Christmas At Walt Disney World - Part Two: Osborne Lights

The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights at Disney's Hollywood Studios (formerly Disney-MGM Studios) theme park is absolutely awesome. Over 5 million lights decorate each and every inch of the backlot area of the park and every 10 minutes or so, the lights "dance" synchronized to music. It's truly amazing and hard to capture the scale of it in photos.

Entering the park, you first walk down "Hollywood Blvd" with a vintage feel.

They herd you down to the end to enter and when you get in, you turn the corner and see this.

They make it "snow" in between the dancing too!

And because still photos don't show you the dancing, here is one with Willow and one without just to show you some of what it looks like when they dance!

It's so much fun and I'm so glad Willow could get to experience them!

(Part 3 coming next!)

Christmas At Walt Disney World - Part 1: Epcot

Last Saturday we went to Walt Disney World and hit THREE of the four theme parks to take in the holiday decorations. I took so many pictures, I'm going to divide it up into three entries.

Coming onto Disney property!

First park we hit was Epcot. A combination of "Future World" and "World Showcase" this park features both science and technology themed attractions and a type of "world's fair" with pavilions themed around host countries.

To get a lay of the land, here's a map. We came in through the front main entrance and worked our way around counter-clockwise starting in Canada and moving all around the Lagoon back through to Mexico.

Spaceship Earth

Canada

Canada

United Kingdom

France

Morocco

Japan

Japan

Italy

Germany

China

Norway

Mexico

Spaceship Earth at night as we headed out.

Look for part 2 of 3 where we go to Disney's Hollywood Studios and take in the 5 million Christmas Lights in the Osborne Spectacle of Dancing Lights soon!

Afternoon in the Park

I'm lucky enough to have a County park and preserve right next to my apartment complex. It's also right on the edge of Tampa Bay so the park has lots of water access as well. This afternoon, I needed to get out and stretch my legs so we headed over and walked around a bit.

In what must be a fit of irony, they have wood snowmen figures at the entrance. It was 84F today.

Driving into the park. It's quite a long way back to where the water and trails are from the access road.

They have canoe rentals and a launch just down that ramp to the left.

You can see the mangrove trees with their roots peeking out of the water.
hey make little "islands" without actual land.

There's a whole boardwalk along the water.
We walked down it and stopped to take in the scenery. (Not bad for December, eh?)

A display of various shells, bones and other fossils from the area.

Playing with the "miniature" setting on my camera. Those are the same canoes from earlier!

They have an elevated viewing area you can go up to and get a sweeping, panoramic view of the area.

You can see the part of the boardwalk that runs along the waterfront.

There are trails through the scrub brush and woodlands. Lots of palms and Southern Oaks.

Not sure what the plant was but it was appropriately festive in color!

Some of the stately - and very tall! - Native pine trees.

Christmas Tree Shopping

Today we went out and got a Christmas tree! Yay! Willow came along with us to help us pick one out. (Sorry, only cell phone pics since I didn't want to get my DSLR sticky with sap! LOL)

And here's the one we wound up picking in the freshly cleared out space in our "dinning" room!

Christmas Tree Prep

Yay! It's December which means it's time for a tree! Of course, getting a tree is like step 10 and steps 1-9 involve getting ready for a tree. Which means clearing out a space and moving furniture and such in preparation.

So we cleared out the space in our "dining room" area of the apartment tonight so tomorrow we can go tree shopping!

Willow checks out the space. Yes, I think there's room now!

Willow also got a jump on checking the lights.

Out and About at the Mall and Such

While I'm not crazy enough to risk life and limb on Black Friday, today (Saturday the 30th), I needed to get a few things so we braved several shopping centers and even the mall!

I didn't want to bring my DSLR with me as a lot of stores get touchy about taking photos with a big, "professional" looking camera so I just used my cell so sorry for the poor quality. But I thought Willow might enjoy a little bit of an outing.

Just heading down the road from where I live off to the mall. I figured this was a good road to show you how utterly FLAT it is around here! It was a little overcast earlier today too.

Walking through the mall. (One of many, many malls around here!)

We spotted elves walking by.

Later, we found the elves and helpers handing out reusable tote bags advertising "Christmas Town" at Busch Gardens Tampa. We're thinking of trying to see it for the first time this year so if we do, Willow will of course come along.

After the mall, we hit Target! (You can see the Hula girl on Love's dashboard next to Willow in this shot. LOL)

In addition, we also had to visit both Joann's and Michael's today but I didn't get pics. It was a lot of running around but we got all our errands done so yay!

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was a simple affair this year, just Love and I at home. Two weekends ago, we had a family meal with his family at his cousin's house and my Mom doesn't do a big Thanksgiving anymore because it's just too much work for her.

So Love and I bought a small, breast-only turkey (since neither of us likes dark meat) and cooked it up with homemade mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy and corn.

The bird is straight out of the oven and cooling and the other items are staying warm.

That's a pretty fine Thanksgiving dinner!