The Moist Exhausting Free Trip Ever - Link to Part II Thread pg. 244

[nittanyliongirl02]

Hey Glenn! I'm back after a loooong weekend in PA for a wedding. I loved the posts though! On our honeymoon, DH and I also stayed in the Casitas, and while it was nice, the hike to the Dig Site did seem to take forever. We tended to spend the majority of our pool time at the quiet pool near the gym.

As for the piano show, I had no idea it even existed?! Does he play every night, or just certain nights of the week? It seems like it would be a great way to cap off the night and relax (with beverages of course!).

 

[englishrose47]

Morning Glen !!!!

 

[glennbo123]

That was rich! Sketchy. I love it!

I must admit...that had gone right over my head.

I'll bet you are a stylin' kind of 50 somethin' kind o' guy.

Yes, you certainly have me pegged!

Marvin, are you forgetting that some people on here have actually met you, and can call you out on these statements?!

The mortified kids was the part that was left to be exactly like you! I don't need the other stuff to get them to mortified, they already get that way whenever Dad does anything that draws attention. (not that I ever do )

Okay, this is more like it. Totally believable.

Sometimes I wonder if it's simply my very existence.

It's good to hear that this is universal between parents and teens.

Yeah, I think they're finally catching on! I guess they realized how much $$ they are losing to off-property resorts and rental homes/condos.

I think so. It's definitely more than just adding another hotel with a different theme.

Hey Glenn! I'm back after a loooong weekend in PA for a wedding. I loved the posts though! On our honeymoon, DH and I also stayed in the Casitas, and while it was nice, the hike to the Dig Site did seem to take forever. We tended to spend the majority of our pool time at the quiet pool near the gym.

Thanks! Yes, it was quite a hike. We used that same quiet pool you described later in the week.

As for the piano show, I had no idea it even existed?! Does he play every night, or just certain nights of the week? It seems like it would be a great way to cap off the night and relax (with beverages of course!).

Now I'm wondering where I first heard of him? It was probably somebody else's TR, but I don't remember! He's there (usually) Wed-Sat nights. You have to check his schedule (Link to Yeehaa Bob's website) to be sure, because he sometimes has out-of-town gigs that cause him to not be at POR.

Morning Glen !!!!

Morning, er I mean, good afternoon Rosie!

 

[marvali]

Marvin, are you forgetting that some people on here have actually met you, and can call you out on these statements?!

Okay, this is more like it. Totally believable.

Now THERE'S the glennbo I know and love..........






Well, tolerate anyway!!!

 

[glennbo123]

Now THERE'S the glennbo I know and love..........


Well, tolerate anyway!!!

I know that smiley doesn't relate....I just haven't found an occasion to use it yet.

 

[glennbo123]

Day 2 - Part 1

For our first full-day at Disney, we planned to finally get to a park, Disney Hollywood Studios namely, and we’d be there for the final day of Star Wars Weekends for 2010. Yes, that would mean it’d be crowded, but this was our only chance. We got up around 7, had cereal bars for breakfast, and I got to try the Starbucks Via I had brought with me for my morning coffee. I’d had some at home, and thought they were quite good, but here at Coronado Springs it tasted “plastic-y”. It was due to the plastic coffee cups they give you at the moderate resorts, and when we got to Kidani that situation would rectify itself with the ceramic mugs that are there. Well, at least I got some caffeine anyway.

While we were enjoying our cereal bar and plastic-y coffee breakfast, Judy went down to the Convention Center to get our PChef shirts. While she was gone, the girls were doing their hair, or whatever it is that girls do to get ready, and I said to James, “Psst. C’mere.” I showed him a piece of paper, with my hand-written notes. “I jotted this down from the Internet. They’re ways to boost your score on Toy Story Mania.” Boy, did his eyes light up. I had wanted to read over them with him while we were on the plane the day before, but I just never got around to it. He was playing with his Nintendo DS the whole time, and I was reading and resting. Anyway, he didn't want the girls to get this valuable information, so he said in a loud voice, “ah, let’s go outside and put some sunscreen on.” (Like he ever does that voluntarily.) Then we went outside of the room and started quickly reading the game tips. There was something for each scene on how to get some higher-point-value targets. On some of them, we had to work together. For example, we’d each have to shoot 5 balloons on each of our sides of the screen, only once, and then some higher targets would appear. Stuff like that. It was a lot to remember, and we had very little time.

After only a minute or two, Judy returned and we went back inside. When Judy entered with the shirts, Lauren said “Oh, red?! Why’d they have to be red? I look terrible in red.” Judy said she thought the same thing when she saw them – she wasn’t happy that they were red. I didn’t really have much of an opinion on it one way or the other.

We got to DHS right about 9am, and had just missed the rope-drop crowd. To the right of the ticket booths as you enter the park, cast members were giving out fastpasses for autographs of the Star Wars celebrities who were there that day. The girls weren’t interested in getting them, but James and I went through and got one for Peter Mayhew (the actor who played Chewbacca). Wait, I need to describe the setup better. Okay, so there were several cast members over to the side, and for each celebrity there was a cast member holding a sign with the name of the celebrity, and another cast member handing out the fastpasses, and still more cast members urging guests to come over for fastpasses. Since we had missed the rope drop crowd, and the hard-core Star Wars fans that were undoubtedly lined-up way before the park opened, almost no park guests were over getting fastpasses – cast members were waving people over. I think they just wanted to get rid of their fastpasses so they could be done with that particular job for the day. All right, now that you understand the setup better, I can continue. So, like I said we got fastpasses for Peter Mayhew, and then I turned and walked up to the cast member giving out James Arnold Taylor (voice of Obi-wan Kenobi on the “Star Wars the Clone Wars” cartoon) fastpasses. But we were rebuffed by a cast member who told us that we could only get one fastpass at a time. For more, we had to walk all the way around the ticket booths and re-enter the line. (The non-existent line.) Sooo…we started walking around the ticket booths. The stormtroopers were on the roof of the park entrance, like they had been when we at Star Wars weekends back in 2005.

Since I had to go for a little walk, I handed my camera to Marlene and asked her to take some pictures of them. She took several! (Glad I wasn't using film.)

They had some new banter going on this time. I heard one of them say, “He’s trying to use the Jedi mind trick on you -- look away!” Then a little bit later: “You’ll never be able to show your helmet anywhere!”

We walked a little ways along the ticket booths and I thought “this is ridiculous” and we cut back through to the other side and went back to get another celebrity autograph fastpass. The "walk around the ticket booths and get back in line" rule probably made a lot of sense earlier, when there was a big line....but now, not so much. We got our James Arnold Taylor fastpasses and met back up with the girls and entered the park.

Here’s what it looked like at the front of the park that morning.

Nice weather, busy park.

Since our first celebrity autograph time wasn’t until later in the morning, we decided we’d start-off with a Toy Story Midway Mania fastpass. We walked to the fastpass line which extended all the way back to the theater for The Little Mermaid show. But what are you going to do? We got in line anyway. After we made it about halfway, Judy said “We don’t all have to be here. The standby line is growing, we’ll get in line and you can join us after you get the fastpasses.” I had thought of that, but the fastpass line was so long I was afraid they would enter the building before I got there. I’m okay with squeezing into line with my family while they’re still outside, but I don’t want to be one of those people who are going through the line, “excuse me, excuse me” to reach their family. That’s a little rude. So, they left and after a bit I had our fastpasses.

They were for 11:55, not really good on a normal park day, but we had some celebrity autographs to get to, so this would work out fine. Oh, seeing the picture above, I’ll mention that when I wrote last year’s trip report I noticed that a couple of times when I took the fastpass pictures I had captured some of the crowd in the background, (albeit out of focus), and I liked that….that you could get a sense of the park. So, I decided that I’d try to do that for all of them this year.

So, I joined my family in the TSM standby line. It wasn’t a problem, they were still outside. Way outside. It was already really hot. We were all getting pretty hot and sweaty. We could see some Star Wars characters out getting photos with people, but we were too far away for a good picture. We saw a Gamorrean guard, who was the guy who had a pig snout at Jabba the Hut’s palace in "Return of the Jedi". This website http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Gamorrean says they are a “porcine humanoid” which describes it well! All I know is it must have been really hot for those cast members in costume.

When I had been in the fastpass line, there was an elderly couple a few people behind me on ECV scooters. They apparently had no idea what the line was for, because they didn’t even get fastpasses -- they just got out of line when they got to the fastpass machines. They probably just saw a line and figured it must be something good. Then they moseyed over near the standby line, but it looked like they had no idea what they were doing or where they should go. Judy went over to them and asked them if they needed help, but they said no, and scootered-away in a very slow scoot. It was actually kind of sad.

We finally made it inside of the TSM building and noticed that some of the winding, back-and-forth areas of the line were not in use. This was a good news / bad news kind of thing. Good news, in that there was less of a line than we’d imagined (and on a side note, the fastpass times were just now starting, so not a lot of people were budging in front of us), but on the bad news front, why the heck had we been standing out in the sun when we could have been in the air conditioning if they had only made the queue go through all of the twists and turns?!

It looks cool over there in Candyland!

As much fun as a barrel of monkeys.

James wanted me to take his picture in front of this, as we went along the wall.

Marlene wanted me to take her picture, while she made it appear that she was drawing this Woody artwork.

As we approached Mr. Potatohead, he took out his ear! I hadn’t seen him do that before and didn’t know that he could. I thought it was pretty cool. I quickly took a picture before he put it back in.

Then Judy said, “Whoa! What’s going on with Mr. Potatohead’s eyes?” We said, “What do you mean? They look fine to us.” She said, “They look bloodshot or something...like he’s had a rough night.” Then she took off her sunglasses and determined that something about her sunglasses made his eyes look strange. We all tried them on, and could see it too.

I tried to capture the effect by putting her sunglasses over the lens of my camera. Here’s a “before” picture, without anything over the lens.

And a couple of pictures with her sunglasses held over the lens. It works better in person, but you can kind of see the effect, mostly in his left eye (to the right of the picture).

When we got to Mr. Potatohead I asked the person behind us in line to take a picture of us for me. I started to explain how to focus it and she said she knew all about it, she had the same camera. I think it shows -- I really like the picture. She did a really nice job framing us and Mr. Potatohead. I almost used this one in my Introductory post to the TR, but I wanted to show our red shirts for the one TR title I considered.

As we neared the loading area, I started cracking my knuckles and limbering up my pop-gun arm. And I checked the “notepad” function on my cell phone. I had keyed-in Jenbear’s score that I needed to beat -- 179,200. Nuts, that was pretty darned high.

The ladies preparing to board.

James is psyched!

We boarded our car and off we went. The only “tip” for higher-score targets that either James or I could remember from my internet cheat-sheet, was to get the fox in the henhouse in the first scene. Did that. Oh yeah, then a little mouse. Okay, now what? After a couple of scenes, I could tell that I was waaaay off the pace. My final score was 147,500. Not nearly enough to beat Jenbear, not this time anyway, but at least I beat James.

Up next: It's so hard to pick a favorite Chewbacca quote
Link to next chapter

 

[marvali]

I know that smiley doesn't relate....I just haven't found an occasion to use it yet.

Rock on, Mr. Potato Head!

Day 2 - Part 1
I said to James, “Psst. C’mere.” I showed him a piece of paper, with my hand-written notes. “I jotted this down from the Internet. They’re ways to boost your score on Toy Story Mania.” Boy, did his eyes light up. I had wanted to read over them with him while we were on the plane the day before, but I just never got around to it. He was playing with his Nintendo DS the whole time, and I was reading and resting. Anyway, he didn't want the girls to get this valuable information, so he said in a loud voice, “ah, let’s go outside and put some sunscreen on.” (Like he ever does that voluntarily.) Then we went outside of the room and started quickly reading the game tips. There was something for each scene on how to get some higher-point-value targets. On some of them, we had to work together. For example, we’d each have to shoot 5 balloons on each of our sides of the screen, only once, and then some higher targets would appear. Stuff like that. It was a lot to remember, and we had very little time.

Oh man, that's just WRONG!!!



Don't you know you should start stuff like this with a "Spoiler Alert!" (now pass me that list of valuable information)

After only a minute or two, Judy returned and we went back inside. When Judy entered with the shirts, Lauren said “Oh, red?! Why’d they have to be red? I look terrible in red.” Judy said she thought the same thing when she saw them – she wasn’t happy that they were red.

Some people would complain if you hung them with a new rope!

We got to DHS right about 9am, and had just missed the rope-drop crowd. To the right of the ticket booths as you enter the park, cast members were giving out fastpasses for autographs of the Star Wars celebrities who were there that day.

Nice snag on the celebrity FPs!

Since I had to go for a little walk, I handed my camera to Marlene and asked her to take some pictures of them. She took several! (Glad I wasn't using film.)

Marlene obviously learned her skill watching you take those Candi pictures......

Since our first celebrity autograph time wasn’t until later in the morning, we decided we’d start-off with a Toy Story Midway Mania fastpass. We walked to the fastpass line which extended all the way back to the theater for The Little Mermaid show. But what are you going to do? We got in line anyway. After we made it about halfway, Judy said “We don’t all have to be here.

I'm taking it she doesn't read along when you're on TGM...

Wow, just missed RD and already 11:55!

We finally made it inside of the TSM building and noticed that some of the winding, back-and-forth areas of the line were not in use. This was a good news / bad news kind of thing. Good news, in that there was less of a line than we’d imagined (and on a side note, the fastpass times were just now starting, so not a lot of people were budging in front of us), but on the bad news front, why the heck had we been standing out in the sun when we could have been in the air conditioning if they had only made the queue go through all of the twists and turns?!

Guess they were trying to save some A/C for later in the day!

When we got to Mr. Potatohead I asked the person behind us in line to take a picture of us for me. I started to explain how to focus it and she said she knew all about it, she had the same camera. I think it shows -- I really like the picture.

Either you and Judy are getting shorter, or the kids have really grown since last summer!

We boarded our car and off we went. The only “tip” for higher-score targets that either James or I could remember from my internet cheat-sheet, was to get the fox in the henhouse in the first scene. Did that. Oh yeah, then a little mouse. Okay, now what? After a couple of scenes, I could tell that I was waaaay off the pace. My final score was 147,500. Not nearly enough to beat Jenbear, not this time anyway, but at least I beat James.

Obviously you spent too much time PTRing and not enough time studying your notes. You tried to be sneaky and STILL couldn't top Jenbear's score???? I'm not sure which is sadder, that or drowning your sorrows with the satisfaction of beating poor little James.

I know, I know, Mr. Potato Head was hungover.......

 

[onelilspark]

Mr. Potatohead definitely had a rough night.

That picture of the family is a great one though!

 

[dd50]

great update.

Love the part about red t-shirts. Girls don't like the color and men just take the t-shirt and don't care what color.

Even tho you didn't beat jenbear you did get a good score. You got some nice pics in there.

 

[englishrose47]

Great update Glen !!! TSM is a huge favorite of mine even if I suck at it !!!Had they updated the games for TS3 !! The girls are hoping they do soon !!!

 

[dd50]

Rock on, Mr. Potato Head!

You tried to be sneaky and STILL couldn't top Jenbear's score???? I'm not sure which is sadder, that or drowning your sorrows with the satisfaction of beating poor little James.

I know, I know, Mr. Potato Head was hungover.......

 

[SurfinTX]

Red shirts work for me being from Texas Tech!

We saw Mr. Potato Head pull out his ear a few times but the line was so slow the kids in the area got tired of him. When he asked them who do you love they all screamed "We hate you Mr. Potato Head!" which he then responded with "You are so Cruel!" and stopped entertaining for ten minutes or so.

I didn't notice it but what was the standby wait time you had? Ours was right at 2 hours and it was painful! You still scored fastpasses for later so you will get a chance to look over those hints.

My score was 117,000 but I was riding with my DS8 who really wasn't aware of any tricks and only scored 68,000.

Up next: It's so hard to pick a favorite Chewbacca quote

My favorite is Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh! After Artoo makes a spectacular move in 3-D chess.

 

[KatMark]

Great update. I love TSM. Nice family shot in front of Mr. Potatohead.

 

[Disneygrl36]

OK Toy Story Midway Mania to quote an a buddy from our Adventures by Disney trip to Disneyland......Toy Story Midway Mania=Pixar Crack. I love this description because it's so true....I could ride it over & over again. It's addictive.

Great family photo with Mr (I've had a rough night) spud!

 

[FairyGodmotherJen]

DH and the kids saw Mr. Potato Head take off his ear, but DH didn't have the camera ready. I missed him completely this trip, since the one time I rode it we used Fastpasses. Judy's sunglasses give quite the effect - woah!

I couldn't get over that they had a queue (ropes and all) to get a Fastpass!! DH is going to want to see that list of cheats for improving your score, though...I'm sure he's Googling them right now, since I told him about it!

 

[jane2073]

Enjoying your trip report!

I believe your wife's sunglasses are polarized. That could be why Mr. Potatohead's digital (?) eyes look odd.

 

[Disneygrl36]

Hey, I just noticed your Grand Canyon ticker. I'll have to talk to you about that sometime. I'm thinking of taking the family there next summer, and I'm not really sure what to plan. For example, I'm wondering things like is 3 days enough there or are there enough things to do to spend a whole week? If we combined it with a trip to Disneyland, should we drive to CA, with maybe a stop at Joshua Tree Nat'l Park? Just curious what your plans are.

Way OT but since you asked.......
Hey just noticed this Glenn......we have never been either. Eric really wanted to do this for his 40th birthday. We are totally ripping off the Adventures by Disney Southwest Splendors itinerary. We are flying into Grand Junction & driving to Utah to stay at The Red Cliffs Lodge. We can access Arches from her & they are right on the Colorado River too. Then we are driving & spending a night in Monument Valley before heading on to the Grand Canyon. We are staying at the Thunderbird Lodge right on the rim of the GC & we are decided to do 4 nights there. We just really don't want to be rushed & want to be able to see everything. Not sure how long of a road trip it would be to Cali...we looked at driving to Vegas to fly back but it was pretty far from the GC so we are flying back from Phoenix. Have several guide books & need to start reading since we are getting closer.

 

[JPFamilyMom]

My 2 yo LOVED all the potato head pictures. Both my kids LOVE Toy Story, and love to see the ride pictures on the computer. The picture with your family is GREAT!

Can't wait to see what you do next on your DHS day.

 

[vamassey1]

Wonderful family shot with Mr. Potato Head. We rode stand by just so I could see the line, but Mr. Potato Head wasn't there. I guess he was hiding behind the red curtain. I was so disappointed.

I would sure love those secrets too if you're sharing.

 

[Millie12591]

Wow, Glenn! Now that I've read through all your posts....it's funny to see/hear the differences of someone else's experience in the same place. When we stayed at CSR we didn't have nearly the beautiful scene's you did, although I didn't really look around our "area," where we stayed either. I really only went from the front of the resort to our room (and not by way of the court yard-just the side of the building to get to our room) when we got there and then from there to the pool, and from the room to the bus stop which was a hop skip and a jump from our room. We did however have regular ceramic coffee mugs, never used them for coffee, but we had them.
Our rooms looked exactly the same, which i loved! I made good use of the neck roll pillow by putting it under my pillow to keep my feet elevated (I can go into more of that later...I didn't have such a good physical response to the heat)
Our building was right next to the dig site-just behind the slide and to the right, just so you have an idea where we were staying while there. (I'm having a brain glitch moment so I can't remember the name of the building)

Looooove the picture of you all standing in line for Toy Story ride! You have such a beautiful family. Funny....I had fast passes to ride Toy Story and never did get to ride it the whole time we were there. I think it was the only think I didn't get to do while there in the parks that I wanted to do, pretty good in my book. Between my last trip and this one, I've pretty much done ever ride I wanted to do. Hands down my favorite is RnR!!! Only got to do it once though.
Sorry if my spelling is off, I just don't have the energy to look up what I think is mis-spelled.