early so that we could hike early and be on the road by about 9:00. This was both so my dad and I could get back to our work days and also so that we could leave Goblin Valley before it got insanely hot.
Before leaving the yurt site, we got to see a neat sunrise.
The morning was perfect weather and the valley of the goblins was not crowded at all. We had such a good time!
We climbed the green mountain.
And climbed and walked on the dragon’s back.
Goblin Valley has become such a prominent getaway spot for our family and it was so so fun to share it with my dad and Suzanne. We are so grateful they came to make the trip extra special!
