Just flew in last night from another whirlwind vacation in the shadow of the mouse, where we took Sydney down for her 10th birthday. It was a blast! I'm going to recount each day's activities in subsequent posts, but first I thought I'd talk a bit about the house.

It was interesting returning home after a few other folks had now stayed there. Still smelled like new (versus smelling like anything else) but I did notice a few scrapes against furniture and walls, and a few things moved where they weren't before. Like the dining room table. Someone switched it up from vertical to horizontal! And end tables were moved around... as well as plants. Very odd.

We took a good chunk of a day to stock up on a few more HDTVs for the bedrooms and DVD players... so we now have 19" TVs in the master bedrooms and in one of the Queens, and DVD players in all but the Queen. We picked up the TVs at Sam's Club... and let me jump on a tangent here about shopping in Kissimmee. We've been typically shopping at the local Wal-Mart and let me tell you...  I *hate* Wal-Mart. It's always packed, and yet despite this fact there are very few checkout lines open. So you wait... and wait... and wait... but the prices are unbelievably cheap. Cheese is half the price it is here, and Illinois is right next to Wisconsin! The "can you smell my dairy air" state! Anyway, the night we went out for TVs the Wal-Mart was out of power (bizarre) so we traveled a bit further up US192 to the OTHER local Wal-Mart. This one was even worse. Frustrated, we left.

Now, I figure all Wal-Marts are the same... crowded, too few checkouts, yada yada... at least that's my been experience. And Sam's Club, the baby brother discount arm of Wal-Mart, is no exception here. But in Kissimmee... it was heaven. Barely 1/4 of the parking lot was full. Big huge aisles you could walk through and nary run into another soul. And someone actually came up to me as I was looking at TVs, and asked me if I needed help! I showed him the choices I had, and I was eyeballing a model with built-in DVD player. The Sam's Club guy actually pointed me a less expensive, non-DVD set and told me to not buy the DVD model, as they'd been having too many returns!

I felt I was in the Twilight Zone... and not the Tower of Terror!

So I picked up the TVs at Sam's Club, and DVD players at Wal-Mart (go figure, they had better deals there) and then HDMI cables at the Super Target, where they were half the price of the other two.

I also picked up a wireless Internet router at Wal-Mart... a Belkin... and this was the biggest pain of the entire trip. Took me forever to finally configure. But the entire house now has wireless Internet.

I also installed a keyed lock for an owner's closet. We don't ahve too much we'd want to keep there, mostly just a screwdriver (that I bought to install the lock) and a collapsible cooler we bought to bring our lunches to the parks in.

Oh yeah, that was a *great* idea Lora had to bring our lunches. Disney Parks have decent food, but it tends to be really expensive. Like $50 a pop for the fast food, and well over $100 for the four of us for a sit down. Combine that with the frozen cokes and churros the kids must have

and it really starts to add up. So Lora would make sandwiches in the morning (I preferred the ham and swiss, with little love pockets in the folded lunch meat)

along with Pringles and grapes or bananas, and we'd pack up the cooler for the trip. Disney offers lockers to keep your stuff in, so we'd store the cooler until lunch, then pull it out and find a nice shaded spot to eat. Worked out great! We'd save money AND time (the lines for food can rival the lines for the attractions).

Ok... next post I'll tell you about the first park we visited upon arriving... EPCOT!