Team Esteve

Over in my twitter I mentioned (or tweeted as the cool kids are saying this year) that all the reservations were finalized for our upcoming Disney trip. The wife and I will have been married 14 years in the coming months. Last time we were at Walt Disney World (WDW), we decided to celebrate our 15th anniversary by going down to Disney World all by ourselves, staying at the Contemporary resort, and having a great time. Things were going along swimmingly until I heard on a podcast that the mouse was running a special: buy a four night package at a WDW resort and you get 3 nights FREE!. I mean, C’MON! How could you turn down something like that? So we called the best Disney travel agent ever(!), Vickie over at Mouse Fan Travel (ask for her by name and mention that we sent you there) and told her to hook us up a year early. She handles all the details, down to calling the reservation number exactly 90 days from the vacation date at exactly 7am Eastern time to get us Advanced Dining Reservations (ADRs) at all the places where we want to eat.


So now that everything is finalized, let’s run down the basics:
We are staying in the Contemporary Resort (that’s the A-Frame building that has a monorail running through it). We decided to splurge (15th anniversary and all that) and get a room with a view of the Magic Kingdom. We’ll be there for about a week. While there we’ll be eating at the following places (in alphabetical order, so no stalking)
– Biergarten
– Flying Fish Café
– Jiko
– Le Cellier
– Restaurant Marrakesh
– Victoria & Albert’s
I linked the restaruant names with their menus over at allears.net so you can get a flavor (pun intended) of what we’ll be eating. They’re a great resource for all things Disney. The wife is SUPER excited about Victoria & Albert’s (and I am also for the record). How many places at WDW can you say don’t allow children under 10? How many restaurants require dinner jackets? How many restaurants at Disney World tell you to plan for 2 to 2.5 hours of dining?


So those are the basics. As we get closer, I’ll tell you about the tours we have planned and what else we are planning on doing.


Gasucawa,
Jason

If you’ve invited me to Facebook or MySpace or LiveJournal or whateverthat’professional’versionoffacebookis and I didn’t reply, no hard feelings, but NO. It’s not that I’m not social. I am generally a social creature (demented and sad, but social, if you’re a Breakfast Club fan). I just have trouble living up to expectations. If I don’t post a blog entry here for months (or even years) on end, very few people know and/or care. If my loving wife, who is a Facebooker (or whatever you kids are calling it), doesn’t log in for 12 hours, she apparently gets ‘kidnapped’ by someone and ‘poked’ 14 times by people she met once in middle school. Also, she has nasty things written on her ‘wall.’


By definition, I’m a ‘pleaser.’ I have issues and don’t sleep well at night if I think I’m not being all things to all people. Why put myself through the torture of the expectations of people that I haven’t seen face-to-face since I was 14? You want to complain that I haven’t talked enough about Easy-Bake Ovens? Leave a comment in a post or a page, but don’t feel bad if I delete the comment without giving a shiny rat’s behind. There are expectations with Facebook. Mercifully, there are no such expectations with MY website. You don’t like what I’m saying? Fine. Go back to engaging in some fake interaction with someone who is a friend of a friend who happened to be on the same social networking site that you are on. I’m not saying it’s one step away from e-harmony, but c’mon.


Nothing against those sorts of sites, but I know I can’t meet your ‘collecective’ expectations. Those of you who can? WOW! Much love to ya. Like so many other things in life, this one is subject to personal opinion, but next time you wonder why I’m not doing the Facebook, cut me some slack. I’d be fun for a while, then eventually disappoint you and make you resent me. Do either of us really want that? I didn’t think so.


Gasucawa,
Jason

I scanned in some pictures that we took during our 2006 trip to Sea World and Discovery Cove. It was Arianne’s 8th birthday and she got to swim with the dolphins. That was a great vacation and those are some of the best memories of my life.

Over there on the right is my Twitter feed. Feel free to follow me.

Welcome back, faithful readers.  Missed me?  Hopefully with switching over to a new server and switching over to WordPress, posting will be a little more frequent (like it could be less frequent).  Things are still very much in flux around here, but the one constant (not the Desmond kind, but close) for now will be the upcoming vacation.  More about that later, though.  I’m off to see what I can add to these sidebars.  Wish me luck and Gasucawa!  It feels good to be back.