"Please Refrain From Tying People To The Bus Doors, Thank You"~Jersey Week 2012

[mickey'sbff]

Heelllooo Humans and welcome to quite possibly the most awkward trip report you will ever read. Clearly, if you used the foreshadowing skills you learned in sixth grade literature, this would imply that I'm a very awkward person, which is correct. I give you permission to shout, "That's awkward!" and point to your computer, mobile phone, magic mirror, or whatever your reading this on whenever you read or see something you deem to be awkward. I won't judge you. Surrounding friends, family members, strangers or pets might, but I'm sure they'll catch on eventually.

I guess I'll start with the "how this trip came to be" since that's how all the hip trip reporters are doing it. We like Disney so we said "why not?" and packed up out bags and left.

No really, that's pretty much it.

Well, it was also Jersey Week and my school district is one of those lazy ones that just gives us the whole week off.

But you know, little did we know that we would have the whole week off before because of that little rascal Sandy. As some of you may know (if you follow on me on social media), I live on the Jersey Shore and my county was one of the worst hit. Thankfully, my town is not right on the water so we were able to escape with only some downed wires, a broken fence and no power for a couple days. A lot of surrounding towns, places we know and love, weren't so lucky. It was just strange because when you hear about these natural disasters, as horrible it is to think that way, it's just human nature not to think much of it when they're so far away from you. Now that it was happening practically in my own backyard, it has really changed my mind about all kinds of disasters, not just hurricanes. My sister and I volunteered a little bit before our trip but sorting clothes and such and we just thought it was so awesome to see everyone come to get together and help out the people that needed help. Sorry, about that little tidbit, I just felt if I just talked about it now, the less I would need to talk about it throughout the trip report.

We left through JFK on American Airlines on Sunday, November 4th and got back home on Sunday, November, 11th.

I guess introductions are next!

I'm Sarah and I'm a Disney Fanatic.
"Hi Sarah"

I'm into the whole theatre thing. I like using sarcasm, its what I do. I'm very bad at scrabble and practically every other board game every made. I like the smell of Disney water. I also like sipping hot chocolate by the fireplace and taking long quiet walks on the beach.

Along for the ride were my parents and my older sister, Lauren. Lauren didn't come until Monday. She was originally not going to come until Tuesday, but was able to find a cheap flight for Monday evening I also have an older brother but he's still in college and couldn't come, but he wish he did when we told him all about the Food and Wine festival. He's a "foodie" and will try practically anything that's edible, so he would loved all the exotic-ness. We also met up with Lauren's friend (who ironically is named Lauren as well), her boyfriend and his mother, a couple times during the week.

We stayed at the lovely Saratoga Springs in the carousel building. This is something new for us, we usually stay in the boardwalk area, but it was a nice change.

Thanks for joining me, I hope I have the stamina and drive to actually finish this trip report!

 

[mickey'sbff]

CHAPTER LINKS

Day 1; Sunday, November 4th
- The One When The Businessmen Aren't Going to Disney World

 

[Disney~Cutie]

Mmmmmm, you know I'm in girl (;

 

[mickey'sbff]

Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep on the day of our arrival at "the World". I mean who can when you know you're leaving for Disney World in 2 hours AND a Friends marathon is on (Well, there's a friends marathon on practically every night on Nick at Nite, but who cares)? So yes, the official wake up time for November 4th was about 1:30 am. Yup. That gives me about 4 hours asleep. I don't do naps. I just physically can't take naps. I've probably taken about 2 naps in the past year. So I was running on about 4 hours of sleep all day long. Oh boy.

I basically just watched tv and played on my phone (Side note; I'm kind of obsessed with my phone, I know, I know, I'm such an unruly teenager. The funny thing is though, I hardly text, but I'm on my phone all the time!) until about 3:30 am because I decided that since our ride to the airport was arriving in half an hour, it was time to be productive (and also because the Friends marathon had seeped into episodes of The Nanny and I'm not a big fan of "Oh Misterr Shefffeiiillld"). Around this time is also when my phone started blasting a lovely instrumental version of The Mickey Mouse March and this splendid site popped up on my screen.

(Super sorry if the pictures in this TR are overwhelmingly huge)

I got dressed and got my carry on ready and requested to have a "pre-Disney picture" taken. (It's a tradition)

At that point, the car service guy had arrived, we packed up the car, and were on our way to JFK airport. At that point, Hurricane Sandy was still a popular topic of conversation (It still is) so most of the hour and a half car ride was spent discussing that. We arrived at the airport around 5 am. And man, IT WAS COLD. The shirt I was wearing was borderline sweatshirt, so I assumed I would be okay without wearing a jacket, but I was freezing. My mom and I went inside while my Dad checked the bags and my teeth were STILL chattering once he came back inside about ten minutes later.

Something I always found interesting about airports how so many different people are going some many different places in one day. The family with two young kids in Mickey Mouse shirts, the younger couple going to Las Vegas, the group of older couples going to Europe together, etc. I find it all so interesting.

ANYWAYS, we were lead to security which had practically no line. I hate security, it gives me anxiety. But then again, no security would give me even more anxiety. My dad was SURE that there was going to be a huge line at security but it was 5 am and there wasn't. Come on, Dad. We walked right up and would of been out in probably less than 3 minutes, but I caused a two minute backup when my backpack got stuck in the scanner on the way through. Ooops. Minor inconveniences.

So we headed to the gate that the worker who lead us to security told us to go to and along the way stopped at a little store because my dad wanted to look at the magazine collection so while he browsed my mother and I took a moment to laugh at the cliche I <3 NY merchandise that we can just never seem to get away from. Then I decided to look at the book selection because I have a book obsession (I may occasionally review books if I decide that you MUST read them) and came across The Book Thief, which is a very popular book right now and I had wanted to read it (I haven't got to it yet, because the way my reading works is that I have a list of books I'm going to read, and when I get a new book, I just add it to the end of the list and I haven't quite gotten to the end yet) so I bought it. Then we proceeded to the escalators, which went down, and then there was one of those moving platforms and then there was another escalator that brought you back up, we didn't understand the reasoning behind that.

We got to the gate and took a seat. My parents began to occupy themselves by whipping out their phones and Kindles as soon as we sat down but observed surroundings first. Something wasn't right. I turned to my parents and said, "Something tells me that these businessmen in suits aren't going to Disney World". My mom suggested that these people were just here for an earlier flight, but my dad and I pointed it out, that it was almost 6 am and wouldn't you think someone else would be at the gate for a 7 am flight? So my Mom went and checked the gate board and came back and reported that the gate for Orlando was gate 7. We were at gate 47. So we got up and played musical gates and went to gate 7 and we could tell that this was clearly a Walt Disney World gate. We found seats and witnessed parents surprising their kids. It was adorable. We tried looking to see where the flight at the original gate was going but we couldn't find the gate on any board! Twilight Zone much?

I read my book at the gate. ((SIDE NOTE; The book I was reading at the time was Bunheads by Sophie Flack (Not to be confused with the tv show with Sutton Foster, it has nothing to do with it). I would recommend to someone who is into ballet, since it is clearly a very ballet centered book. I only did ballet til I was like 8, so we didn't really get that in depth with the terms, so I didn't understand a lot of the terms used in the book. It was an okay book, I was disappointed with the ending, it was very random and didn't seem to be well planned out))

We were in the second or third group so we boarded the plane fairly quickly. One thing about this was that the tunnel to get on the plane was VERY LONG. There were about 5 turns and then a long hallway after turn. There was an man behind us who sighed in aggravation about every 10 steps and around the 3rd or 4th turn shouted out, "We don't even need to fly! Just a hundred more feet and we're there!"

The flight was uneventful. The flight attendants comforted crying young children by saying, "Why are you crying? This is a happy flight!". I read my book, wrote notes in my trip journal and studied my lines for a Christmas play I was supposed to be in (It was since postponed til next year since the theatre suffered damages from Sandy) and I humored myself by listening to the boy in front of me singing A Spoonful Of Sugar in different languages throughout the flight. He also looked EXACTLY like one of my friends.

Before we knew it, I opened the window and saw this sight!

Coming up next: The One When These Are Not The Droids We're Looking For

P.S. I'm so sorry this chapter was so wordy. While I only took around 100 pictures, for the rest of trip the pictures are closer together.

 

[Sam33]

I'm following along! We had some overlapping dates and I'm Friends obsessed and love your chapter titles!

 

[mickey'sbff]

I'm sorry I haven't really updated yet! I've been quite busy and the next one or two updates will be done by Friday the latest and I'll be updating a lot during my Winter break!