Christmas Adventure

For Christmas this year, I went to see my family in New Mexico like I do almost every year.  It was really fun to catch up with my younger brothers and to spend some time with my mom and everyone.  This year, the weather was pretty bad so we spent most of the time inside playing board games but even so, it was nice to just spend some down time with my family.  This is the only time of the year that I get to see them so it means a lot to get to spend a week there.  

My family: brother Jake, Mom, me, brother Jeremey, and Stepdad George.

Stu surprised me this year and gave me a trip to WALT DISNEY WORLD for my birthday and Christmas so after I made it back from New Mexico, two days later, we were on a plane to Florida.  It was an awesome trip!  Our hotel was great and we were actually on the resort so we were in walking distance to most of the parks.  The first night we didn't get into our hotel until 11 but were so happy when the man at the desk told us that the Magic Kingdom was having "magic hours" until 3am that we could get into because we were staying at one of the resorts!  Even though we were exhausted from all the traveling and being up since 4:30 in the morning, we still went and had a blast!

A view of our hotel on the walk to Hollywood Studios

Florida is three hours ahead so we were able to sleep in until 10 there (7 oregon time) almost every morning and then stay out in the parks until like 3am (really only midnight for us) when all the other people were gone.  It was awesome.  We had great food and got to see some pretty cool stuff.

The second night we were there we decided to stay in and eat at Kimono's, a sushi place in the hotel next to us.  It was the best sushi ever!  The waitress saw me taking a picture of the delicious sushi and asked if we wanted our picture taken.  We look a little wiped out.  We were pretty worn.

We were pretty tired every night from all the walking we did.  There were shuttles everywhere but we discovered that we could walk to Epcot or Hollywood Studios in the time it took the water shuttles to get there so we pretty much walked everywhere.  It was awesome to be in almost 80 degree weather after being in Oregon with all that snow!  I was wearing tank tops and wasn't even cold!

Sleeping Beauty's castle in the Magic Kingdom at night.  It was beautiful!

It was definitely sad to have to leave the park the day after New Years.  The people and fireworks had been so awesome the night before!  But we were pretty tired and ready to get back to the ferrets and life in general.  I have posted a lot of other pictures from our vacation on Facebook if anyone is interested.