MarkBarbieri
Semi-retired
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2006
- Messages
- 6,172
We're back. We got in today at around 4:00 PM. We spent 1.5 days in the car in each direction and 13 days in Orlando. That worked out to 2 days at the beach, 10 days at the theme parks, 8 days at the water parks (most of those were also theme park days), and 1 day at Disney Quest.
Despite being at the parks more, I think I took fewer pictures than past trips (which were usually 1 week trips). Part of that was because I didn't carry a camera at the water parks on most days. Part of that was because it was so blasted hot. I'm from Houston, where the weather is similar, but it's still just too darned hot and humid.
We stayed at Fort Wilderness campground. We tent camped. We use a window AC for the tent and a fridge to keep our food stuff cool. That worked well enough for a place to stay at night, but it was almost useless as a place to relax in the afternoon.
Our typical day consisted of a quick breakfast at camp. Then we set out for the 8:00 AM early entry park on most days. We hit as many rides as we could in the morning and collected as many fast passes as possible while doing that. In the afternoon, we took in shows, used our fast passes, and left for the water parks. We sometimes went back to a park in the evening. We didn't spend much time in the parks at night. We're a morning family, and the kids just couldn't handle being out much past 9:00. I made a couple of solo trips to the Magic Kingdom at night, but they weren't very productive. The park was amazingly crowded at midnight (50 minute wait for Peter Pan for example) and it was still really muggy.
I never really got my photography mojo going. I think I got a few nice shots, but nothing really stunning or exciting. I'm blaming the heat. Really good photography requires putting out extra effort to think things through and get things just right. When I get really hot, I just want to muddle through things and get them over with.
The kids were also a different dynamic this time. On our last trip, they were in strollers and basically did what we wanted to do. On this trip, they were walking and doing a lot more to call the shots. That meant more rides and fewer shows. They were also engrossed in their new iPod Touches between attractions, so there were a lot fewer cute kid photo opps.
When we set out, I had intended to shoot a fair amount of video. I ended up shooting very little. Good video is hard. It's not good when you are feeling hot and lazy. I had also planned to do interviews with the kids back at camp during down times, but we didn't seem to have many of those. When we did, it was too hot to sit around camp and do video work.
We got to almost everything we wanted to see. The big ones that we skipped were Wishes (10:00 PM was just too late for the boys) and Fantasmic. We tried during our last week, but it was rained out Tuesday, wasn't showing on Wednesday, and was rained out again on Thursday. Technically, the show might have gone on Thursday night, but we got there 1.5 hours early and were chased off because a thunderstorm erupted right over the park. Rather than wait it out in the rain, we packed up and went back camp.
We had another reason for heading back to camp that night. Tuesday night's storm flooded our tent. We left a corner of the rain fly unconnected (not sure how we missed that) and enough water got into the tent to soak two of the four sleeping positions. The kids had already fallen asleep in the van, so we left them there, cleanup the up the tent, and took the other two places. In the middle of the night, the boys woke up, so we let them have the tent while we did laundry and slept in the van.
On Thursday, we were chased out of Blizzard Beach by a particularly violent thunderstorm. On our way from there to DHS, we stopped by to check on the tent. This time the tent was intact, but our campsite's drainage was so bad and so much rain had fallen that the tent was sitting in about 2 inches of water. We shoveled away most of the water with a boogie board. The interior of the tent was damp but habitable. Our screen shelter over the picnic table was destroyed by the storm. It was a cheapie, so it was no big loss. The one significant loss was that my 5DM2 battery charger was plugged in under it and got soaked. I'm giving it a few days to dry out, but I have little hope that it will work again. After that, we battened everything down again and went to go see Fantasmic. After we were driven from the theater by another storm, we decided that it would be best to get back to the campsite to deal with any more water related issues. Everything turned out OK that time.
Overall, the trip was a moderate success. The heat was more bothersome than I had anticipated. On the other hand, the kids love the water parks and the beach. The water parks were less crowded than I expected, with most of the slides we used having 5 minute waits most of the time. The Typhoon Lagoon wave pool was a huge hit.
OK. that's enough yapping. I'll make future posts a lot more photography related. I'll probably be loading pictures onto the computer most of tonight and playing with them tomorrow. I'll start having things ready to post tomorrow.
While at the parks, I dumped pictures from the memory cards into Lightroom on my laptop. Because the laptop drive is small, I actually wrote the photos directly to 2 external USB drives. I used one as the primary Lightroom location and the other as the backup, so I automatically got two copies when I imported. The downside was that the drives are super slow, so I couldn't really work with the photos on the laptop. Then again, given the heat, I wasn't really going to spend much time with them anyway.
Despite being at the parks more, I think I took fewer pictures than past trips (which were usually 1 week trips). Part of that was because I didn't carry a camera at the water parks on most days. Part of that was because it was so blasted hot. I'm from Houston, where the weather is similar, but it's still just too darned hot and humid.
We stayed at Fort Wilderness campground. We tent camped. We use a window AC for the tent and a fridge to keep our food stuff cool. That worked well enough for a place to stay at night, but it was almost useless as a place to relax in the afternoon.
Our typical day consisted of a quick breakfast at camp. Then we set out for the 8:00 AM early entry park on most days. We hit as many rides as we could in the morning and collected as many fast passes as possible while doing that. In the afternoon, we took in shows, used our fast passes, and left for the water parks. We sometimes went back to a park in the evening. We didn't spend much time in the parks at night. We're a morning family, and the kids just couldn't handle being out much past 9:00. I made a couple of solo trips to the Magic Kingdom at night, but they weren't very productive. The park was amazingly crowded at midnight (50 minute wait for Peter Pan for example) and it was still really muggy.
I never really got my photography mojo going. I think I got a few nice shots, but nothing really stunning or exciting. I'm blaming the heat. Really good photography requires putting out extra effort to think things through and get things just right. When I get really hot, I just want to muddle through things and get them over with.
The kids were also a different dynamic this time. On our last trip, they were in strollers and basically did what we wanted to do. On this trip, they were walking and doing a lot more to call the shots. That meant more rides and fewer shows. They were also engrossed in their new iPod Touches between attractions, so there were a lot fewer cute kid photo opps.
When we set out, I had intended to shoot a fair amount of video. I ended up shooting very little. Good video is hard. It's not good when you are feeling hot and lazy. I had also planned to do interviews with the kids back at camp during down times, but we didn't seem to have many of those. When we did, it was too hot to sit around camp and do video work.
We got to almost everything we wanted to see. The big ones that we skipped were Wishes (10:00 PM was just too late for the boys) and Fantasmic. We tried during our last week, but it was rained out Tuesday, wasn't showing on Wednesday, and was rained out again on Thursday. Technically, the show might have gone on Thursday night, but we got there 1.5 hours early and were chased off because a thunderstorm erupted right over the park. Rather than wait it out in the rain, we packed up and went back camp.
We had another reason for heading back to camp that night. Tuesday night's storm flooded our tent. We left a corner of the rain fly unconnected (not sure how we missed that) and enough water got into the tent to soak two of the four sleeping positions. The kids had already fallen asleep in the van, so we left them there, cleanup the up the tent, and took the other two places. In the middle of the night, the boys woke up, so we let them have the tent while we did laundry and slept in the van.
On Thursday, we were chased out of Blizzard Beach by a particularly violent thunderstorm. On our way from there to DHS, we stopped by to check on the tent. This time the tent was intact, but our campsite's drainage was so bad and so much rain had fallen that the tent was sitting in about 2 inches of water. We shoveled away most of the water with a boogie board. The interior of the tent was damp but habitable. Our screen shelter over the picnic table was destroyed by the storm. It was a cheapie, so it was no big loss. The one significant loss was that my 5DM2 battery charger was plugged in under it and got soaked. I'm giving it a few days to dry out, but I have little hope that it will work again. After that, we battened everything down again and went to go see Fantasmic. After we were driven from the theater by another storm, we decided that it would be best to get back to the campsite to deal with any more water related issues. Everything turned out OK that time.
Overall, the trip was a moderate success. The heat was more bothersome than I had anticipated. On the other hand, the kids love the water parks and the beach. The water parks were less crowded than I expected, with most of the slides we used having 5 minute waits most of the time. The Typhoon Lagoon wave pool was a huge hit.
OK. that's enough yapping. I'll make future posts a lot more photography related. I'll probably be loading pictures onto the computer most of tonight and playing with them tomorrow. I'll start having things ready to post tomorrow.
While at the parks, I dumped pictures from the memory cards into Lightroom on my laptop. Because the laptop drive is small, I actually wrote the photos directly to 2 external USB drives. I used one as the primary Lightroom location and the other as the backup, so I automatically got two copies when I imported. The downside was that the drives are super slow, so I couldn't really work with the photos on the laptop. Then again, given the heat, I wasn't really going to spend much time with them anyway.
Too bad about all the rain and the heat....
I'm going in the opposite direction, only 2,512 last drive. Hey Mark, here's a question - how many of those are separate photos and how many are series of burst shots? 937 seems like a lot of shots for one day unless you're really cranking out a lot of burst shots or fireworks shots.
