USA - Disney World, Ohio & Saginaw (July 1-16) part 1

As I mentioned in the last post, we arrived late in Florida after several delays and arrived at our Disney hotel - Port Orleans Resort quite late.  We had selected the meal plan for each day of our visit, so we set up our room and then headed out to get some dinner.  After that we headed to bed so we were ready for the parks the next day.

This time we were only going to do the Disney Parks (not the Universal Parks like last time).  This was purely a financial and time decision as we had really enjoyed Universal.

Our park visit plan was:
Monday 2nd - Animal Kingdom & EPCOT
Tuesday 3rd - Hollywood Studios  & Magic Kingdom
Wednesday 4th -  Disney Springs & Magic Kingdom
Thursday 5th - Animal Kingdom & EPCOT
Friday 6th - Hollywood Studios

As always it was ridiculously hot and humid (38-40 degrees and 95% humidity), but after a big rain storm on Thursday, the weather became a bit milder.  It was also really crowded due to Independence Day (4th July), which meant that the line for rides was really long. In the end we mostly rode the rides that we had set up Fast Pass for.

We didn't take as many photos this time, as we had lots of shots from the first trip, but there was some new areas and cool Memory Maker Professional shots.

Our accommodation was in the Port Orleans Resort - Riverside, which was located in the Disney complex:

Port Orleans Resort - Riverside

Our first park on Monday was Animal Kingdom.  We'd planned to start pretty early, but we were tired from the late night, and got to the park around 9:30.  It was about 37 degrees and 90% humidity, so it was a hot one.  The pictures below are a mix of our two trips to Animal Kingdom.

On the bus to Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom

The Tree of Life

View from outside in 2016

There was a new attraction in Animal Kingdom - Pandora, the world from Avatar.  We had seen it being constructed when we visited in 2016, but had no idea what it was going to be:

 Pandora opened up two new rides - the Na'vi River Journey, a slow boat ride through a themed world and the Avatar Flight of Passage, a 3D motion ride where you ride a Banshee through Pandora. The lines for both were pretty bad, but we managed to get a Fast Pass on the Na'vi ride.  The Flight of Passage was booked out before we even got the option to add Fast Pass and the line was always about 180 minutes.  Eventually we managed to get on the Flight of Passage on the 5th of July (while the big firework show was on at Magic Kingdom).  The line had dropped to 2 hours, but it was a long wait.

Entering the Valley

Heading into Mo'ara Valley

Strange plant that spat mist

The floating islands over the crowd

 

Posing by the Pandora Utility Suit

A talk from a Pandora Utility Suit operator

Entering the Flight of Passage ride

 The next few photos show the themeing in the line for the Flight of Passage ride.  The queue starts outside and works its way up the mountain and then inside into a cave.  You then move through an abandoned facility with warning signs and plants and then into a science lab and finally into the ride area itself.

Gardens outside the ride at night time

The Na'avi River ride was themed as a journey to find a Shaman of Songs.  It was a dark ride with music and lots of glow in the dark plants and animations.  The most impressive things were the amazing animatronic Shaman at the end that moves so fluidly and some of the effects, like those of frogs jumping on the leaves above the river.

My video didn't turn out too well because of how dark it was, but there are full videos of the ride on youtube.(Na'avi River Journey video).

The Avatar Flight of Passage was amazing, the video was super crisp and the ride had you mount a motorbike like saddle which simulated the movement of the Banshee, including the pulsing of breath.  Here's a youtube video of the ride: (Avatar Flight of Passage).

We also visited the rest of Animal Kingdom, getting our photo taken with some of the Ducktales characters, riding the Dino ride and our favourite Expedition Everest.  I had a pretty decent fall when I clipped the back of Camerons shoe and ended up doing an epic sprawl in the middle of dinosaur kingdom.

Welcome to Dinosaur Land

Looking down the Kali River Rapids

 

Who wouldn't like an adventure up a great bird...

One of our secret Mickeys - the bubbles on the Coke cups

Parrot

Cam being eaten at the Rainforest Cafe

Posing with the Rainforest frog

Cam and the frog on their first date

The double-sided frog made it so the frog was always looking at you, but made it freaky from the side

The van from the Kilimanjaro Safari

Looking out over the river towards Mount Everest

Here's a few of our professional photos from Animal Kingdom:

Flying with Launchpad McQuack

Launchpad McQuack

Outside the Harambe Africa area

Scared of the hyenas

On the bridge overlooking Mt Everest

In the Africa area overlooking the lake

Tree of Life

 

Representing Sweden at the Tree of Life

Falling leaves

Happy 4th of July!

Meeting Daisy Duck.  Tomas wanted to wait for her to go so he could get a photo with the dinosaur

 

On the Dinosaur ride

Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Animal Kingdom

20 Years of Animal Kingdom

Mount Everest

Pretending to sleep (except for me being a Vampire) on Expedition Everest

Posing by the plant in Pandora

Floating islands in Pandora

 

Meeting Scrooge McDuck (or Farbror Joakim von Anka as he is called in Sweden)

At Everest

Tree of Life at night

With the Animal Kingdom Frame

After Animal Kingdom, we returned to the hotel for a change of clothes, shower and swim, and then headed out to Hollywood Studios.

There was a new Toy Story Land at Hollywood studios, that had opened only a few days early, but it was so crowded we avoided it on the first day.  We came back on our 2nd-to-last day and went on one of the rides - Toy Story Mania - which was a 3D shooting gallery ride. The wait was about an hour. There was also a new rollercoaster - Slinky Dog Dash, but that had a 3 hour wait the whole time, so we never bothered with it.

Here's our photos from both trips to Hollywood Studios:

Hula-Hoops at the entrance of the park

 

Building a lightsaber each

 

Two Jedi capture an evil Sithlord

Meeting BB8

Rey's Speeder

Cam takes on a Storm Trooper

Meeting with the First Order

Hollywood Tower Hotel

Waiting for the Tower of Terror

Hollywood Tower Hotel

Heading into Toy Story Land

Themed fences in Toy Story Land

Woody at Toy Story Land

Toy Story Land and the Slink Dog Dash Roller Coaster

Meeting Buzz Lightyear - the line was huge so we didn't get a photo with him

The entrance to Toy Story Mania

Tom with the giant Uno cards

 

In the line for Toy Story Mania

 

Dr Malpractice, Pumping Heart Playset

Kris compared my facial hair with this close up of the Swedish Chef

The Swedish writing was a bit wrong - the ö is the only one of those characters to appear in the Swedish alphabet

Here's some of our professional photos:

Meeting BB8

Outside the main stage

Meeting Kylo Ren

Cam and Tom with Kylo

Meeting Chewbacca

 

On the Rock 'N' Roller Coaster

 

At the park entrance Fantasia display

Tom and the balloons

Jedi with a captured Sith Lord

Representing Sweden at the Tower of Terror

Tower of Terror ride photo

Outside the Rock 'N' Roller Coaster

Meeting Kylo Ren:

Mr Potato Head tells a joke:

Ride video for Tower of Terror:

Skåne Old Boys (and Kris and the kids) tour to Glasgow (27-30 June)

The first part of our final trip was a Skåne Old Boys Rugby tour to Glasgow. I flew out on Thursday from Copenhagen to Edinburgh, and Kris and the kids flew out on Friday.  We separately caught buses to Glasgow.  I stayed in a hotel with the Old boys and Kris and the kids stayed in a hotel. On Saturday night, when the Old Boys caught their bus back to Edinburgh to leave, I stayed in the hotel and we then went to Glasgow airport to fly to the US for the final stage of our adventure.

I seemed to be starting a trend of taking more and more luggage on the Old Boys tours.  The first trip (Romania) I took a single carry-on bag with all my stuff.  When we went to Poland, I took my rugby bag as carry-on and a small suitcase.  Since the trip to Glasgow was part of our return flight home and, we needed to carry everything we didn't send sea freight, I ended up with a huge camping backpack weighing about 23kg.  This looked pretty humorous along with everyone else carrying their small bags.

The Old Boys landed in Edinburgh on the 27th of June.  We caught a bus from the airport to the centre of Edinburgh and then walked to a pub where we met up with the rest of the team.  One of my friends had a wheeled bag, so he let me balance the massive backpack on it and rolled it along.  The only problem came when we went to get on the bus and, once he and the big bag were loaded, we were told the bus was full and I'd need to wait for the next one. Fortunately the guys dragged my huge bag out of the bus and to the pub where it was waiting for me.

The path we walked along led us past the Scottish National Gallery, and impressive pillared building, behind which we could see the top of Edinburgh castle:

National Gallery

 

Once we reached the pub, we had a few drinks and some lunch and then a few of us headed off to explore Edinburgh. I was keen to see the town as we'd missed it when we came to Scotland, due to needing to pick up the motorhome.

Our first stop was the Assembly Hall. Built in the mid 1800s it is the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland:

Behind the Assembly Hall was The Hub, built in 1845 it is the home of Edinburgh Festival:

We then headed up the castle, but it was closing for the evening, so we made our way back to the pub via a few more stops:

St Giles Cathedral

Scott Monument  - dedicated to author Sir Walter Scott

The Royal Scots Grey Monument in front of Edinburgh Castle

Once everyone was gathered at the pub, we headed out and caught our bus to Glasgow. We arrived pretty late in the evening, got a few drinks and then headed to bed.  The next day started with a tour of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens:

Botanic Gardens

Main Greenhouse

We broke the rules by playing rugby on the grass (before we saw the sign), so we posed by the "No Ball Games" sign, with the ball of course

We then took a walking tour of Glasgow to check out the sights:

Glasgow City Chambers

Big Willie's

Wellington

You may have noticed that the last photo was a little strange. It turns out that there is a tradition to make sure that Glasgow's Duke of Wellington statue is always wearing a (at least one) traffic cone.  Wellington is famous for defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, and this statue was built in 1844 to commemorate the man and the victory.  Sometime in the early 1980s it is believed that a drunk student placed a traffic cone on his head.  This became somewhat of a tradition, even though it was frowned on by the police as it could damage the statue. There were a variety of options raised to prevent the placing of the cones, but the public argued that it was a representation of culture and a petition to keep the cone got almost 75k signatures in 24hrs


On the Saturday we had our two games of rugby against the Scottish teams. Kris and the kids met us at the rugby ground with the Swedish flag and we had a great fun, ending up winning both games:

After the two games we were exhausted and ready for some drinks, but there was an AFL game about to start on the field and the visiting team were short of players.  They asked us to play and since I was an Aussie I got volunteered, along with another of the Skåne players, Eddie. The team shirts were a but tight but we got geared up and ready to go:

The Kingdom Kangaroos (+2)

Unfortunately the opposition team complained that we hadn't been registered for long enough and put in an official protest - I guess they were scared.  So we were not allowed to play after all.

We had a great afternoon with the three teams, had a bit too much to drink and then I parted ways with the Old Boys.  They were taking the bus back to Edinburgh to catch the flight the next day, and I caught the local bus back to Glasgow central to meet with Kris and the kids and get a sleep before our flight out the next day.

There were a few other stories, but what happens on tour stays on tour.  Like us crashing a wedding, pretending to be Icelandic and pretending that the Swedish små grodana song was a Swedish version of the Haka and not a kids song and dance.

Sunday started early, as we needed to be at the airport early in the morning to get our flight. We ordered a taxi, but since we had so much luggage it was a real squeeze to fit it all in.  We did manage it, somehow, and got ourselves checked into our flight to Orlando, Florida.  Once we were settled in, we were informed that there would be a delay before our plane was ready. We boarded the plane an hour and a half late and then were informed that there was a minor technical issue that needed to be investigated, so we had another hour delay sitting on the plane waiting to take off.  They gave us a free drink and access to their premium movie pack, but it was frustrating as, before we'd even taken off, we'd lost 3 hours of our time at Disney World.  Eventually we got to take off and started our 12 hour flight to Orlando.  We made up about half an hour in flying time, but when we landed, we were again informed that there would be a delay - the customs area was full and we needed to stay on the plane.  We were kept on the plane for almost an hour before being allowed out into the customs area, where there was still a huge line.  We had expected to hit our Disney hotel at about 3pm, instead we finally go there at 9pm.  We had a quick dinner and by the time we got settled in, it was 11pm.

Leaving Malmö and Sweden

After two and a half years it was time to say goodbye to Sweden and Malmö.  We really enjoyed our stay and made heaps of new friends. My company in Sweden had asked if I could stay longer (and Kris' work had asked to keep her too), but work in Australia needed us back for a new project.

To say goodbye, we organised a goodbye picnic and BBQ, spread over two days. The first day we had friends from both my and Kristine's work and I cooked up some hamburgers on the BBQ (without making a huge fire this time). We had a great time and my work gifted us with some Swedish shirts and hats marked with the submarine project numbers.

The second day we had all of the kids friends over and had a crazy day with a massive water balloon fight.

After the party it was time to get serious about the move.  We'd been starting to sort all of our gear for a while, working out what we wanted to take back to Australia, and what we would donate or give away.  We had removalists coming to take our freight and, after that, everything left needed to either fit in our suitcases or be left behind. Our furniture was owned by my work, so that would be donated - either to friends or to charity, but all the souvenirs, board games, toys, clothes, bedding, bikes, soccer goals etc etc needed to be sorted.

One week before we were scheduled to leave we moved into a temporary accommodation - a hotel near the kids school.  We had been informed that we were able to take 6m3 of sea freight and 1m3 of air freight. They checked out our pile of stuff and informed us that we had about 11m3 (I was a bit dubious as they added a box for pretty much everything - "pillow, that's a box. Book, that's a box", but it wasn't looking good for fitting it all in. They offered for us to take the full amount as sea freight only instead of taking air freight for no change in cost.  Air freight would be likely to arrive at the same time we did (we were doing some travel first), but sea freight would get there about a month and a half later (late August).  We didn't see that we had much choice though, so we booked it all to go by sea.  We did manage to reduce to total amount to 9m3, but we ended up repacking and reweighing our suitcases multiple time to make sure everything else would fit.

Our big problem was the way we'd decided to return home. Instead of taking a nice easy flight straight back to Aus, I decided to take long service leave and have a good trip to finish off.  The first weekend I had an Old Boys rugby tour to Glasgow, Kris and the kids were going to follow and then we'd head off on Sunday and fly to Orlando to visit Disney World for a week.  After that, we'd head up to Ohio and Michigan to visit family and the fly out of Ohio to head home. This meant that we needed to make sure we could take our huge amount of luggage on all the flights.  The flight from Orlando to Ohio was the hardest as it was a with a cheaper airline that didn't allow cabin bag without paying lots of money, so we booked an extra under carriage bag. This meant that our cabin bags needed to collapse down to fit inside our normal luggage for that flight only, and still stay under the weight limit.  It was a pretty stressful time, but luckily Kristine is a packing god and managed to get us through by skimming the bag weight limits by a couple of grams per bag.

My next couple of blog posts will describe our travel on the way back to Australia, but I wanted to take this time to say that we really loved our time in Malmö and Sweden in general.  We found the people were lovely and welcoming (once you got past the Swedish dislike of small talk...) and the travel was amazing.  We never expected to places like Iceland, Rovaniemi, Budapest, Rome, Tallinn, Lichtenstein Castle, Saltzberg, Vienna, Prague, Oslo, Legoland, Niagara Falls, Disney World - just to name a few.  It was an amazing opportunity and despite some initial difficulties it was a rewarding experience.  The kids made friends with people with a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures, they saw so much of the world and experienced so many new things. I got to see a giant Lego pirate ship - do I need to say more..

But what made our trip so awesome was the amazing people that we met.  I won't name them all here, for fearing of missing someone, but we were welcomed into so many families it was a true privilege and it really made our stay memorable, and the leaving so much harder.  I am hoping that we can head back for a visit or host some of our friends in Australia soon. So, to everyone we met in Sweden, thank you all so much.

Anyway, it's time to pack the bags and get moving.  We have friends and family waiting in Australia and more traveling to do.  So long, Sweden. This is definitely not a goodbye.

Vi ses Sverige.