Spent the morning and early afternoon walking the worlds and sampling the food at the garden show that is going on there. Lorna had a easter egg hunt that she picked up at the pin trading kisok that we did along the way. Nice afternoon, good food and a pleasant walk.

Tonight we’re going over to hollywood studios for star wars dessert party with the fireworks. We’ve done this once before. Tasty desserts and a reserved spot (last time there was no seating though) for the fireworks show. We’re just finishing up getting ready to go…need to hit the bus by seven or so.

Almost at half-way through the vacation. Feels a bit more that that as we’re going to be doing a short cruise nextr week and thus will be leaving Orlando and the parks for a chunk of time.

Having a blast so far. Looking forward to the rest…

Saw the last wishes show last night. We parked ourselves behind the castle to avoid the huge crowds out front. Not as good a spot as I was in last time I shot form back there as the buildings got in the way.

I stayed after to grab some long lens night shots. No idea how these will come out once I get them home to post process on a big, calibrated monitor.

I have been playing with ‘cluttered’ shots where a long shot of something interesting has some nearer bits in the line of sight. Hoping for interesting rather than cluttered.

Pool and rest day yesterday. Grabbed dinner at Morimoto in Disney springs. Good food though the portobello fries tasted mostly of the oil and coating with little mushroom to them. Sat and had drinks with Lorna while a guitar player ran through his material further down the way after we finished eating.

I’ve been thinking about using my Intel NUC and  wireless router with my tablet as a laptop replacement for vacation purposes. This laptop is getting old (battery no longer holds a charge) and it is rather bulky for my normal vacation needs. I need to be able to transfer photos to hard drives from mhy camera and get at my blog mostly.

The biggest challenge is a display. If the room has a television with an exposed HDMI or DisplayPort connector then that works. If it doesn’t then I need to RDP into the little compute-brick from my tablet and use that as the display and input focus.

I had not fully set that up at home. Yesterday, mid-day I finally worked through all of the relevant setup (I think). I’ll keep using it over the remainder of the vacation and see if it works well enough. I’m thinking that my other option is a surface tablet or something similar…small…decently capable and with a reasonable keyboard and a few USB ports  to connect drives and a chip reader to. I tend to transfer photos to two laptop drives while on vacation as I’d be more than a little upset if I had a drive failure and lost everything from a trip.

Been down here since last Friday and having a good time. Playing with my 100mm-400mm lens a bit. We’ve been to each of the parks and Disney Springs at least once. This vacation we’re taking it a bit easier than usual…we tend towards keeping running around until we’re exhausted and then waking up the next morning to dive in again.

Getting to the point where we’re working on taking up a slightly more relaxed attitude. Tweaked my left knee the week before heading down here as well so that is slowing my down a bit.

We did the ‘keys to the kingdom’ tour in Magic Kingdom on this trip so we’ve now glimpsed the fable utilidors.

I had my baymax shirt on for the visit to Epcot and we saw a short line to get pictures taken with baymax for real. When we came to the front of the line, baymax acted like I was a long lost friend and then tried to get me to stay and give photos and hugs while he switched over to tourist mode. Very cool.

We saw the new soarin’ and while the list of locations was a bit obvious, the views were spectacular.

Disney Springs is almost completely changed since our last visit. Lots of high end stores that we really aren’t interested in, but pretty cool to walk through. We hit the big disney store, the pin station and grabbed a drink at a little stand on the lower-rent end of the area.

Yesterday we saw rivers of light at Animal Kingdom. The show was visually spectacular, but the timing getting in for the fast pass area and waiting on the stone benches for an hour and a half was very hard on Lorna’s back. The crush of the crowd heading out was worse. I’ll post pictures once I’ve had a chance to post-process them on something with a better screen than this laptop.

Before rivers of light we hit the afternoon kilimanjaro safari. Was very cool as the giraffes and rhinos got in the way of our truck and forced up (of horror) to stay put until they cleared the road ahead.

Dinner at Boma in Animal Kingdom Lodge which was delicious as always. Seems as if this is turning into an eating trip. Lorna grabbed us a surprise reservation for breakfast at Trail’s End buffet this morning…yum!

Saw the hoop-tee-do review and they were more fun than ever (and they’re generally pretty darn good).

Drank ‘german-sized’ beers (I like the grapefruit beer) at the Biergarten in Epcot Germany seated with a very pleasant family (always group seating there). We still need to go back to finish the easter egg hunt through the worlds. As we headed over to dinner we saw the chair stacking street performers in France.

Having fun and still lots to go…waiting on most pictures until I have better facilities at home…posting a few direct to facebook from my phone now and again. Hope all is well on the home front…