My Blog

Monday, April 11, 2011

Our Time in Florida

Just over a week ago Brent and I came home from our week long vacation in Florida. We had a marvelous time together. We vacation so well together...we always have the same ideas at the same moment of what good vacationing is. We were best friends before this trip, but we became bestest friends on the trip.

We took something like 700+ pictures, and I promise to post only 75% of them on my blog. I've divided the pictures up between the different days of our trip, so each post will be about a different theme park or attraction. As for this first post, it will be about our trip in general and about the resort we stayed at.

Brent got all fancy with the camera on our flight over. Beautiful picture, huh?

Our first sighting of our resort as we exited the freeway. We stayed at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin. Well, to be more precise, we stayed at the Dolphin, whose triangular structure you can see pointing out above the Swan.


This, my friends, is the Dolphin, as it appears when you pull into the valet parking lot (before you realize that you need to go farther down the street to the self parking unless you want to pay mucho bucks).


View from our hotel window. The Swan was just across the lake...lagoon...pond...whatever.

To the left, the red and white buildings are Disney's Boardwalk Resort.

Our view of Epcot from our hotel room window.

Our view of Hollywood Studios from our hotel room window.

Night view of the place we called home for one week, taken near the Swan.

Beautiful.

I made us reservations for this steak house for our first night in Florida. It is inside the Dolphin, so we didn't have to go far. Don Shula's Steak House is themed after the 1972 Miami Dolphins' "Perfect Season." They serve the largest steaks I have ever seen in my life. I ordered the 32-oz prime rib and ate almost half of it. Brent ordered a porterhouse, and declared many times during our stay and a few times since we've been home that it was definitely in the top three steaks he's ever had the privilege of eating.





So why did we choose to stay at the Dolphin, you ask? Easy. We wanted to stay at a Walt Disney World resort from which we could either walk to all of the theme parks or have access to Disney World's amazingly efficient shuttle system. The Dolphin was the most affordable of all of the resorts. That's why we stayed there.

We visited many of the other resorts situated in different areas of Walt Disney World, and we found that by far, our location provided the most escape from the hubbub and frenzy of tourists. Walking "home" to our resort each night always had a calming and relaxing effect...it was often the only time of day when we had more than 5 feet of personal space outside of our room.

The Dolphin had a fantastic swimming pool, beach volleyball areas, hammocks, jacuzzis, tennis courts, basketball courts, you name it. We only found the time to use the swimming pool, jacuzzi and hammocks, but we found ourselves looking on longingly at families playing together in the other recreational areas as we hurried past them to bigger and better things, like the theme parks.

To end this post, I leave you with this picture. A topsy-turvy cake created by the chefs at the Cape May Cafe at Disney's Beach Club, a buffet style restaurant where Brent and I ate brunch our last morning in Orlando.

(To be honest, I'm struggling to come up with a way to tie in the last picture with the rest of this post...let's just pretend it belongs, ok? It needs a home.)

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