Babymoon: Strasburg, PA

Now that I’ve got some time off, time to finally catch up on blogging.  Back in October we were faced with some pregnancy complications that were going to completely stop all travel after October 18th.  We had been planning one last trip to Disney World for the first week of December, but that got thrown out the window.  We ended up going up to Strasburg, PA for a train-filled long weekend.

We took off work on Friday and drove up in the morning.  After getting the lay of the land and picking up our “Strasburg Day Pass” tickets, we went to a place John read about online for lunch (Issac’s Deli).  It was right next door to the Choo Choo Barn, which was on our list of things to do, so that worked out perfectly.  Issac’s is an awesome sandwich shop.  Lots of variety and large portions (of course I couldn’t finish mine to save my life).

The Choo Choo Barn is a 1700-sq foot train layout that’s designed after Strasburg and the surrounding areas.  They’ve re-created the Strasburg Railroad, Dutch Wonderland, and lots of other stuff.  If you’re in the area, you could blow at least an hour looking at everything.  Our next stop was the National Toy Train Museum which is another multi-hour eater if you’ve got a train fan in your midst.  The museum has lots of amazing history and educational information.

By the time we were done at the museum it was going to be too late to do anything else so we checked in at the Hershey Inn where I had a little surprise waiting for us.

After resting a bit and deciding where to have dinner we went to the Carters outlet to do some window shopping.  We still hadn’t bought anything at all for the baby because we were afraid we might jinx it after the long road we’ve been down.  I figured that since we knew it was a girl and she was healthy that maybe it would be ok to buy a onsie or a blanket or something…. but John had other plans.

We had dinner at a place called Iron Horse Inn.  Honestly, it sucked.  The atmosphere was bad — we were seated in the bar area and were treated to a loud television with sports on.  John’s steak was cooked really poorly and my “Jumbo Stuffed Shrimp with Crab Meat and Garlic Sauce” came with zero sauce — but the waitress did bring a side of cocktail and tartar sauces after I asked about the missing garlic sauce.  (”That entree doesn’t come with garlic sauce, but here’s some stuff for that.”)  Dessert was a serious disappointment, and honestly it’s not easy to screw up Shoo Fly Pie.  It was an expensive disaster from the very beginning.  Don’t go there.

We slept in the next morning and had breakfast at the hotel restaurant which happens to be the Hershey Farms Restaurant, which was included in our weekend package.  It’s the standard “Amish Buffet” stuff, and it was pretty good.  From there we headed across the street to catch a buggy ride tour of an Amish farm.  While we were at the farm, we bought a little cloth train book for Carrie.

After the buggy ride we headed to the Strasburg Railroad to catch the train.  It was really busy (Saturday.. what did we expect?), and I was getting really hungry so we decided to put the train ride off until the next day.  We did catch a ride on the Cagney train while we were there, and poked around in the various gift shops before heading across the street to have lunch at Issacs again.  (For those who don’t know, a Cagney is a miniature replica live steam engine.)

The day was moving by pretty fast but we thought we might have time to fit in the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum before it closed.  We were there for four hours and still didn’t get to see all of it because they closed before we could see the outside displays.  That place is HUGE.

So, it was Saturday night and we still had mini golf tickets to use from the day passes, so we played the Gold course at Village Greens.  23 holes of AWESOME.  It’s a 23 hole course (who’s ever heard of that) with all natural obstacles that meanders through the woods.  I’m sure it’s a pretty cool course during the day but we played under the lights in the dark — pure wickedness.  We had a ton of fun.  If you’re ever in the area, you need to play that course.  We capped off the day with dinner at Applebees in town (at least it was a safe dinner).

We did not sleep in on Sunday morning because we wanted to get breakfast, ride the Strasburg Railroad, and get home at a respectable hour.  We arrived at the Railroad about an hour before the first train departure and got an extra special treat — there was a photo shoot going on with one of the engines, so we were able to get really close to it while it did various maneuvers.  I got lots of great pictures, and John was very excited.  We got our train ride and then headed out.

John decided that maybe we should try the other mini golf place that was on our way out of town after lunch, so I got a twofer that weekend.  It was a pretty nice course, but the one from the night before is still our favorite.

Catching Up

It’s been a while since I’ve written much.  I ended up being sent on a last-minute business trip to Huntsville the week of April 19th.  Term papers and final projects were due for my college classes last week. I just got back from a business trip to Orlando this week.  Finished the last of my final exams this morning.  Time to start being a human again.

We’ve got 40+ mph winds here today; it’s crazy.

I have tomatoes, peppers (bell, hot banana, red hot cherry, and cubanelle), sweet onions, green onions, carrots, radishes, green and yellow squash, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, brussels sprouts, oregano, parsley, mint, basil, cilantro, green beans and rhubarb in the ground.  Wow, that’s a lot of stuff.  I still have one more variety of tomatoes to get down and then I think I’m done.

I’m also happy to report that I’m almost famous.

In March and April I was working on a magazine article on software assurance.  After responding to some comments that the editors had, I was informed this week that they’ve accepted it and sent it in as part of the package for the September/October issue.  This certainly doesn’t mean that it will get published; apparently the decision about what gets published and what doesn’t in this magazine is made by Department of Homeland Security.  For those of you who are in the Defense industry, keep an eye out for the September/October issue of CrossTalk.  If DHS liked it, my article will be in there; if not then it will be held by the editors for a future issue.  It’s not a paid thing, but it is very exciting … at least for me.

Also in the area of exciting:  one of my major clients, Xerox, has asked me to participate in a webinar that they will be doing this month about security features of multifunction devices (copiers, for you laymen).  I will be speaking about the Common Criteria during the webinar.  An announcement was emailed out to their customers, but nothing is on the website yet.  I’ll link it here when it does go live.  Again, not life changing but very exciting for me.  These small opportunities give me a sense of validation that I am an expert in my field.

In general, March and April brought me amazing highs (me, famous?  Mamma Mia! on Broadway?) and insane lows (how many people get rejected by Korea for adoption, exactly?).  I’ve been looking forward to some downtime this month to get my classes finished, my veggies in the ground, and back to being a human being….. before classes start again on June 1st.  *ugh*

NYC 2012 — Mamma Mia!

John has been taunting me with a surprise since January.  He told my close friend Diane what the surprise was — so she knew for 2 months!  But I didn’t get to find out until the week before.  The surprise was a day-trip to New York City (via Amtrak) to see Mamma Mia! on Broadway.

We got to NYC around 10am and wandered around for a couple of hours.  Along the way we stopped at Starbucks for warm drinks.  Neither of us realized how many there are in NYC; I swear, there is one on every corner! We stopped in the Times Square information center to get some maps and brochures of what’s in the area (because we did have some time to kill).  While we were in there, we saw an exhibit of little pieces of colored paper tacked to a wall with notes on them.  It turns out that since 2007, the folks that drop the ball have been putting out pieces of colored confetti for people to write wishes on.  On New Years Eve, this confetti is what gets tossed off the top of buildings onto the crowd below.  The temptation was too great — I had to write out my wish for NYE 2011.  Can you guess what it was?  LOL

Eventually we needed some lunch so we stopped at an Irish pub for fish and chips.  It wasn’t the world’s greatest – -that honor still goes to Yorkshire County Fish Shop at Epcot.  The bread was soggy, but the fish and the tartar sauce were tasty.  John enjoyed a black and tan while he was there.

And then the show.  The theatre was very small.  The show was absolutely awesome; 100x better than the movie.  If there had to be a first time ever for seeing a real show on Broadway, then this was the best one John could have picked.  By the end, everyone was standing up and dancing — except for me because I felt bad for the little kids in the row behind me who couldn’t see.

We had such a great day.  It was so nice to get away, just us, with no cell phones ringing, a good time to look forward to after the hard time we’ve had recently, and we had all day long to just talk.

Disney 2010: The End

If you’ve been reading the blog, then you know that we did see the shuttle launch yesterday (and you got to see what I saw through my camera video), so I won’t go into all of that.

We got back to the hotel a lot earlier yesterday than we did after Sunday’s failed launch attempt.  We were snug as bugs in a rug by 6:30am.  I was only able to sleep until around 9:30, but John was happily snoozing until 12pm.  We packed our bags and grabbed lunch at a nearby McDonalds (not the “unique” one) before heading to the airport.  Along the way we stopped for reading materials and to get fuel.

Getting through the security line took forever with all of the other stranded passengers there.  We each had a Mocha Frappacino while we were waiting.  I blogged and John read one of his new magazines.  Our flight from Orlando to Atlanta departed on time; we kicked back with our free business class upgrades (again, thanks to my business travel) and enjoyed a couple of drinks on Airtran.  As it turned out, the crew for our first flight was the same crew for the second flight so we really had all the time in the world to make our connection since it couldn’t leave without them.

Neither of us was very comfortable until the flight from Atlanta to Baltimore was wheels-up; we both really just wanted to be home and were worried that the flight would get delayed or canceled, since BWI only had one runway open and other airlines were still canceling their flights.  But Airtran got us home, on time.

Our neighbor, Mark, did an amazing job getting our driveway clear.  I would almost say that I don’t know what we would have done without him, except that some of our close friends did show up on Sunday intending to do the job themselves.  We were in bed around 1am, and very happy to be here.  Just in time for Snowmegeddon 2.0, or Snowmeggedon Jr. or Son of Snowmeggedon, or Snoverkill…. or whatever we’re calling this second storm.

Since I just can’t post without pictures, here are some pictures that I took today of what happened while we were gone.

Disney 2010: Day 9

It took us a while to recover from being awake over 24 hours in an attempt to see the space shuttle launch, but we were finally up and around, and ready for lunch by 2pm.  The first thing we did was go check out the “Most Unique McDonald’s in the World” right down the street.  It’s definitely unique.  The entire inside is a huge arcade and they have amazing stuff on the menu, like:

Very neat but very noisy, so we had lunch at a Chili’s that was down the street.  After lunch we played mini-golf at my favorite course, where  John beat me by 9.

We wandered around some after that, looking for reading material to pass the time before leaving for the shuttle launch attempt and for our wait at the airport.  We also stopped by the model train exhibit, but John didn’t want to go in because he’s not into G-scale.  When we got back to our room around 6pm, we had this waiting for us:

Mark, Geoff and Eric had gone to our house to shovel our driveway; but when they arrived the found that our neighbor, also Mark, had already done it.  So they sent us this photo instead.  We still can’t believe that our neighbor spent all that time shoveling, and that we had friends who were prepared to do it too.

We watched the Superbowl through the end of the 3rd quarter and then went to get some dinner around 9pm at a tapas restaurant that I love to go to when I’m down here on business.  And we napped some more too.

And then Lee and his dad picked us up at 12am for launch attempt #2.  Short story is:  yes, we got to see it launch at 4:14am.  It lit up the whole sky like sunrise x2.  Here’s a video I took with my cheap little “point and shoot” camera.

Disney 2010: Day 8 (Part 2)

What day is it again?  We’ve lost track of all time and space at this point.

We headed out for dinner around 7pm and wandered around some.  Finally settled on TGI Fridays before heading back to the hotel to kill time before we were supposed to meet up with Lee for the shuttle launch.  We watched the Bud Shootout, and then John surfed the internet while I started watching Runaway Jury.  Almost forgot, we saw this insane Lobstermobile, on the way back to our room, at the “Boston Lobster Feast” buffet.  The lobster must weigh as much as the car.

Lee called around 11:20pm, so we headed downstairs to meet him at the front of the hotel.  It took around an hour to get to Kennedy Space Center where we would be watching the launch of STS-130.  It was scheduled to go at 4:39am.  It was very chilly on the causeway where employees were assigned to park.  Not much wind, but my hands were freezing as I tried to hold on to my hot chocolate.  We were about 4.5 miles away from the launch pad and could see the shuttle.  Unfortunately my little P&S camera isn’t good enough to get decent shots so Lee told me he’d send me his once we’re all done.

I sent some commemorative envelopes to selected people at home.  They’re addressed and stamped, but won’t get postmarked and mailed until the launch has actually happened.  And then we waited, and waited, and waited some more.  As we were waiting, the clouds were starting to move in and the chance of a launch dropped from 80% to 30%.  Unfortunately the numbers just weren’t on our side — the launch was scrubbed at T-9 (4:30am) because the clouds just wouldn’t clear.  It’s been rescheduled for 4:14am Sunday night, so I think we’re going to try again while we’re here.

It took us over 3 hours to get back to our hotel because the traffic was so bad.  John is still sleeping, and I’ve been up for less than an hour.  I think we’re going to putz around Orlando some and then have dinner at Cafe Tu Tu Tango before heading out again tonight.  Since my camera won’t capture any of this, here are some photos from NASA’s photo gallery. (Photo credits and copyright as described on the NASA website.)

Disney 2010: Day 7

We woke up to this monster:

We started the day somewhat sure we aren’t going home, but still hoping that the storm would pass quickly and we could get out of here.

Our first stop for the day was Animal Kingdom where we had some “cleanup” to do.  We had missed the Kilamonjaro Safari and the Finding Nemo show on our first cruise through,  so we came back to do them.  While we were at Animal Kingdom we also finally caught a glimpse of the “Tree Lady” who I’ve been looking for but never seen.  It’s very cool to watch how she slowly walks around on those stilts and raises long poles above her head to mimic trees that are around her.  When she covers her face, you would never know she wasn’t a real tree.

And look what else we found!  He’s only been here for three weeks (which is still a lot longer than the newborn monkey we saw — 3 days old).

From Animal Kingdom, we took a bus to the Ticket and Transportation Center, and then a ferry from there to Magic Kingdom to finish up our shopping.  We left Magic Kingdom just as the rain started. But not before we saw these HUGE rice krispies treats in the Main Street Confectionary.  They’re $50 each.

I called our friend Pam to send her hugs over the wires since she was supposed to be getting married on Saturday.  All is well — they and their officiant are staying overnight at the resort where the wedding is, so they’re getting married no matter what.  But she mentioned that she had heard that flights were being canceled already.  I called Airtran and sat on hold for 35 minutes and was told ours was not canceled.  20 minutes later in our room (where we found a puppy towel animal) I got an email that our flight is canceled.  UGH.  Right now we’re rebooked for a flight home at 6:30pm on MONDAY; and that’s the first one I could get. So the plan of the moment is to:

• Pick up a rental car at the Disney Car Care Center
• Check out of Animal Kingdom Kidani Village and check in at the La Quinta downtown
• Meet up with Lee to see the shuttle launch from the NASA employee guest area (super cool!)
• Do whatever on Sunday afternoon and Monday
• Fly out Monday night and then recover at home on Tuesday

I did laundry at the resort while I was arranging the car and new flight info, and making phone calls to let everyone and their mother know what’s up.  With all of that done, we had a wonderful evening to look forward to at “Jiko: The Cooking Place” at the Jambo House side of the resort.  We had decided to do a really nice dinner for our last night down here, and this restaurant took 2 table service credits.  It was definitely worth both of them.  When we arrived at the resort, they were still doing free family portraits, so we stopped by and had pictures taken before dinner.  I’m not going to bother going into all of the details of dinner.  Just know that we ate ostrich, shrimp, lamb, goat cheeses, and had these for dessert:

John’s was a Lemon White-Chocolate Mousse with Sour Cream Ice Cream.  Mine was a trio of choclate goodness — a Flourless Chocolate Cake, White Chocolate Ice Cream, and Chocolate Mousse.  They also brought this tasty Pistachio Creme Brulee as a gift for our anniversary.  The drawings on both my plate and the “gift” plate are actually chocolate that’s been painted on.  “Shangilia”, on the plate below, means “Congratulations” in Swahili.  They also gave us a card with anniversary good wishes written in 6 African dialects.

For anyone who is keeping score, here is our current family of towel animals that we’ve found in our room… they wanted a group portrait.

When we went to bed, we were looking at this.  Oh my.

Disney 2010: Day 8 (Part 1)

I know Day 8 isn’t over yet, but I figured I’d post anyway.  We’re at our new hotel now; John is napping and I’m on hold with Airtran checking to see if we can get a better flight out of here.35 minutes on hold and counting……

First things first.  We woke up to this monster:

We slept in and got everything packed up to go.  I took a couple of final pictures of the view from our patio and the Lion King characters in the sheers before we headed to Downtown Disney to buy a gift for the guy who’s watching our cats.

We did a little shopping at Downtown Disney, then had lunch at T-Rex.  We got an appetizer platter that included chips and queso, onion rings, a quesadilla, bruschetta with eggplant and goat cheese, and St. Louis-style ribs.  It was very tasty, and we were glad to be able to spend time in there — it’s very intricately themed.

And then we picked up our rental car.  I reserved a Chevy Aveo for $55 and fully expect to have some issues getting all of our luggage into it.  But there was no Aveo waiting for us; instead, we got this.  Yes, my friends, that is a brand new Dodge Charger.  It’s pretty sweet.

So, we’re here in downtown Orlando, with a rental car, and plans to meet Lee and his dad around 10pm or so to go see the launch tomorrow morning.  We’re in the hotel that I stay at when I come down here on business, so I can’t wait to show John my favorite restaurant and mini-golf course which are on the other side of the block.  Airtran finally answered and it looks like there’s nothing open until Monday; so no flight changes.  But they did tell me that there are some business class upgrades left available for me to use my free vouchers on (from my frequent flier miles), so I will call after midnight while we’re waiting over at Kennedy Space Center to claim them.

Signing off for now so John can use the computer to pay our bills.

Disney 2010: Day 6

We started our day at Hollywood Studios to finish up the things we missed on Sunday.  First we did Toy Story Mania (and grabbed Fastpasses for later), then the Toy Story Character spot to see Buzz and Woody.  John beat me by almost 10,000 points.

We had some time to kill before the Beauty and the Beast live theatre show, so we browsed the shops down the boulevard and collected some pressed coins.  A very nice lady in the candy shop gave us chocolate covered marshmallows on sticks for anniversary.  They had sprinkles and M&Ms on them too — talk about sweet.  Holy cow!

Along the way, we ran into a DVC kiosk.  We’ve periodically talked about investigating the Disney Vacation Club (timeshare) since this is our fourth trip, but have never actually done it.  With almost no plans for the rest of our day and $100 in it for us, we went ahead and made the appointment to go see Saratoga Springs later that afternoon.  From there we got to Beauty and the Beast with a few minutes to spare.  It was a great show!  Lots of singing and dancing; all of the songs from the movie.

Our appointment with DVC wasn’t until 1:40 and our Toy Story Mania Fastpasses didn’t start until 12:50, so we had more time to kill.  First on the list was lunch, which ended up being at the Studio Catering Flatbread Grill.  John had a chicken caesar wrap that he says was pretty good.  I went with the BBQ.  We were right next to the Honey I Shrunk the Kids movie set, so we decided to stop and check that out.  Pretty darned cool!  We  had a great time climbing the spider webs.

After the webs we used our TSM Fastpasses.  This time I won… and then off to Saratoga Springs for our DVC tour.

The Saratoga Springs resort is beautiful, and it’s probably the one that we would call our “home away from home” if we were to buy into DVC.  The DVC program itself would seriously work for us because we could use it at any Disney resort world-wide, or at over 500 other locations world-wide….. and a lot of the places we have been talking about going (Gatlinburg TN, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Mexico, Great Britan, France, Sedona AZ, etc) are on the club.  The question for us is:  do the numbers really work with the way we vacation. The buy-in is reasonable, but there are annual maintenance fees of up to $700 (increasing by up to 2% per year) for the next 50 years to think about.  So we really need to think about that, run some numbers, create massive spreadsheets, pray, and think some more.  But enough of that — here are some pictures of a one-bedroom studio with a jacuzzi tub that looks out on the lake (the room we’d probably be renting with our points).

After the tour they dropped us by the ice cream parlor for sundaes, but we passed because we had dinner scheduled at Restaurant Marakesh in Epcot later that evening.  We did stop for free family portraits though.  They did the standard one, but after watching John enjoying the toy train that was running around the tops of the walls, they did one over at the ice cream bar with the train in the background too and gave us both.  Unfortunately they’re only printed copies; I may try to scan them later because the second one is pretty neat.

And then it was off to Epcot where we saw a funnel cloud, Alice in Wonderland, Mary Poppins and lots of seagulls before dinner.  We had dinner at Restaurant Marakesh in Morocco.  Instant favorite.  We both had couscous dishes; mine was beef with zucchini and other veggies.  John’s had beef, plums, sesame seeds and a honey sauce.  Both were amazing.  The entertainment was good too.

After dinner we wandered around some, and John bought me a pearl at the Pick-A-Pearl stand in Japan.  It’s pretty crazy; you select an oyster and they shuck it right there with lots of ceremony and drums banging.  It was a very pretty 7.5mm pearl; white with some pink shine to it.  We had it mounted on a very simple gold setting that would fit on the necklace I brought down here with me.  We finished the evening at the tequila bar in Mexico.  I bought a flight of three traditional tequilas, but John didn’t want any.  The bar tender brought over a free fourth shot for my birthday.  No worries — they were only 1/2-ounce shots; not whole ones!  John had one, and I had the other three.  And then we went back to our room where these little guys were waiting for us.

So.. what’s next?  We’ll finish up Animal Kingdom and get our shopping done at Magic Kingdom.  We’re keeping an eye on the weather back home; not quite sure what to expect.

Disney 2010: Day 5

Yesterday was another sleep-in day.  We didn’t get out of here until around 9am.  We rode a bus to Hollywood Studios to catch a bus to the Swan and Dolphin resorts so that we could play a round of mini-golf at Fantasia Gardens.  (Pictures of every hole are in the gallery.)  John was beating me pretty badly up front, but we ended up finishing 2 strokes apart and both beat par.

From there we caught a boat to Epcot and wasted some time walking around World Showcase before our 1pm lunch ressie at Nine Dragons.  We love that place. After that we wandered around through Norway before deciding to head to Magic Kingdom and do everything we didn’t get to do the day before.  First up was a ride on the WDW Railroad around to Toontown, where we got pictures with the Fairies.  Fawn and Tink were very excited by my firefly button (a light-up Tinkerbell), but Tink was a bit jealous that she didn’t have fireflies too.  We tried to explain to Terrance how John doesn’t need Pixie Dust to fly, but he just wasn’t getting the concept of a flying machine that carried people.  And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you haven’t seen the first Tinkerbell movie, LOL.

Then we rode Space Mountain, which is freshly refurbed.  The new theming is pretty cool, and the ride is smoother, but it still jerks you around from side to side.  The first year we came, we rode it 4 or 5 times in a row.  This time we gave our Fastpasses to someone else to use because once (and the headaches that came with it) was just enough for us.  Guess we’ve got to grow up sometime, right?

We finished the evening with sandwiches at DTD, where I discovered that my room key had been lost or stolen or something.  Guest Services assured us that our resort could handle that pretty easily (and we never link our credit card to the thing!), so we stopped by Goofy’s Candy shop  for breakfast pastries and a choclate covered strawberry for me before catching a bus back to the resort.

The front desk invalidated my old key/ticket and issued me a new one with just a few clicks of a button, and we verified that all of our meal credits were in order, then finished the evening with a drink in the Sanaa lounge and 4 rounds of air hockey.  I think I my have scored more points on myself than John did.  My hand-eye coordination……. eh, not so much.  But we had fun, and that’s what counts.

We’re getting phone calls, emails and Facebook messages about the snow that’s coming, and we actually spent some time being a bit nervous about it.  I mean…. what happens if our flight gets cancelled?  Do they ship us back to this Deluxe resort where we’d have to pay $500/night to stay over?  Do we get sent to a random hotel at the airport?  Does AirTran put us up somewhere?  What happens to our bags?  Do I even have a chance at getting to Italy now?

Nothing we can do by worrying about it, so whatever happens, happens I guess.