I met Melissa and Jonathan at Universal CityWalk. We walked to the three hotels and ate at SouthWest Moe’s and Menchie’s.
It is a long, frustrating story on how Minnie and Gonzo were not in their room when they checked-in. Minnie and Gonzo were even lost today, but they were found by hotel management and the two did receive the sign and characters.
Melissa loved the swings in BreadBox. Andrea knew she would. Jonathan is pretending he has a selfie stick in the Portofino picture.
Melissa and Jonathan have arrived for the weekend.
The plan is for them to go to SeaWorld tomorrow. I am going to meet them at City Walk tomorrow night. Then, they are going to the beach on Friday followed by a Music Man musical on Friday night. On Saturday, we are going to Boma and Epcot. On Sunday, we are going to church, followed by lunch at Downtown, exploring the Magic Kingdom hotels, and then, Robert is going to get them into MK Sunday afternoon.
Before the weekend, I thought I should post some pictures from the last few weeks here.
I met with some French Quarter friends who are back in town. Shereta was living in North Dakota and just recently returned. Christopher was on a cruise ship, but he is back too. We went to Universal. They showed me the Hard Rock (didn’t even know there was one in Orlando) and Loews Portofino. Both were within walking distance of Universal. I am not a fan of Universal, but their hotels were nice.
Other pictures include a few free birthday meals I have received already. I also met-up with Bev (another friend from the College Program). She is back in town. I showed her around where I live and work. We went to a Greek Restaurant.
We also had some celebrations at work – a birthday and a graduation.
Recently, I won (well, everyone in attendance) a $100 voucher for anywhere Southwest flies. So, Andrea and I are running a half-marathon in Chicago over Labor Day.
I lost the confirmation code and could find the confirmation email, so I called Southwest. The agent asked me if I lived in Decatur. Then, she went on and on and on about Krekel’s Custard and Hamburgers. Evidently, the place is in Springfield, Illinois also.
Check out this link.
Beijing = 6,336 square miles compared to Paris = 40 square miles.
Beijing didn’t feel that big.
Since both the card and the book are going to be slightly late, at least, you can view the book now a few hours before your birthday.
Click here to view this photo book larger
Some of the pages are not loading, you might try this link: https://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=3UaMnLRu7w
Facebook has allowed little games/ applications that “analyze” your profile. It is silly but also fun and a waste of time.
Dad went out to the Southwest United States. He visited the Rockies and the national parks in Utah. He was in Death Valley, Sequoia, and Yosemite yesterday and today. I wish I could be out there with him, but I was able to fly out to Las Vegas on Friday night to meet him for the weekend at least. And it was a great weekend. As some of the weight loss experts say, “I got the furnace going again”/ cheat days. We ate so much food. As you can tell from the video below, I eat a lot. Tomorrow, I will go back to Planet Fitness.
Las Vegas is nice when you have a car. I don’t really like extroverts and massive amounts of people and noise, so 48 hours in Las Vegas is all I can handle. But we did a lot. With the car, we were able to drive to different hotels including eating at an Irish pub at Mandalay Bay. We also went to the Hoover Dam.
You might have seen on the news about the fire at the Cosmopolitan. We were actually in the hotel minutes before. We went over to Planet Hollywood to get the Garrett’s popcorn mix and came out and saw many fire trucks.
My flight on Sunday night left at 10:55 p.m. It arrived in Fort Lauderdale at 6:45 a.m. The plane let the passengers connecting to a Baltimore flight leave first as their flight was departing in 2 minutes. I figured I had plenty of time as my Orlando flight left at 7:43 a.m. Little did I know, my flight was in a different terminal! When I heard this I tried to follow the signs, I saw a bus that said “Terminal 3″ and I got on. I basically looped around and came back to Terminal 4 as Terminal 3 was very close to Terminal 4 – probably less than a block. Then, I had to go through security again! I kept hearing “Last Call for Orlando Flight 548.” It was like 7:20 a.m. After security, I ran really fast to the gate and made the flight with like 10 minutes to spare….so “Last Call” was called too early, but if I didn’t have the ability to run 1/4th of mile fast, I would have had trouble.
I was annoyed. I don’t believe I “get angry for nothing” as the picture in the next post says. I think I have valid complaints. I just emailed the airport. I don’t think businesses spend enough being a guest in their own establishment. What is it like when a person doesn’t know the layout of the airport and is under a time crunch? How many airports make connecting passengers within the United States leave a secure area? Orbitz et al. should be notified not to send passengers through that airport under short connection times. My annoyance also stemmed from me being tired probably.
Anyways, I made it to work on Monday morning and all was fine. The weekend was great actually except for transportation issues. I can tell you about the taxi driver another night.
After Yellowstone, we went to Grand Teton National Park and back to the Black Hills. I probably could spend a few weeks in both places. We back to Mount Rushmore two more times! On the way back from the lighting ceremony at night, I was driving around 3o to 40 m.p.h. on a curvy road when what looks like a boulder comes out of nowhere in the middle of the road. It was a lone, male bison. It was kinda scary. I was able to stop in plenty of time, but I didn’t look at it walked on by our car. Whew.
I flew out of Sioux Falls. Sioux Falls has a population of over 160,000, but when we arrived around 5 p.m. all the hotels were booked!! All! They told us to go back to Mitchell. I didn’t want to go backwards. We called places in Brookings and into towns in Minnesota and nothing! Fortunately (even though we were getting tired of putting up the tent), Jellystone Campground had a few tent sites left.
(It is very hard to stay in shape on vacation. I have tried to give up red meat, pastries, and for the most part, bread. Red meat was easy to give up. I love pastries and bread though. We had some pizza on the trip and it was really good. Once I returned to Orlando, I promptly bought a gym membership. )