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Blogroll Me!
There are people on the net that have nothing better to do with their time
then be nasty to other people online. They post rude comments, spend hours
a day talking about sites they hate so much, that they well, spend hours a
day talking about them. (lame) They mock the owners and posters for their
opinions and their right to free speech. They expect everyone to fit into
their narrow-minded little world view or else they throw a temper tantrum.
To these people I say grow up.
Here's a bit of info people...the web is
a HUGE place. If you don't like what I say here, or who I am, or what I
do, or talk about, or what I look like, or the color of my hair, or
whatever asinine thing you dwell on, go somewhere else. It's
really, really easy. Honest. You just click the little "x" in
the corner of your browser and *poof* the offending, big, mean and nasty
site has disappeared.
I pay for this site. It's mine. That
means I can use it for whatever the hell I want to. Don't like it if I'm
bitching about something in my life? Oh fucking well. Go somewhere else.
Think I'm stupid for expressing my thoughts? Too fucking bad, don't read
them. Somewhere along the line, someone forgot this simple fact: Live
and let live Don't like me, cool, fine, whatever, I don't care.
This journal is NOT for you. It's for me. I'm not in it for popularity or
fame or anything stupid like that. I write it because I need to write and
express myself and get things out of my head sometimes. So read or don't,
it doesn't matter, but don't waste my time (or yours) bitching about it.
*gets off soapbox*
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wishlist and mailing address
Monday, December 06, 2004
Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party - Recap
Ok, this is going to be a long one... So, as wel all know, the wonderfully sweet Cy got two tickets for my Love and I to attend the MVMCP on December 3rd. I've been looking forward to it for about a month and had planned everything so we could have as smooth and as easy a day and as much time at Disney as possible. Sadly, the best laid plans.... Friday. Noon. Love gets off work. (He took a half day.) I'm already up, getting ready and organizing what I need for the day. Two days before I had called Enterprise Rent-A-Car and put a reservation on a car for Friday afternoon pickup. (Our car is really on it's last legs and I didn't want to risk our only car breaking down AND missing the event.) The event starts officially at 7pm, but you can get into the park as early as 4pm, get a wristband and have two extra hours to roam around before the park closing at 6pm when they herd people with wristbands over into Tomorrowland. So we go to pick up the car just before 2pm, giving us two hours of trip time to get out there for 4pm arrival. Get there. Guy's a total fucking asshole. Gives us a hard time about everything. Then tells us there's a $200 credit card deposit for the rental car. I specifically asked two days prior exactly what I'd need for the reservation and rental. He only said the amount of the rental ($34.99). My credit card isn't a real credit card, it's a checkcard linked to my bank account. My bank account had only $100 in it because I didn't know I needed $200 for the hold. He won't do anything - not even hold $100 additional in cash or anything - except make us run to the bank. When we moved in October, we not only changed cities, but we're into another county now. Our bank only has branches in our old county. It's about a 20 minute drive away. So, it's already 2pm and now we have to drive to the bank, deposit $100 MORE dollars (our spending money which I saved up over the last month) and then drive back and get the rental. So we do. Drive all the way over there and all the way back. By this point, it's about 2:45pm. Not only are we losing time in Disney (it's between a 1 1/2 hour to 2 hour drive), but we're pushing into Friday afternoon commute traffic time, making the drive even longer. We get there, go through the paperwork again and he says the card came up declined. I have the receipt which says there's $215 available dollars in my account. He doesn't care, won't run it again, won't do anything and there's nothing he can or will do. Asshole!! So, now it's almost 3pm and we have no car. I break down crying. I don't have any reservation anywhere, don't know where else to rent one (because remember, we live in a wholly different area now), and don't think I can anyway since my check card didn't seem to want to authorize the $200 hold anyway! My friend Rand had off for the week. He builds up too much vacation time and every so often just takes time off so he doesn't lose it. He's working on stuff around his house. Having no idea what else to do we head to his place. It's just up the road from ours. Rand being the sweetheart that he is lets us borrow his Jeep. We leave him ours and our keys just in case and get out on the road. Everything's great for the first fifteen minutes until we hit I-275 through Tampa. It's all backed up. We inch our way through it to get to I-4. I-4 is the ONLY road to get to Orlando. That's it. So we finally get to it and for the first 25 miles, it's three lanes and the traffic breaks up and we get going. Things are looking good, finally. I'm still upset how late it is and how badly everything's been blundered so far but trying to get past it and look forward to just getting to Orlando. Two exits before the one for Disney, we come to a dead stop. For the next half hour, we crawl through this one area. When we get through it, there was no accident, no construction, nothing. Just massive, massive congestion. Oh and did I mention both of us had to pee like crazy and the drive was getting longer by the moment? Finally, we got to the WDW exit. Drive in, pay our $8 parking and head into the lot. Got parking really, really close up front for some reason (I guess people leaving emptied the spots and unlike normally, where they very strictly point you in one car after another into the spots, there was no one directing the cars so we just kept heading up front.) Got out, practically ran to the ticket center and hit the restroom. Ah...life is better. Next it's onto the ticket center to hit will-call for our tickets. Cy gave me a confirmation number and said they'd be waiting under my name. Get there, give the guy the number...and, you guessed it, not valid. The event by the way is sold out. So if they can't find the tickets, I can't get in even if I did want to buy a second pair. Looks up my name, looks up Cy's name, looks up Love's name - looks up varriations on all of our names. Nothing. He's clueless. Finally, after about 20 minutes the lady next to him says to let her try. About 30 seconds later, she's got it. The confirmation number had one too many digits in it and she just tinkered until she found it. I could have kissed her. Tickets in hand, we get on the monorail and get over to the Magic Kingdom. We get into the park a few minutes shy of 6pm. Think about that. We were planning on leaving at 2pm. Didn't borrow Rand's Jeep until after 3pm. Then spent not an hour and a half in drive time but over two and a half hours to get there, THEN 20 minutes to get the tickets. (All the time I was trying not to break down crying. It was like, what else can go wrong!) Finally though, we were there. We didn't get to go anywhere, we had to go right into Tomorrowland. The park was closing and they were keeping those of us coming in for the event over there only. So we rode Carousel of Progress. (Which was good because after the party started, it closed.) Then we went and rode Buzz Lightyear. Always fun. After that, we hit the new Stitch ride. "New" is pushing it. It was exactly the same story and effects of Alien Encounter - just watered down and with a Stitch overlay. I was really disappointed. Why it took a year to do that I'll never understand. And all the people coming off were really disappointed too. Not one person had a nice thing to say about it. Sheesh, I was really embarrased for WDW. I'd never heard such universally negative comments coming off a ride before. Ever. It was about seven by then so we had free roam of the park. We went up to Main Street to see the snow. It was really neat how they did it. In the air, it really looked like snow flurries. Really light and airy. (If you want to know how they did it, ask and I'll let you know. Don't want to spoil it for anyone if they didn't want to know.) It was all so pretty though. All the christmas lights strung up, the massive tree, the snow - it was so beautiful and magical. Over the course of the night, we rode Pirates of the Caribbean, Philharmagic, Haunted Mansion (and met a really nice lady from one of the Disney communities I belong to and even brought her some cookies - Hi Vanessa!), Buzz, Carousel of Progress, Big Thundar Mountain (twice), PeopleMover (TTA) (twice), Stitch, saw the Parade, watched a special, enchanced version of Wishes (the fireworks show), got super, super yummy free hot cocoa and cookies, got our photo taken with Donald, got our MVMCP photo taken for free (they send you a print), and just generally enjoyed ourselves. It was a really, really great night. I didn't want to leave. There was so much to do and so many special shows and events going on that I'd love to go back again to see more of it. And despite the event being sold out, I didn't feel it was overly crowded at all. They limit the number of tickets and I think it's a good number. I've been to the park many, many times on "normal" days when it was way busier then that. We didn't wait more then five to ten minutes for anything and even the most crowded times - around the Castle hub for Wishes and the Parade - weren't jammed packed. Most normal nights you can't even squeeze through, but there was plenty of room to move and we were right up front for the Parade coming there a few minutes before it was scheduled to start. Normally, you'd need to line up a half an hour to an hour in advance. Wishes was fantastic too. Already an AMAZING display, the finale was shot off literally all 360 degrees around you. So you didn't just have them going off next to the Castle, but all around you and circling the entire park. It was amazing. Needless to say I didn't want to leave. At all. I just kept looking around and wanting to hold on to all of it for just a little bit longer. It was so pretty. And by the time we were getting ready to leave (after looking through the stores for awhile), almost empty. So it was really peaceful. We headed out about 1:20am (the event ended at midnight but they always have the shops open after for awhile). By then, it was starting to get a real bite to the air. The gauge on Rand's Jeep said it was about 49F at that point. Feels-like might have been a few degrees lower because there was a bite to the wind. Tired and worn out, we headed home. And ran smack dab into a four-mile back up road stop for construction on I-4. Ugh. I hate that road. Put it this way, I've lived in Florida for almost twenty years now. The road has been under construction without break for literally as long as I've been here. They're trying to expand it to three lanes the whole length, but so far, only the first 25 miles out of Tampa are three lanes. The rest is disaster. It was about 3am by the time we pulled into Rand's garage. We needed our car and our apartment keys which we left with him with our car keys. Poor Rand had clearly fallen asleep, but was sorta up when we came in. We had hoped to not wake him and just make the swap and head home but, not so much. We picked up a Donald ornament for him - his favorite character and something he asked us to keep an eye out for - and headed home ourselves. We got a set of Mickey ear ornaments for our tree and I got the pin for the night's event. I also got a Santa hat that had Mickey ears on it that I wore around all night. It's really cute and it kept my head warm. Hee hee. What was really great about the event was that since it's a seperate ticket - even if you're a passholder you have to buy a ticket for it - it's really only people who want to be there. No angsty teens or anything. So most people were wearing santa hats, christmas tree hats and one group was even dressed up live elves complete with ears and batery-operated christmas lights strung on them! It was a hoot. Everyone was a Disney and a holiday fan and so it was all the more fun for it. Huge thanks again to Cy. Seriously. It was such a great gift. If you haven't already, go check out the photos from the night. Sadly, most of them didn't come out (either too dark because my flash's range is apparently non-existant) or blurry (because I forgot to bring my mini tripod) but they're decent enough for a web gallery. I just won't be able to really print any out. :( They're still fun though and show off some of the neat detail of the event as well as much of the parade. I also have a few small quicktime movies that I'm going to look into uploading since they look nicer then many of the photos. All-in-all, we had a wonderful time. Once we got there. It was just the getting there and getting in part that was the problem! But, disaster after disaster avoided and we made it through all the hurdles and still had a great time. I highly recommend if you ever get a chance to go, to do so, because it's really a wonderful event.
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