Can I Get A Witness

WOW!! The last time I talked to you all we were on our way to Disney World and had just made it to Orlando. We arrived at the same time as the first tropical depression of the season and it started raining approximately 5 hours and 22 minutes after we entered the park and didn't stop until some time after we left town. Yes people, we experienced Disney in a monsoon. It can be done. All the locals there seemed to think it would console all of us who had spent our blood, sweat and tears to make a trip to the SUNSHINE STATE if they informed us all that leading up to this torrential down pour they had been in a 5 week drought. However by the end of the week even the locals were cursing the rain. One of my good friends told me that they had started the week tracking our weather as a means of keeping up with us, but by mid-week the national news was reporting on Orlando weather and she no longer had to track it......There is an upside...... God always orders things perfectly now doesn't he? We did not have to wait in line for much of anything. People kept trying to avoid the rain so we would brave it and yank on our Mickey ponchos and grab our Mickey umbrellas and head out. There were only two rides we missed out on, one was inoperable in the rain and even though we returned to Epcot on three different occasions it was always too wet to ride it and that was Test Track. The other was The Flight of Peter Pan. We missed this because.....I forgot about it.....we made a couple of trips to Magic Kingdom and we stumbled upon it the last time, but it did have a wait and we had reservations for dinner so we had to miss that one. Another positive about the rain is that it kept the temps down and the kiddos didn't get hot. It's so hard for them to be hot and walk all that way. At 5 and 7 our girls walked each park from 9:30 each morning until closing time each day WITHOUT the aid of a stroller. We brought one but they didn't use it the first couple of days and it was a pain in the rain so we quit bringing it. Had it been 85 and sunny I don't think they could've done that.

So, I have no complaints about the weather. I think that it was just the way it was supposed to be. I'll admit I was bummed about it until the last day for two reasons, one, we had spent additional money for water park tickets that we obviously had not been able to use, and two, we had not been able to take pictures the way I had hoped. The picture possibilities at Disney are limitless....did I mention I scrapbook??? So, of course, you know I wanted to have a ton of photos, but with the rain, getting the camera out was not a lot of fun, not to mention the kids were wearing the same outfit in every picture....a wet poncho and wet hair plastered to their little melons. After Tuesday Tracy said no more ponchos, so every time we saw a character or had a photo op with no BIG raindrops we took off the ponchos and tried to fluff the hair. That helped a little. Then on the last evening we heard from Angie, the lady who got our tickets for us, that Disney was going to give us a credit for our water park tickets since we had not used them and the weather had been so bad. That was an answer to prayer. Then the last morning we woke up and it was not raining we headed straight to Epcot to get some pics and maybe a chance at Test Track before it started to pour again but it was still down from the storm earlier in the morning. We did however get some wonderful pic's in the hour we were there before the bottom fell out and we decided to head for higher ground, literally. So we got in our car and headed north to Alabama. The Lord answered all of our prayers.

I'm gonna post a few pictures that we took on here. One of my faves was one of the whole family at Chef Mickey's but I don't have it. I was surprised it turned out to be worth anything. It was one of those days where we had been in the rain all day, our reservation was at 8:40 and we had come straight from the park. I hadn't seen a mirror since 8 a.m. so you can only imagine. When they told the whole family to gather for a photo I asked Tracy "how to I look?" he gave his usual pat reply, "fine"....why do I ask...I asked the girls, "maybe just the two of you should go, does Mommy look okay for a picture?"...Elly said I looked fine, but my hair looked tired, to which Sydney added that I smelled like wet trash. ????? The woman taking the photo found it all quite funny, but not as funny as I found it twenty minutes later when they brought the picture to my table and wanted $39 for it. Yeah, I don't think so!

I cried many happy tears when they saw their first parade there, when they saw their first princess there, when they cried because they had to leave and said that Disney World really is magical.......here are a few of our pics to share with you.....this is just a few, I'll do a slideshow later.....