This year we need to save some money and spend most of our Christmas vacation at home.  We had a lot of activity earlier in the fall and have some pretty significant plans for summer 2015, so Christmas 2014 is being done on a budget.  Last spring we won 4 day-passes to DisneyWorld at a school auction, so we decided to cash those in and make a short Orlando jaunt our family gift.

We drove down today and checked into the Bahama Bay Resort, a place we’ve stayed several times in the past.  It’s 20 minutes from DisneyWorld and you can get a 3-bedroom condo (with full kitchen, two bathrooms, and full laundry room) for around $150 per night (including taxes).  For what you get, it’s one of the best lodgings deals we’ve seen, assuming you have a car available.

We stopped at a Publix grocery store to buy the makings of a dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast before we checked in.  I bought some tea because I forgot to bring some from home.

The packaging didn’t make it clear that this green tea was not, as it turns out, in tea bags, but rather in those little pods only useful in a Keurig coffee machine.  (Lesson learned: always read the small print.)  I opened the box and pulled out the pods.  Holden was standing next to me and said, “Maybe you can open the pod and dump the leaves in your cup.”  So that’s what I did.  The pod contents sat on the top of the water in a pathetic little hydrophobic powdered hill.  Holden said dryly, “Don’t forget to stir that.”  It was utterly undrinkable.  I’ll have to find a solution tomorrow.

December 21, Sunday  — Epcot Center

Today was full of ups and downs.  It started pretty well.  This year, for the first time, we agreed to let the kids go off on their own.  Isabella has a phone, and I gave mine to Holden so they could get in touch with us if they got separated from each other.  (Adam has a phone, too.)  The kids were beyond excited about this new, grown-up development.  The second we entered through the gates, they hollered “See you later!” and took off.

Adam and I, for the first time ever, got to wander around an amusement park with just each other.  It felt weird not to have the kids with us and we experienced some pretty mixed emotions.  It’s part of life, your kids growing up enough to have some independence.  They love it and they need it, these little test flights out of the nest.  But also the end of a stage of life, for all of us.  Adam and I were proud of them, but also a little melancholy.

It’s so much easier to get around an amusement park when there are only two of you.  We held hands and got in the short lines for the “boring” rides and had a wonderful, romantic time. Until we got to The Land pavilion.  As we were going in, a kid burst out and puked right in the doorway.  Oh, the horror.

Checking out some “art” in France.

We finally got a chance to see the Captain EO movie.  In the past, the line for this has always been so long we didn’t bother with it.  Today we were able to walk right in.  They are still showing the original 3-D film created in 1986 — produced by George Lucas, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Michael Jackson and Angelica Huston.  That is quite a pedigree for a film and we were pretty excited about seeing it.

It was remarkably, hilariously bad.  Michael Jackson’s character is the captain of a spaceship that lands on a planet ruled by a wicked queen played by Angelia Huston.  She captures Captain EO and his animated sidekicks (one of whom is named Fuzzball, presumably because he’s a ball of fuzz with a face) and for the crime of contaminating her planet with their presence, sentences them to be turned into trash cans.  (Yes — trash cans.)  Captain EO tells Huston that he’s going to bring out her beauty with a song and dance number.  He rips his jacket open to reveal a flaming rainbow on his shirt that blasts magical beams at the queen’s robotic henchmen and turns them into fabulous aerobics instructors.  They are wearing leotards and everything, just like in the Olivia Newton John “Physical” video.  Every time Jackson does his signature “WOO hoo!” more fabulousness blasts from the shirt rainbow and from his sparkle-gloved hands.  In the end, Angelica Huston is transformed from a scary reptile/robot hybrid into a permed blond wearing a purple leotard.  Jackson and his animated sidekicks aggressively and victoriously dance in formation back to their own spaceship.

It is just stunningly bad.  Jaw-droppingly bad.  It also contains glimmers of Jar Jar Binks.  The signs were there, but nobody saw them before The Phantom Menace came out in 1999.  “What the hell was Lucas thinking?” people asked in 1999.  Well, you can see exactly what he was thinking.  It’s all right there in Captain EO from 1986.  It was the warning no one noticed.

A little while later, we got a text from Holden that said, “Josie has a really bad headache.”  This was worrisome news because on Friday after school, she went over to a friend’s house and had to come home early because the friend was sick with what they thought was probably strep throat.  A few minutes later, another text came in from Holden that said, “Isabella is making Josie really upset.”

We met up with the kids in China.  Josie was in tears and obviously miserable.  We found the First Aid station and they gave her a dose of children’s Tylenol.  (We’ve had to visit the First Aid station at Disney parks twice now, and they are superb.)  She started feeling better, but didn’t want to go off with Isabella and Holden anymore.  She opted to stay with Adam and me for the rest of the afternoon.

Josie continued to feel more and more rotten  as the day progressed.  The one thing she wanted to do was visit Japan because they sell Pokemon toys in the shop.  She perked up a bit and was showing some signs of excitement over our new (very tentative) plans to visit Japan for real next summer, but when we headed over to eat baklava in Morocco she lapsed back into misery.

Josie trying to enjoy the store in Japan.

She bought a couple of Pokemon keychains. While Adam and I ate baklava in Morocco, she examined her treasures.

Meanwhile, Holden and Isabella were having the time of their lives.  I found these pictures on my phone.  The first is Holden’s attempt at a selfie.  

And then Isabella met Mulan.  

By this point, we knew we needed to call it a day.  We went on one last ride, Mission: SPACE.  This ride freaked me out, because even though we went on the “green” line (the non-spinning version meant for little kids) we got into the space capsule and discovered each one came with a packet of puke bags.  I’ve never seen an amusement park ride equipped with puke bags before.  That set off a panic attack and I sat trapped in that claustrophobic chamber with my eyes shut trying to astral project myself to just about anywhere else on Earth until it finally came to an end.

Miserable Josie, trying to make the best of things.

We left the park before dinner and found an urgent care clinic.  I wanted to get a strep test done on Josie, but the wait was going to be at least 2 1/2 hours so we decided to skip it and just go back to the hotel.  The Walgreens clinics open in the morning.

Battling the crowd to leave.

Dec 22, Monday

Josie woke up feeling somewhat better today, but we didn’t want to buy park tickets in case she started feeling lousy later on.  We searched around instead for cheap/free things to do in Orlando.

First stop was Downtown Disney.  They have shops and restaurants, but no rides.  The kids were happy to visit the Lego store and we bought some chocolates in their Ghirardelli shop.

Isabella and I bought bagels at Starbucks and ended up feeling a lot of our food to the chickadees.  You can’t really see them in this photo because they are so small, but there are dozens of them right next to us begging for crumbs.

Josie was still feeling OK, so we bought tickets to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum.  It’s not as neat as the original location in London, but the kids still had a really good time.  They have a rather large collection of conjoined twin animals (two-headed calves, etc.) that were interesting to Isabella because she and I have been watching American Horror Story: Freak Show.

At Ripley’s – a psychedelic tunnel that rotated, with lights and blasting music. Those are the 3 kids dancing around inside.

After Ripley’s, we were at loose ends.  We’d spotted an outlet mall nearby and decided to go shopping.  That turned out to be a horrible idea.  We got stuck in pre-Christmas traffic for a really long time and when we finally made it into the parking lot, there were no spaces left.  We ended up driving away, having wasted a bunch of our afternoon.

Our last stop of the day was the Universal Studios CityWalk.  It’s a lot like Downtown Disney.  By this time Josie was feeling pretty rotten again, so we had an early dinner at the Bubba Gump restaurant and went back to the hotel.

Dec 23, Tuesday

Josie woke up feeling awful, so we packed up and headed home.  We got out of the hotel by 7:00 a.m. and made it home in time to take Josie to the doctor for a strep test.  (By this time I was pretty sure she had a virus, but wanted to confirm it before everyone was closed for Christmas.)

Her strep test was negative, so now we’re just going to relax and I’m going to make a huge pot of restorative chicken soup for my baby.