Our vacation time in the Walt Disney World parks in 2017.
We did the dessert fireworks in the Magic Kingdom one evening after the new fireworks show started. I’ve started rummaging through the shots from that evening and here are a few initial samples.
This is our first weekend home again after vacation. I think we’re almost caught up on sleep and feeling human again 🙂 I’ve got most of the pictures from vacation together in one lightroom archive and ready to work on. Loads of pictures to be worked through but I’ll start posting here as I make progress…I expect quite a few postings over time.
This was a somewhat different photographic vacation from previous trips. I picked up a 100mm-400mm lens for my SLR last winter and wanted to give it a spin. This resulted in many more cell phone and small camera pictures (for anything that needed a wide angle) and lots of long and tight shots with the SLR as swapping out that monster for something wider was a bit of a hassle. Overall I think it worked out pretty well but only the final results will tell the tale.
We flew back from Orlando Monday evening. The flight was already scheduled to be late (9:20 out of Orlando to about Midnight here) and got bumped and bumped. They started telling us there’d be a short delay and by the time we were done, the flight headed out after 11 PM and we finally got in after 3 AM.
Lorna had picked up something that seems like strep throat at the end of the cruise and by the flight home she was pretty unhappy. I had started to feel some soreness in my throat as well. With the late hour and throat problems we’ve both been a bit frazzled for the balance of the week. Lorna gave it a couple of days and yesterday she set up a doctor’s appointment.
I worked Tuesday and Wednesday but by this morning my throat was getting worse as well. I decided to take the day as a sick day both to avoid possibly spreading the problem as work and to try to double up on the appointment. We did get looked at but so far we haven’t heard back about whether the strep test was positive. We are now on antibiotics and seem so far to be getting better.
I expect that this weekend is going to be a bit of a recovery weekend. We’re both still a bit worn out and Lorna’s not feeling the greatest. Got to get everything unpacked and squared away and get things rolling in the right direction.
I’m going to try to start working on my vacation photos this weekend. There are a lot of them and I still have some storage chips to load into the lightroom repository and the photo-pass pictures to download from my disney experience.
Hoping to hear from folks that we met on vacation who stop by the site…drop an email to kyle@ninecrows.com or comment on one of the items here to keep in touch.
Our last in-park meal this year was at the Sci-Fi restaurant. Cool and cheesy in equal measures. Lorna and I were both a bit worn out by this time (and she had picked up a sort throat on the cruise with a mild fever) so we really didn’t fully enjoy our last few hours in the park.
Vacation is over for all reasonable purposes. At this point we’re just hanging out in comfy chairs in the lobby of the Disney Boardwalk resort. Devices recharging after a last day of use and before the craziness of the airport.
Hitting the bus at 6 PM with the flight making it to Manchester by sometime after midnight. Going to be a painful work day tomorrow running on a few hours sleep for a nine hour day. Expecting that this coming weekend will be a recharge and recover time.
Lorna got a bit of a bug at the tail end of things that left her final day less happy than might have been hoped. She seems to be feeling better now…hoping the flight home is uncomplicated.
aww…
Waiting for. Lorna at the exit to destination space. Coming to the end of a wonderful vacation. Disney parks, great food and a double dip cruise. Only thing that could have made it better would have been if Alyssa could have joined us.
Checked out of the wilderness Lodge and waiting to grab breakfast at the Kona Cafe at the Polynesian. Somehow, my mind is automatically in ‘end of vacation’ mode even though I know we’ll be on the Disney Fantasy in a couple of days and back here at Boardwalk for a final weekend.
Cell phone shots as the computer is stored ?.
Fully post processed images will have to wait a couple of weeks.
Got pics with Chewbacca and Kylo Ren followed by the dessert party. Had a nice chat with Eddie from the Dakota’s about engineering and vampire robots. Definitely need to get photos post processed and up here as soon as I get home. Reminds me that the site needs to be loaded up in advance.
Just a few shots from this trip.
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.