Greetings from The Sunshine State!

We’re in Florida!

We arrived late Wednesday night, it was nearly midnight. Our first flight to Atlanta was wonderful. We upgraded to first class for free and landed the very first seats in the row a.k.a. tons of leg room! I was feeling better, but sinuses were still acting up. Head pressure and congestion, etc. I’ve been taking Mucinex-D even though I’m not really supposed to with high blood pressure, but it has helped. I’m done with it now, and I think it did help a bunch but I still need to see my doc when we get home.

Cell phone pic from plane…

Anyway, from NY to Atlanta the flight was fantastic until we started to descend. Oh. my. GAWD. vertigo swept over me like you would not believe. Head and ear pressure, then I became dizzy and nauseated. It was an awful, AWFUL feeling. That 20-30 minutes between the pilot announcing our landing and actually landing felt like an eternity. I”ve never felt so sick in my life. When we were getting off, I could barely walk. I was so dizzy and sick and could barely hear anything. Dustin helped me while I stumbled off of the plane like I was intoxicated to the nearest restroom where I ended up leaving my lunch from earlier. SO embarrassing. After 20 minutes or so, I started to feel better, but we had to board our connection flight immediately, and our connection flight wasn’t nearly as pleasant as our first flight. The second flight was JAMMED and our seats were next-to-the-last row. Dozens of crying, screaming children, unlike our first flight that was so quiet all you could hear was the plane’s engines. And we sat on the runway for over 60 minutes before we took off. I was pretty miserable. Thankfully it was a short 1 hour 5 min flight from Atlanta to Orlando!! This time around, I chewed on the cough drops I carried on with me, and I think it helped, though I still wasn’t feeling wonderful.

I think my preexisting sinus troubles made the barotrauma so much worse than it usually would have been. I was never happier to be on the ground.

We picked up our rental car from the airport. A cute little Mustang convertible. hehe

The good news is: My sinuses have gotten SO MUCH BETTER since we’ve been here. The first day, still pretty congested on and off, but not as bad as the days prior. By the the time we got back to our hotel room last night, my sinuses were pretty clear. YAY! I picked up a Neti pot from CVS last night to help keep on the feeling-good track. This morning I woke up and I had very little congestion. Thank GOODNESS! I almost feel back to normal; the pressure and pain in my left ear is nearly gone, though I still feel a bit of it. I think being in the fresh air yesterday really helped. YAY FLORIDA SUNSHINE!

We got a late start to Disney yesterday. We were up until 3:30am the first night we arrived. We’re staying at the Radisson Celebration in Kissimmee. It’s alright. Basically just like a Marriott Courtyard room, but a little less nice. The bed is a Sleep Number bed; it sucks! It either feels like a hollow spring mattress or plywood. We haven’t found a setting that we like. We miss our memory foam. I’m glad we got to try out the Sleep Number before we bought a new bed for our future home. Tempur-pedic is still #1 on our our list, haha.

We bought 6 days worth of Park-Hopper passes at Disney. Yesterday, we started with the Magic Kingdom.

I was feeling a bit “hung-over” the next day, so we stopped at the Bakery on Main Street in the Magic Kingdom for breakfast. I had an orange juice and a banana. Need my potassium! Lost so much in the past 2 weeks.

That potassium-rich ultra carbo breakfast made me feel much better, too. Being dehydrated and stuffy sinuses and barotrauma and vertigo is never a great was to kick off a vacay, but I was determined to have fun anyway!

I apologize in advance for the low, low, low quality pictures. I was using my Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot camera all day, I didn’t feel like carrying my DSLR around, it’s so heavy and bulky and my purse already weighed about 76 lbs, hahaha.

 

We’re not good at taking self-pics. And we’re too antisocial shy to ask anyone to take one for us, lol.

Sometimes if we look pathetic enough, a nice person will offer to help. We haven’t found one of those yet, but we did pose for a Disney pic in front of Cinderella’s castle that we have to get developed for only $91023823, I mean, $13.

Dustin needs to relax in pictures. He always strikes such a rigid pose, LOL.

Cute little ducks.

Lunch: We went to Columbia Harbor House for a quick bite. We both ordered the lobster rolls. They were kind of “meh.” A little too sweet for my taste. We ate half of them. I felt bad wasting so much because they were kind of pricey! Sorry, I didn’t take a pic. Imagine a hot dog bun with a scoop of lobster salad that was mixed with iceberg lettuce.

We must have walked 15 miles yesterday. I was so hot and thirsty the entire day. We stopped for drinks a few times, and an ice pop in the afternoon. We hit up Thunder Mountain, the Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Caribbean! My favorite. <3 Plus, we watched the Country Bears Jamboree and so many other touristy things. We had lots of fun!!

Dinner: We hopped over to Hollywood Studies for the Prime Time 50s Café. LOVE that place!!

Ugh. Flash pics are so terrible. Sorry!

Our waiter, Cousin Jason, was hillllariousssssssss! Loved him!

We started with the blue claw crab cake:

And the iceberg lettuce wedge salad with blue cheese dressing and bacon. OH MY GAWD! You haven’t had a blue cheese salad wedge until you’ve had this. It was FABULOUS. But anything covered in about a gallon of blue cheese dressing has to be pretty frickin’ delicious, right? We shared half of it, but left most of it. So rich, so amazing. YUM!

I’m on vacation, I’m eating what I want, when I want and make no apologies for it. Ya dig?

Dustin ordered the fried chicken and shared a tiny bite with me. Delicious. He said this is his new standard for fried chicken and mashed potatoes, lol.

I had the spaghetti and vegetarian “meatballs.” Also delicious, but a little on the spicy side.

I ate every last bite!!

Just kidding. I had one meatball and a few forkfuls of spaghetti and took the rest to-go.

Because I’m totally going to eat it in our hotel room that doesn’t have a microwave… or a fork, right? Yeah, it’s sitting in the mini fridge, probably until I throw it out, lol. It was just too yummy to leave there, lol.

We made the journey back to our hotel after dinner; takes about an hour because we were parked in the Magic Kingdom and went to another park for dinner. I’m pretty sure I walked off about 5 lbs of water yesterday. The exercise feels really, really good, and I attribute my improving health to it.

We’re doing it all again today. On our way to Epcot right now! Cannot wait to eat more yummy food and go inside the golf ball!! I haven’t been to Epcot since I was 8, haha. They have so much more to see now, we needed the 6 days worth of passes.

Be back later to talk about Epcot and whatever else we do.

Tagged as: 50s Prime Time Cafe, barotrauma, chicken, Disney Parks, Disney World, Florida, food, Magic Kingdom, plane, restaurants, sinuses, spaghetti, theme parks, travel, vacation