Austerity Measures and Prosperity Stimulus

Among the definitions for austerity is the one that I'm thinking about in this blog: "Reduced availability of luxuries and consumer goods."

Some of its connotations are that of severe self-discipline or the WWII idea of limiting non-essentials during a wartime economy.

Over the past few weeks, we've been working on our resolutions and goals for 2013, along with a budget. With the looming fiscal cliff making for some awkward budgeting, we've been cutting expenses wherever possible--our own personal austerity measures.

We also have set some ambitious goals for 2013. More on that in a later blog post.

The end result is that 2013 is going to be a year where we want to continue having a positive quality of life, but also make some pretty radical adjustments on how we're managing money to be able to work towards some pretty significant goals. Our budget is "aggressive", but doable.

But managing money going out is only half of the plan. Many years ago, I caught a snippet of an episode of Oprah where Lady O mentioned that to reduce debt, you had to cut expenses because you couldn't just increase income.

I laughed, and the people I was with thought I was crazy. I pointed out that there's always the ability to increase income, but people don't want to do what is necessary to make that happen.

Thus the second part of our plan--prosperity stimulus. From selling things we don't need anymore (electronics to a buyback program, garage sales, book/CD/DVD trade-in) to finding new sources of income to increasing the amount of income for my current projects, we're looking to bring in more income while reducing our outflow.

The trick to getting ahead is a combination of the two. Austerity measures alone don't work. Prosperity stimulus alone doesn't work. When you combine the two, you can do anything.

The Plan, In Progress

Wow...haven't updated this since September. That's probably because we've been crazy busy. Mostly boring life stuff, but a few significant updates.

Around Thanksgiving, we sprung the news to everyone about our plans for moving to Florida in 2015. Needless to say, family will miss having us within a shortish drive, but everyone understands the reasoning behind it.

The core reasons for moving are pretty simple:

1. Schools are bad here--and Lily will need a better option when she gets ready for elementary school.

2. The cost of living is crazy high here. That prevents us from being able to put away the amounts we want to invest.

3. The house we're living in doesn't suit our needs well. For those who haven't seen our house, we live on the "second floor" (which is at ground level). Our first floor is a basement, which is built into the side of a hill, so it has a "ground level" exit on one end. The floor we live on has three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, dining room, and living room, plus our sun porch with hot tub. The "lower level" has a bedroom, a bath and a half, another kitchen, another living room, two storage rooms (one finished, one semi-finished), and a family room. All we use that basement for is storage and an occasional party space. It is truly wasted space, but we're paying to keep it heated/cooled, and paying for pest control down there and running the dehumidifier and on and on. It really doesn't work well for us, but if we were to sell it and then buy something else in this area, we couldn't get what we'd want for the outrageous housing prices here. (See #2 about cost of living--that goes for housing prices, too.)

4. The environment is bad here. We all have health issues from the poor air quality, and the weather makes it so that we can't spend as much time outside as we'd like.

5. The taxes are bad here for me, as an independent contractor. To put it in perspective, Maryland taxes are about half again as much as I pay in federal taxes.

6. We enjoy spending time at Disney, either for vacations, cruises (now that we realize how much we like them), and races. That means we're spending a lot of money and time to get down to Florida that we'd like to spend visiting family. (A good example is race weekends, which can cost around $2000 each and take 3-4 days of vacation each. When you don't have a lot of vacation time, those races add up quick.)

7. Our social life is largely tied to the Disney community, so a move to Florida means more time with friends and living around people with shared values.

8. DC-area jobs are high stress. Florida jobs are less stressful. That doesn't do a thing for me, as I'd keep the same employers, but really does a lot for my husband. It also would mean that he'd not have to spend large portions of his day in a commute on I-95.

So, with all that in mind, we went house hunting on our most recent vacation, and found something we really like. There will be a blog post about that in the future--I promise!

Looking at our expenses, if we sold our house today, we'd be able to pay off all our debts, but not have a downpayment available for the new place. On the other hand, if we wait until we have that all squared away, the community we want to buy in will be fully built and housing prices are likely to rise.

Because the house is in a short-term rental area, if we bought a property there today, we'd be able to rent it out as a vacation home until such time as we're ready to move. That being said, we'd need to figure out how to get a deposit down.

With all that in mind, we've decided to take a very aggressive budget for the next year--one that both allows paying down debts and gathering money for a down payment on the new place.

We've also run some other scenarios about what to do with our current house to make sure we are debt free asap, even if that means selling the house before we are ready to move, and taking on apartment life for up to a year or so. (The benefit on that would be that when the Florida job comes through, we wouldn't have to then try to sell the house.)

And, to top it all off, the two adults have some health goals we want to meet. Going to be aggressive on that as well.

So, yeah, busy bit of thinking going on, but very realistic if we set our minds to it. Updates will be forthcoming to see if we're just crazy for thinking this way, or if this is just so crazy that it will work!

If Bill Clinton says it....

Check out the former prez on TDS, specifically starting at 5 minutes:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/403696

If the two cities that the former president thinks are working (on the tech job front) are San Diego and Orlando...that's pretty cool in my book.

What the wealthy are driving

Every so often we joke about being wealthy. Although we're a few zeroes away from being 1% folks, it is gratifying to know that we do share some things in common:

http://autos.yahoo.com/news/-what-the-wealthy-are-driving.html?page=2

What the Wealthy are Driving
5. Toyota Prius

The eco-friendly Toyota Prius is one of the most popular cars in three very affluent zip codes, all  in California. It’s popular in the Northern California tech haven of Atherton, in Century City, and in Ross in Marin County. 

This small car costs only $30,565, although the residents of any of these towns, who have an average income of $672,000 a year, could certainly afford to pay more if they wanted to. But apparently, those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and movie studio executives know that you don’t get rich by spending money.


Darn tootin'!

American diets and refrigerators

It is CSA day again, and my husband graciously spent the past couple days trying to clear out a lot of our produce from the previous week so we have room for this week's haul. Aside from our produce drawers, our fridge is mostly empty. This got me thinking...

It seems to me that one of the challenges to the American diet may be tied to the fridge. If our fridge was 3/4 produce drawers and 1/4 additional space, I wonder if we'd have more fresh fruits and vegetables in it. I wonder if that, once those produce drawers are full (which it doesn't take long to do), we figure that we've got enough fresh fruits and vegetables in the house that we have no need to have additional choices.

Just food for thought (pun intended).

The Mystery Bag

I'm sure it isn't just me...

Typically we are really good about labeling things before we shove them in the freezer. Even in our chicken scratch, we almost always put the date and contents on the bag.

Almost.

When cleaning out the freezer, sometimes we will find the mystery bag. Today, I brought one up and started thawing it. It is a brown saucy-looking something, and we think it may have particles of chicken in it. There was a thin layer of ice crystals on it, but not enough to classify it as wholly freezer burned. Do we eat it? Do we throw it away? Do we place bets about what it might have been?

Or do we just try and do better about labeling things in the future? Yeah, I'm voting for the last option.

Rubbing two brain cells together

My job is a combination of "regular" day-to-day work from a steady freelance client along with large projects that pop up, make for a busy couple weeks, and then disappear for a few months. About a month ago, I accepted one large project and got a huge portion of it in all at once. I cleared out most of it, only to get offered another project. No problem, the first one was put to bed, so I could take on the second one. Well, due to some interestingness with the project, I ended up getting most of the first project back in my lap while the second one was coming in. The good news is that I work with some of the most amazing writers in the business and have totally awesome project managers to provide support every step of the way. Because of how awesome they are, I feel an above-and-beyond obligation to go the extra mile for them. That has meant working from 8 AM to 11 PM for multiple days in the past few weeks.

The good news--wrapped up the big project last night (or at least most of it). The better news--the second project is now coming in, and at a very reasonable pace with incredibly well-written and clean files. The best news--it will be a good payday once I get the invoices for those projects turned in, and I'm very satisfied with the work that I've done for them.

But, yeah, that's why no deep insightful blog this week. I'll try again next week!

Resume resumé

I'm a very lucky freelancer. Most freelancers end up having to spend large amounts of their time tracking down work in the hopes of nailing something to pay the rent. (As the saying goes, freelance writers/editors get paid per hour, per page, or perhaps.) For many years now, I've had plenty of work from steady clients. Still, all things change, and with the challenging economy, some clients have run into problems this year that have meant cutting back on their freelance and contractor staff. Cutbacks for them means reduced income for me. Although we're a far cry away from lacking due to adjustments in income on my part, I'm looking at adding clients to my base--and perhaps going back into writing if I don't like what I'm seeing in the editing options.

That means dusting off the ol' resumé. I think the last time I updated it was....2010? 

I'm pretty much using the same resumé that I've been using since I got my first publishing job back in 1997. It is a work experience resume that most people use for their careers--I worked here from these dates doing this. Before that, I worked there from these dates doing that. You know the kind.

As a freelancer, that really doesn't fit anymore, because I have so many jobs that overlap. I don't have a single employer right now--I have multiple clients. My publication list turns more heads than my academic degrees. With that in mind, I've started redoing my resumé from scratch. It will be a more freelance-friendly version, and really highlight just how many pots I've had fingers in for the past decade or so. Trying to figure out what all I worked on has been quite the challenge, but once I get it done, I know I'll be proud of it. Hopefully that will also lead to some interesting gigs, too.

Bullet ----- Us

Yep, we dodged a bullet with the DC derecho of 2012. We kept power (except for a few minutes at the height of the storm), and we had supplies on hand to get us through after the fact with water restrictions in place (bottled water for drinking and plastic/paper goods so we wouldn't rack up dishes). Because we had so much stuff purchased for the cruise, even not being able to do laundry wasn't the major setback that it could have been.

Around this time last year, more or less, we had a pine tree leaning at a pretty troubling angle towards our back porch and driveway. We also had an oak in the backyard that had died and was starting to show signs of rot. When we called out the tree people to remove those two, we pretty much had them remove every tree up to the property line, except for a few saplings and the healthy big oaks between our property and the neighbor's property. Seeing all the stories from people who had trees fall into their houses or on their cars, I am so grateful that we spent the $700 to remove the trees, lest we would have had to spend a hundred times that piecing a house back together.

We still back up onto a forested area, and that forested area still has very big trees. It is possible that someday one of those trees will fall, and there's a remote possibility that they will hit something more than just trees and dirt. For the meantime, though, I'm thrilled that we made it through this bit of interestingness with nothing more that stories to tell for years to come.

Not that we need this yet

But saw this article:
http://realestate.yahoo.com/news/10-diy-projects-to-sell-your-home-faster.html

And thought the advice was pretty good. Looking at our property, here would be our to-do list:
"Create a Welcoming Entrance"
--Would need to move the rose bush and improve the landscaping
--Double-check the quality of our address numbers
"Eliminating odors"
--Let's face it, we've got cats, we cook a lot at home, and we have a hot tub...both of those probably put odors into the air that we may not immediately notice
"Other"
--Resurfacing cabinets -- maybe, but that might be too much work for the return
--Repair/repaint baseboards
--Fix nail holes (and in our case, wall anchors)
--Clean out the closets

Very doable stuff...but things to keep in mind.

The finances of my generation

Today I saw an article on Yahoo titled "Basic Rules for Getting Rich." The article, which has very sound advice, can be found here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/basic-rules-for-getting-rich.html


The quote that seems to have poked the hornet nest is:
Say you're 40, have $200,000 saved, with 60% in stocks, and are putting away 10% of a $100,000 salary (including company match). You have a 52% chance of retiring with 70% of your pre-retirement income, according to T. Rowe Price. 



Some of the comments are as follows:


"Say you're 40, have $200,000 saved"...I stopped reading there.


I agree......I don't know one 40 year old who has $200,000.


where does this writer get off thinking we all make 100 grand a year ?


 By 40 most people are lucky to have any savings


I barely have 10k put away for retirement at age 40. I think I am the norm, [not] the oddity.


I am not yet 40, but my husband has passed that milestone. Our investments are not in line with the example shown above (especially the 60% bit in stocks--most of our investments are in funds), and we're not quite at the dollar figure mentioned for savings (mostly because our funds are in a "rebuilding" phase), but the numbers there aren't unreasonable. Some of the money we're putting away on a monthly basis goes into Lily's college fund, which I didn't account for in the assessment of our retirement fund. That money is hers for school, not ours for retirement, after all.


We have no car payments, but we do have a mortgage on the house. We have some credit card debt that goes up, gets paid down, and goes up again when we go on vacation--but nothing so exceptional that we are pinching pennies or unable to keep putting money into investments every month. We live in an area with one of the highest costs of living in the United States and we're sending Lily to private school. But we also don't have the most flashy house or buy all the latest this or that. My car is 10 years old, and I'm hoping to get another 5 years out of it at least. We've cut back on eating out. I don't get mani-pedis or get my hair styled. My husband doesn't buy a $5 coffee in the way to work anymore. We don't go out to the movies much (the last movie we saw was Toy Story 3 back in 2010!). 


People have told us that they admire us for our "sacrifices", but I don't see that we're sacrificing quality of life. If you've read the archives of this blog, we just got back from a two week vacation that included a 7-day Caribbean cruise! We're going back to Walt Disney World this winter for a week. We have some of the latest iGadgets that make our life (and my job) easier to handle. 


Are we the exception on so many levels? We have savings...we are *actively* saving with every paycheck. We have a good quality of life. We have good income, but we don't live as if we are rich. We aren't misers, but we are frugal. That puts us so far out of touch with almost everyone we know, however. 


There are days when I am frustrated with the performance of our investments, but I look and see that we *have* investments. I see so many ways for those in my peer group to be able to invest, but I find it difficult to broach the subject with any of them. I don't want to ever have a retirement party for my husband, not because I don't want him to retire (because I certainly can't wait for that day so I can spend more time with him), but because I would feel awkward about inviting our friends to attend, knowing that they will never be able to retire. It isn't a happy thought, but it does make me resolute in pretending to be cutting it close to the bone while we actually are putting our "disposable income" into investments. At least that way we can be in the same boat about not having money to toss out on a whim--even if for entirely different reasons. And on some level, I can hope that maybe they're doing the same thing, too. 

Retail Fast (three weeks on/one week off)

Opportunity cost is something I think about on a fairly regular basis. With limited life resources (time, energy, and money, for instance), it is amazing how quick everyday life makes a dent in resources. With Lily entering school, all of those resources will be lowered. I will lose time driving her to and from school, and there is cost in fuel and in tuition that will come about.

A while back, I noted that if I walk into Target, I will walk out with the bank account $100 lighter. Typically I go once a week. Yep, that means $400 disappears out the bank every month, and for the life of me, I have no real idea where it goes. Looking at the receipts, there’s food stuff and consumables, but most of the stuff is things that just blend into the background clutter of the house.

I also look at the cost of eating out—or in our case, mostly carryout. We’ve cut back a lot, but in a typical month we’re still spending between $150-200 or more in a month on restaurant foods.

Then there’s the Dutch Market…my new place for disposable income to disappear. Poof, $30 in cheese. Shazaam, $15 at the dry good’s store. Woosh, $60 in meats.

In all of those cases, I’m the driving force between pushing money out of the house on things we don’t need.

I was thinking a few days ago of doing a short-term sugar fast. I am a fan of using fasts from time to time (short, controlled ones, though!) to try and help break a cycle. In musing on things, I wondered what it would be like to do a “retail fast” for a period of time—for instance, three weeks no shopping/one week to restock.  Here’s the ground rules I am thinking of setting for myself:

1. This applies to me and me alone. If my daughter needs something, she gets it. If my husband needs/wants something, he gets it. If the cats need something, they get it. All of this with the caveat that good planning is in order—I can buy things that I know that we’ll need for the fast in advance (that’s what that fourth week is for!). If I know we need 3 bags of cat litter, I buy them in advance, for example. The only way this applies to my family is that I’d like to try and avoid eating out.which brings me to number 2.

2. Our Saturday morning trips to Panera are still a go. This is good family time, and they can be budgeted for easily. My husband’s coffee money also doesn’t get cut, nor does any money he needs to do for eating out during the week. If people take us out to eat, or there is a social situation where we need to go dutch, we will do that. The goal of this is to make our life better, not to make our quality of life miserable!

3. There are a few things that will need to be purchased regularly. Although I can easily stockpile milk for the length of the fast, fresh bananas have to be bought on a regular basis. The items that we pick up from the CSA don’t count (as they are already prepurchased), and if there’s a short season for some fruits or vegetables that necessitates stockpiling, that is an acceptable purchase.This also goes for things like fuel, where we can’t stockpile (safely) three week’s worth of car juice.

4. Emergencies happen, and there will be times when it will be necessary to buy a little this or that to handle it. This also doesn’t apply if we’re on the road somewhere.

5. Bills, obviously, are not included in this.

Am I crazy? Quite possibly, but I think this is something I do want to try. If I’m going to do it, I’ll set a start date for June 25 through July 16 for no shopping and then the week of July 23 being a shopping week.  And, of course, I’ll detail how it goes…

Lessons Learned

This is probably going to be a post that gets revisited as I’ve got time to think about our vacation. Overall, the vacation went flawlessly. Are there things we learned? Absolutely!

1.  Do I regret taking Lily while she was so young? Absolutely not! She had a marvelous time and the experiences we had were priceless! That being said, I can’t wait to take her when she’s potty trained, if for no other reason, packing all those diapers was a huge pain and a half!

2. I wouldn’t do shore excursions or venture around town much at ports. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the shore excursion we did, but if I had to do it over again, I’d rather stay on the boat or just hit a couple of the “last minute” tourist shops near the boat than wander deep into town and spend time looking around. The deals weren’t as exceptional as I had hoped (maybe I’m just that good of a bargain shopper), and with the exception of guavaberry liqueur, I don’t think we’d be repeat shoppers at any of the stores. I do want to buy the maximum of guavaberry liqueur, however. That stuff was INCREDIBLE.

3.     I will be very glad to go back on board now that I know my way around the ship. It took a few days before I really felt comfortable knowing where things were, and even by the last day, the moebius strip that is Cabanas confused the heck out of me. (It is because it covers the aft of the ship, so if you enter it on the port side and keep walking far enough, the buffet lines repeat and suddenly you’re on the starboard side. There are subtle differences in the chairs and in the décor, but I never fully got it figured out. To make matters worse, the aft elevators are right in the middle of it, so if you enter from there, you’re entering the restaurant in the middle of the restaurant and get totally mixed up. Then to make it even more crazy, the elevators Aft don’t go down to deck 2, which is the deck we’re staying on, so that meant that I had to find my way back to Midship to figure out how to get home!)

4.    Character meet and greets are a must! Typically at Disney theme parks, you can expect to wait 20-30 minutes on a good day for a picture with any character. On the ship, aside from a couple special nights (formal night and pirate night), you have typically a 5-10 minute wait tops.

5.  Likewise, do the portraits as well as the characters. I do wish we had taken advantage of more of the portrait settings, but Lily really wasn’t up for waiting in line after dinner.

6.     I want to make an ice cream cookie sandwich on the next trip! By the time I figured out this was an option, I was down with “cruise crud” and was avoiding dairy—but they have chocolate chip cookies at Flo’s and they have soft serve at Eye-Scream. You see where I’m going with this? Uh huh.

7.  Order that mint tea punch drink earlier. On almost the last day there, I happened to look at the bar menu as I was cutting through the adult pool area and saw the mint tea punch (tea, mint, cranberry juice, pineapple juice—YUM!). I finally got around to ordering it on the last day, and I could have easily ordered more than one of those. Also, don’t be shy about using the skills of the drink server at dinner—and maybe order AquaPanna most nights. ;)

8.    Do something at the spa. Not being a spa gal, no idea what would be the best thing to do, but I do want to try something there!

9.     Spend some time in the quiet adult pool. That place looked wickedly good to enjoy.

10.  Do Goofy minigolf—when it isn’t windy. We went up there for the scavenger hunt, and the course looked very fun, but it was incredibly windy that day.

11.  Just do more of everything. I would absolutely want to do more of everything.

12.  Bring medicines even if you don’t think you need them. I’m looking at you cough and cold pills!

13.  Bring other people, if possible. It was nice meeting new people at our table, but it would be really awesome to share the experience with people we know. Cannot. Recommend. This. Enough.

14.  Bring less toys (and supplies in general). We packed a huge bag of toys for Lily, along with sippy cups and the like. She rarely touched any of them because she was so busy when she was awake (which meant we were out of the room) and when we were in the room, she was so tired that she was on her way to sleep. She also did just fine with the straw cups, and hopefully by the time we go next time she won’t be obsessed with only one brand of juice.

15.  Try for Palo brunch. Dinner and the tea were great. Brunch sounds wonderful.

16.  Don’t be scared about the square footage of the room, because the room seems much bigger in person than it does on paperwork. If you’ve ever seen the Ikea “my house is only 349 square feet” things, it’s like that. We not only had room for us, but all of our stuff was able to be put away very easily.

17.  Eat at Flo’s—I didn’t realize until the end that they had daily sandwich specials that looked awesome, and that the way they did wraps was to make a wrap and then slice it into snack-size pieces. This meant that you could try a bunch of different wraps for just snacks or things.

18.  Get the museli from day one. I’m telling ya, it was awesome!

19. Arrive a day early! Amtrak is wonderfully good about getting there on time or early. Given the trouble we had on the way down, though, if we had arrived the day we were set to leave port, I would have been a total basket case. 

20. That being said, don't arrive too early or stay too long afterwards. I think this vacation, although wonderful, isn't one I could do length-wise again and enjoy as much as I did with the adrenaline that I had this time. Staying the extra day at Disney really was tougher than I pictured. At the very least, I shouldn't have made dining reservations--it was too much.

21. Bring extra bags in your suitcases. I have no idea how we filled up two extra bags, but we did. I want to be prepared next time, just in case!

22. Decorate your door! Even though we did it this time for a contest, it was tons of fun because we had pictures of us on it--and that meant people we didn't know were coming up to us and saying "Hey, I recognized your door!" That was a pretty neat feeling.

23. Skip the 5K. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt--literally. Although it was fun once, I don't think I'll do it again until/unless Lily is old enough to want to do it--and then I might just cheer with an umbrella drink in hand.

I think that’s all I’m thinking of at the moment, but I’m sure that either Erwin or I will have more to add later on. Thanks for reading all this, and if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments! 

Lucky Day 13 and 14--Heading home?

The morning was a little windy with threatening skies, but it looked like Beryl had pushed in on shore and was more nuisance than disruption. No cancellations from Amtrak, so we were going to be heading home.

We headed up to Olivia’s to get a good breakfast in us before hitting the road. We got everything loaded into the car and then thought about whether there was anything we wanted to do or not. Really there wasn’t… we were completely vacationed out at this point. We drove to Downtown Disney (thankfully not as crowded as the night before) and did some looking around at a few other stores to kill time. Once it was close to lunchtime, we picked up some sandwiches from Earl of Sandwich and headed on up to Sanford and the AutoTrain.

The weather getting there was miserable. While we had been at sea, a lightning strike next to the Gaylord had started a fire that burned a pretty decent amount of land, so driving past the scorched earth and then heading into a monsterous storm certainly had the feel of the apocalypse to it. We got to Sanford, and were held by the trains switching tracks at the station for a few minutes. Even as fully loaded as our car was, the wind was strong enough to shake us pretty bad. The rain cleared a little bit when it was time for us to go inside and check in, and this time I remembered everything that was needed from the car.

We ate lunch and were informed that the train would be loading a half hour late. No problem. We hung out and waited until it was time and then got on board. We still managed to leave on time, however.

Within the first hour, we realized something was amiss. We slowed down to go over a bridge (not unusual), but then we didn’t speed back up. We kept at a really slow pace. At first I thought it was weather conditions as we were heading into the area where the Tropical Storm had blown through.

Behold, déjà vu strikes again! At dinner, it was announced that one of the engines had died and that we were creeping along to Jacksonville where we could pick up a new engine, but we’d be off power when we got there for a half hour or so. (I joked that this was the other engine from the one that blew out on the way down.)  

We got it changed out before dark, and everything else seemed to go fine, although we knew that we would be delayed.

The next morning Erwin got up, had breakfast, and got started on work in the lounge car, as we were now scheduled to arrive in the station at 11 AM. Lily slept in until after 8 AM, and then she and I headed up to breakfast. We sat with a lovely couple from Boston who was on their first trip on the AutoTrain and had hoped to drive back to Boston after the train arrived. With the delay, they weren’t sure that was a good option anymore and thought about getting a room somewhere along the way. I assured them that although this happened twice on this trip, it was highly unusual and typically we arrived very early. It was just dumb luck this time!

The train did arrive at 11, and we got our car and headed home. I got the car unloaded, got lunch for everyone, grabbed the cats, and started unpacking—and to do more laundry. Yep, back in the very big home..and back to normal life. But what an amazing trip! Two weeks, three countries, trains, boats, automobiles. Fine dining, new acquaintences, fireworks, and Mickey Mouse. Life doesn’t get any better than that. I’m so glad we’re booked to go again at some point in the future—it is becoming a must-do vacation for us!

Day 12--Disney Junior, Star Wars Weekends, and a Single-Ride Tour of Disney

When I made a dining reservation for before 8:30 in the morning for this date, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I have learned now—I won’t do that again.

We headed over to Disney’s Hollywood Studios for the Disney Junior play and eat, where Lily was going to meet Special Agent Oso. Somewhere in the past few months, he’s not been on the top of her list for coolness the way he used to be, but we still had a fun time at breakfast. There was some singing, some dancing, and a breakfast buffet with different items to what was on ship. We were all very clearly worn out, though.

As it was Star Wars weekends, when we left breakfast we did a bit of looking around at all the interestingness going on. If you are a Star Wars fan, this would be worth your time. If you’re not, you might not even know something was going on, aside from the Storm Troopers above the entrance gate doing silly comments every now and then.

Lily looked pretty tired, so we decided to go back to the room for a morning nap. This is when we found, much to our embarrassment, that yes, Mousekeeping had come in and seen our very undignified pile of dirty laundry covering most of the living room. Ah well, what can you do?

We tried to talk Lily into a nap, but no luck, so we jumped in the car to head to the Magic Kingdom. At that point she completely sacked out. We decided to do a bit of out of the bubble exploring, so we drove to the Reunion/Championsgate area. Very underdeveloped at present, but a rather nice area. Reunion is mostly vacation properties, although with the economic downturn, I think that some of them are getting permanent residents now. Championsgate is very much a place under construction—but we liked it.

Take Buena Vista Drive to I-4...uh...I-4 East....no I-4 West!

During our driving around, we discussed our plan to buy a home down there in a handful of years. After being on board ship, a house just seems really big. We started tossing around the idea of a condo. Easier to maintain, potentially lower cost, and a better use of our resources. Something to think about long-term.

When Lily started waking up, we headed over to the Polynesian resort to get some lunch, do some shopping, and head to the Magic Kingdom for a little while. (And before anyone gets too twitchy, because I’m a firm believer you shouldn’t park at the resort unless you are staying there or for the length of time you are eating/shopping there, we opted to valet park to make sure we weren’t taking a space away from a resort guest.) We grabbed lunch at Capt. Cook’s and then headed over to the Magic Kingdom for a quick trip. It was pretty mobbed, but we went and showed Lily the Barnstormer. She’s tall enough that she could ride that roller coaster, and when we asked, she said she did want to ride it, but I think she needs a little more age under her belt before we try that. We’ll see how she’s doing in December.

The real reason we wanted to go there was to ride it’s a small world, so that’s what we did. Lily was absolutely in awe…it is her favorite book, song, app, and so on. She loved seeing it all come to life and actually stayed awake through it. The crowds were pretty thick and we all were still pretty tired, so we decided to head on out. We stopped at Casey’s for a few minutes to listen to the ragtime piano player, but then headed out. As Erwin pointed out, this is what it is like to live as a local…we didn’t feel gipped that we only rode one ride and then called it a day because we knew we’d be back soon.

We stopped at the Grand Floridian so I could get some soaps from Basin White, and then walked over to the Polynesian for a quick snack. By then the skies looked threatening, so we got our car and headed back to the resort.

The afternoon involved doing some more laundry and getting back to packing. Still no word from Amtrak about our travel plans being delayed, so we figured we’d be leaving out in the morning. By this point, Erwin had developed the “cruise crud” that I was kind enough to share with him. We figured we'd go to Downtown Disney and grab some food to eat in the room. When we got there, the place was insanely packed, so finding parking wasn't a good option. When we finally found a space and got out of the car, the skies looked very threatening. Because we would have been walking for about 10 minutes each way to get dinner, we figured we'd jump back in the car and drive over to Crossroads (off property) and just grab a pizza. When we saw that the line to get into the shopping center was out into the road, we figured we'd jus head back to the resort, grab takeout, and eat in our room. After dinner and a little more packing, Erwin mentioned he wanted some decaf coffee. I volunteered to walk up to the main shop at Old Key West (and if the walk was too far, I would hop on the internal bus) to get him some, as well as getting me some tea. The walk was an incredibly beautiful one with the river on one side and the golf course on the other. The weather was perfectly comfortable, and there was even a rainbow for the first bit of my journey. I got the supplies and walked back. When I got back, it was discovered how much of a not-a-coffee drinker I am. I had picked up a really nice set of ground coffees, but it never occurred to me that you need a coffee filter. D’oh. Thankfully there was regular in the room, and Erwin drank some of that and was still able to fall asleep. Not knowing what the next day would bring travel-wise was a bit of stress for us both, but thankfully the bed was comfy and we got a good night’s sleep.

Day 11--Leaving the Fantasy, Off to Disney

Breakfast in the morning is served based on your dinner seating the night before, and that meant that first dinner seating has their breakfast at 6:45. (Or as Stanislav said, “Do not worry, we have coffee.”) It was quite a shock to wake up at 6 AM and see that we were already in port. Yeah, it was disappointing to see the dock outside our window. I can’t believe that a week before I had taken a picture from the window so I would never forget that view. Now I just wanted it to go away!

Our breakfast was in the Enchanted Garden, which was really nice as it was right near our room, so we had less distance to cover with out bags. Breakfast was good, and we got hugs from the servers on our way out. We grabbed our CD of pictures and then it was time to head off the ship. It was very strange how quiet everything was, probably because the second breakfast seating folks weren’t up yet. Still, there was no sense staying on board, and we hoped to beat the line to customs.

We walked down to customs, and were immediately greeted by a porter who helped us find our seven bags. Yes, seven bags. We came on board with five, I think. We didn’t buy much, so I have no clue how we got that many bags filled, especially since we didn’t have many diapers left compared with what we started. The porter loaded them all up and took us over to the customs checkpoint. He looked at our form and asked us about what food we were bringing back to the country. We said Gouda cheese, and he said he needed to call a supervisor. (Gulp. Are we in trouble?) She said that it was a hard cheese, so we were okay. Apparently raw milk cheese and some soft cheeses are a no-no. The only other question she had was about how much something like that costs, as she has someone going on vacation and she wanted them to buy some for a souvenir, so she needed to know how much money to send with them.

The porter took us over to our car and helped us load the bags, meanwhile telling us about Tropical Storm Beryl, which was heading this way. Somehow we missed TS Alberto. Hearing him talk about it all, we realized just how out of connection with the rest of the world we were. Ah, I miss that. Bags all loaded and we were ready to go, pay our parking fee, and head out. Yep, with our parking stub. Yep…which we put….uh….

My brain really wasn’t working, but eventually we found it and were finally on our way. (Note to self, next time leave it in the car as planned instead of taking it on board.) We drove back to Orlando, running in to some dense fog along the way.

Even though it was a joy to go through the arches and into Disney, it was still sad not to be on the ship. Yes, this is the first time I’ve been sad to get to Disney.

We headed to our hotel (Old Key West resort) and checked in. Of course the room wouldn’t be ready for a while, so we decided to venture out and find a bank to replenish cash supplies and a grocery store to replenish snacks and drinks. Lily fell asleep en route, so I ran into the store. We were in the Doctor Phillips area, which is one area I had thought might be a good option for relocation. A few minutes into driving around, we realized that it was a little too yuppie-centric for us. (I don’t know if we decided that before or after we saw the bakery for dogs, though.)

We headed to Downtown Disney and grabbed lunch at Fresh A Peel (one of our faves). It was incredibly odd to pay for food instead of just walking away with it. It also seemed that the drinks (non-alcoholic) were horribly high priced compared to the cost of specialty drinks on board. Yes, there’s something to be said about prepaid vacations! We did a little bit of shopping and then headed back to the resort. Old Key West didn’t appear to have a zero-entry pool, so swimming wasn’t going to be an easy option for us, plus Lily and I sounded like walking dead, so we headed in to the Community Hall. (Originally we had hoped to meet up with friends that afternoon, but didn’t want to risk spreading our germs to them, so we were at a loss of what to do.) Erwin and I caught up on our social networking sites and Lily colored some pictures while we waited. The room was ready shortly thereafter, and we headed back to it.

The first thing that struck me about the one bedroom at Old Key West was that the place is HUGE. This is the original DVC property, and I guess they wanted to make a good impression. Especially after being on ship all week, the place was like a cavern! Because we were all running low on clothes at this point, we dumped almost everything out of our suitcases on the floor in the living room and started laundry.  So yes, nice room and we made a huge mess with everything piled up there. (I thought that since we were staying such a short time, we wouldn’t have Mousekeeping come in because it was a DVC property, but because we were staying on cash, they came in to service the room in the morning and saw our huge pile of stuff. Oops. We also didn’t tip until the second morning because I totally forgot about them. Double oops.)

That night, we had reservations for dinner at Olivia’s at Old Key West. The food was pretty good, but it was a nice quiet place after our noisy meals the week before. I hadn’t noticed any effects from being off the ship until we sat down to dinner, and then we felt it. No idea why…but it is what it is.

After dinner, we headed over to Epcot for the evening. Crowds were pretty high (well, it was Memorial Day weekend). There was a 10-minute wait for Spaceship Earth, but we did it because it’s tradition! We also did Lily’s favorite ride (Living with the Land) and then did the Gran Fiesta Tour ride in Mexico. Lily enjoyed that because, in her words, “Donald’s funny!” We then headed to our secret spot for Illuminations, and I grabbed snacks for us. That involved hitting multiple places between Germany and the U.S. as it is getting harder to find Smartwater, and I wanted to get Lily some milk and “yums” (rice krispie treats). I got back with about 5 minutes to spare and we watched the fireworks. Last winter, Lily screamed and cried during the show, but this time she enjoyed watching it—more or less. When the show was over, we asked how she enjoyed the show and she just said “Home. Now.” She fell asleep before we got to the front of the park, so we did a quick shopping run through MouseGear and then headed back to the resort. She had a busy day tomorrow, so a good night’s sleep was in order. We checked on T.S. Beryl and then called it a night ourselves. It was still up in the air (literally) if it was going to be bad enough of a storm such that we would be trapped at Disney for another day. Part of me wanted that, but a good part of me was pretty vacationed out at this point. And yes, I miss the movement of the ship, but thankfully I was tired enough I got to sleep right away.

Day 10--Castaway Cay

Morning broke, and we looked outside to see lots of little islands and signs of traffic at sea (including another cruise ship on the horizon). Yep, welcome to the high-traffic areas of the Bahamas.

We dressed for the run and headed up to Cabanas. The place was packed with early morning eaters (I guess everyone wanted to hit Castaway Cay as soon as we docked), so we ate outside, but thankfully under cover. There was a brief bit of rain (5 minutes or so), and then we saw lots of cast members coming outside to stand on the deck. There was an island approaching, and one of them mentioned that it was Castaway Cay. Time to get Lily down to the nursery for the last time.

Once she got settled in, we went and checked in at O’Gill’s pub for the 5K. The day was already quite warm and humid, so we figured we’d do an “aggressive walk” instead of a run. That was probably one of the best decisions we made in a while. If it was humid on board the ship and hot near the beach, the area where the 5K was done (through mangrove forest where the bike paths are) was incredibly toasty and sticky. To add insult to injury, in order to get to the start of the 5K, you had to walk about a mile or so there. It was fun to do at a fast walk, but I had a lot of sympathy for runners. By the time we got to the finish line (about 42 minutes, so not horribly long all things considered), the cast members had left, but we were told our “finisher medals” would be in our room later that day. (We ended up actually running in to the gal delivering them when we went back to the room to change.) We bought some t-shirts and then figured out the island’s internal tram service to get back to the ship.

We changed into swimwear and then went to pick Lily up. She was sad to go, but we mentioned that we’d be going to make sand castles. For several days, ever since she saw the beach in St. Maarten, she has been obsessed with the idea of making a sand castle. We briefly thought about a nap first for her, but she would have none of it. We did stop at Cabanas to grab lunch before we went to the island, much to her complaints. (We could have eaten on the island, but although a BBQ lunch would have been great for us, we weren’t sure what she’d want to eat, so went the Cabanas option.)

All in all, we spent about an hour out on the beach, and yes, Lily did get to make her sand castle. The water was comfortable, but a little cool, and so we just did some wading. Even though we didn’t go deeper than about a foot, there were actually fish swimming in that close. That was a huge surprise!

After making sand castles, we took the very sleepy girl, grabbed a drink (water for her and my first time trying a Konk Cooler—a little too strong for me, but I can see why there’s fans of it), and headed back to the ship for a nap.

At 4:30, we met down in The Tube nightclub area for the final AllEars meeting. Lots of great giveaways and some noshes. Although we didn’t win anything, it was great to see everyone one last time and thank Deb and Beci and everyone else from MEI for such a wonderful time. Everyone on the cruise was great, and we certainly enjoyed all the little gifts that ended up at our stateroom over the week (and hope that people enjoyed ours, too). By far, the one gift that had everyone talking was from a couple of Canadians on board who brought “Chipnuts”. This is the snack food that I can’t believe Americans don’t have. Take a peanut, dip it in a potato chip batter, and fry it. Oh my goodness, they are so good. Why can’t we get them in the U.S.???

We went back to the room, changed, and headed to the Enchanted Garden one last time. I think that is my favorite of the restaurants, to be honest. Once you get over the fact that cruise ship restaurants are crowded, this one is just a real pretty place. The restaurant goes through a “time change” while you eat, with flowers on the ceiling actually blooming while you eat. It is something to behold. The menu for the farewell meal was also a favorite of mine, and I finally got to try Baked Alaska. It lives up to the hype. I could have easily eaten an extra serving of that!

The final show of the trip wasn’t available on the internal TV system, but we were pretty busy packing bags anyhow. (We did put on Disney cartoon shorts for Lily, who is now a huge fan of Donald Duck and Chip and Dale cartoons.) You have to have your luggage outside your stateroom before you go to bed so it can be taken off the ship for you (aside from bags that you will carry with you to breakfast and off the ship). We also got the customs form filled out and got our satisfaction survey complete. I don’t think any of us wanted to go to bed, because we knew this was going to be it for this trip. But once we got the bags set outside, there wasn’t much to do aside from call it a night. Once again I was feeling a little bit blah (this time having the sinus stuff go into a pretty horrible cough), so I finally did call it a night. Tomorrow morning, back to the real world—or actually a trip to Disney World.

Dungeness Crabmeat Stuffed Tomato

Grilled Potato and Goat Cheese Napoleon 

Lobster and Crawfish Bisque

Potato and Leek Soup

Beef Wellington

Baked Alaska! (I could have eaten ten servings of this!)