Hollywood Studios used to be known as MGM.  I don’t know why the name changed and I keep calling it by the old name.  Not that it really matters.  HS is probably the least “Disney” of all 4 parks.  It is really a tribute to 1950s Hollywood and has a very cool feeling to it.  I think it is also the smallest park.  A topiary Mickey as the Sorcerer’s apprentice greets you.

The brooms were tossing buckets of blue salvia for water.  Very cute!  Must steal that idea for my garden.

The park is just like a big Hollywood set.  You walk down different streets to get to areas.  They have a crossroads where one corner looks down like NY and another looks like California.  This is a cool picture.

In the back where the white barricade is and the man in the orange shirt is – that is a giant mural and not a street.  Looks just like it, though, doesn’t it??

We had a nice quiet breakfast at a place called Starring Rolls.  They also had locally roasted coffee there, which is why we went, but the breakfast was certainly nothing to sneeze at!

Apple Cranberry turnover.  Yep – it was really good.  Did I mention that I only gained 1 pound from vacation?  And that was weighing in the day  after getting back.  I was happy with that.  I think the scale will actually be lower since I am always bloated from plane travel.  Lots and lots of walking was done.

Continuing on. There is also a copy of the Mann’s Chinese Theater:

This is home to the Great Movie Ride. It is a ride that takes you through scenes of famous movies from the noir era, Casablanca, Singing in the Rain, Cassablanca, Alien, Wizard of Oz.  Fun.

Then there is the fun Star Tours! Hello Imperial Walker!

Hello C3PO!

This is a fun, fun ride that is now 3D, which I actually was thinking I was annoyed by (must everything now be in 3D??), but it actually was well done.  They have 50 different possible tours you can take so you can ride this many times and not repeat the tour.  We did it twice.

We did not do the 2 biggest draws here, which are the Tower of Terror and the Aerosmith roller coaster.  Too much ride for this lady.  I’ll stick with the Muppets!

Muppets in 3D vision.  The only people I cut a break for to do cheesy 3D jokes are the muppets!   We catch this show every time we come here and it just cracks me up every single time.

We also hit another favorite spot to eat lunch, which is the Sci-Fi Dine in Theater.  You eat almost in the dark.  You sit in cars in front of a big projection screen.

The screen plays trailers to old sci-fi movies the whole time.

I heard my favorite trailer – Beware of the Blob!  That got in my head for the rest of the day.

Lovebirds eating by dashboard light.

It really is hard to see what you are eating LOL!

After lunch, John went off to see a stunt show (snore….), so I went to see Little Mermaid.

It was a live action puppet show.  Very cute and I think I was the only one in the theater without a little one in tow.

And I couldn’t pass up this opportunity!

I love Pooh!  When there aren’t long lines, I go ahead and have pictures taken with characters.

Hollywood Studios is definitely easy to do in 1 day without feeling over tired.  The Fanstasmic show was not running while we were there, which is unfortunate because that is a cool, cool show at night.

Bye Hollywood Studios!

Tomorrow is Epcot!  My favorite park.

We actually visited the Magic Kingdom 3 times during this vacation. Since we stayed on Disney property, we had the park hopper pass.  Another benefit of staying on property is that the parks are open extended hours for those people staying there.  You just need to show your room key (aka the Key to the Kingdom) to ride attractions.  When we arrived Sunday evening,  Magic Kingdom was open until 1 a.m. with extended hours, so we popped over for a few hours.

Disney does the fireworks shows at park closing for all their parks with the exception of Animal Kingdom. No fireworks there because of the animals.  This makes for a huge mass exodus once the fireworks are done, which I really, really hate.  So, since the park had extended hours for on property guests, that meant after the fireworks at 9 pm, everyone else left and the park was open to the resort patrons for another few hours.  Here is a tip for you.  Visit Fantasy Land in this park on a night like this because it gets swamped with little children during the daytime hours.  So, we rode this:

Welcome to your ear worm for the day.   It’s like a nightmare by the time you get to the end LOL!

Please note – you are not allowed to take flash pictures on rides, but you can take them sometimes without flash or  you can video rides if you have no external light source.  Listen to the attraction attendants as to what they allow. They will always tell you.  It ruins the ride for other people if you use flash, so just don’t do it.

Fantasy Land has another of my favorites –  the Winney the Pooh ride!  You get to go in a big hunny pot.

My most favorite ride in the Magic Kingdom is the Haunted Mansion.  In fact, that was the very first ride we went on Sunday night!

I was giggling like a little kid on this ride.  I love it!

This is the daytime view at the entrance to Magic Kingdom.  They actually are doing a lot of rennovation on this particular park, so a fair number of things were closed.  You can see the big crane in the background behind the castle working on Fantasy Land.  They are supposed to be opening up the new stuff later this year.

Daytime view of Cinderella’s castle

It has a beautiful mosaic walk through depicting the Cinderella story. The detail is just incredible.

On to Frontier Land and Splash Mountain!  This is a cool log flume ride.  I took this shot while on the ride as we floated by the big drop.  Then I put my camera away to keep it dry!

The ride is really lovely and goes through the story of Br’er Rabbit.  Then there is the drop at the end as he escapes through the briar patch.  The camera catches you as you go down the hill to make a big splash.

Note John ducking down.  I was full head up and got soaked LOL!  This is a very fun ride.  No line either.  We walked in all the way up to the line and got right on!  Loved it when that happened.

When there is a long line, another benefit of staying on property is that you can use the Fast Pass option.  You put your room card into a kiosk and it prints out a ticket for you with what time to come back to ride an attraction.  Instead of waiting in the long lines, you just go during the time on the Fast Pass ticket and only wait maybe 5 or 10 minutes in a special line.

That is very, very cool.  Jungle cruise is a classic ride.

It’s cute.  I am a sucker for any train or boat ride.

Of course, I like the safari ride much better in Animal Kingdom with the real animals. 

Adventure Land also has the Pirates of the Caribbean, another one of my favorite rides. It was updated adding in Johnny Depp as an animatronic, which was cool.

This daytime visit was on Friday, and I have to say I was really tired of people at this point. This park had the most people in it during our whole visit.  Plus, I had laryngitis and John had to do any talking or ordering for me.  The next time we come, I would definitely *not* do Magic Kingdom on a Friday.

I had the yummiest snack that day, too.  Fruit tart! This was from the Main Street Bakery.

We ate some very good food this week, even for mass produced food!

Something not to overlook is the castle rose garden.  This is just past the castle before the entrance to Tomorrow Land.

You know I was all over this!  On my bucket list is to come here during the Flower and Garden show at Epcot.

Tomorrow Land has been updated since the last time we were here (and it needed it!).

They replaced the Alien Adventure attraction with Stitch and that was totally lame.  Boo on that one.  Otherwise, the updates were nice.

Bye Magic Kingdom!

Next park up will be Hollywood Studios, formerly known as MGM.

I thought I would recap the parks.  We had the park hopper option, which allows you to go from park to park at any time, so you can do more than one park in a day.  This is nice for those parks that have extended hours at night and you want to pop over there for the evening after visiting a different one during the day.  We stayed at the Pop Century resort, which is one of the value resorts.

When staying on the property, there are buses that pick you up for each of the parks that leave every 20 minutes.  We decided to do Animal Kingdom on Monday.  This was the only park that we did just one day at.

Animal Kingdom is sort of a zoo/theme park hybrid.  There are lots of animal exhibits and then sections with ride attractions.  

The newest attraction is Expedition Everest.  Scary!!!  This was an intense coaster ride, which I dragged John on, much to his dismay.

This coaster goes forward and backwards.  As you go along, the tracks stop and are broken (because the yeti got to them), then you start going backwards.  It is very fast and goes in and out of the dark.

Poor John did not like that ride at all LOL!  I would do it again, but it was pretty scary.

One of our favorite things at Animal Kingdom is the Safari ride.  Disney does such a great job of giving the animals an natural environment with enclosures that you actually can’t see from the people side – so it looks like all the animals interact together.  The Safari ride is a tram that takes you out into the animal enclosures.

They can come near the trucks if they want, but they are not like animals in other safari places that are used to people feeding them.  That is not allowed at this park (thank goodness).

This park was not crowded at all.  No lines for anything, which was great!

We had a character lunch at Harambe. 

We didn’t actually know it was going to be a character lunch, we thought the buffet food sounded interesting and then decided to go ahead and eat there.

Lots of seafood, samosas and plaintains!

Goofy stopped by to visit us.

John is not a character hugger.  Me?  I get right in there!

There are also walking trails that take you through other animal exhibits.

No bars, ever.

John and I had the most outrageous snack.  You think when you get a cupcake at a them park that it won’t be big, right?  Wrong!

That’s a chocolate lollipop stuck in each cupcake!  I about died laughing at the size of these.  We would have just ordered one if we had known.  Could not finish them… probably a good thing.

Animal Kingdom also has a dinosaur section.  A little odd, but there you go.

We went on the Dinosaur ride, which is really rocky and a bit hard on the back (ouch!).  This big dinosaur pops out and they snap a picture of you when it happens.  I laughed really hard at the lady in front of us (we are in the back row):

This is one park that you can actually get through in a single day without having to hurry.

This is the large tree of life in the center of the park. It is nice to just appreciate all of the work that went into the carving of it.

 Easy enough and the ingredients were already in the house!  Double score.

Ingredients:

Note – I like to go by weight, especially when baking.

• 180 grams powdered sugar (1.5 cups)
• 35 grams unsweetened  cocoa powder (1/3 cup)
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 45 grams liquid egg whites  (3 tablespoons or 1 to 2 egg whites)
• 1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 90 grams  semi-sweet chocolate chips (1/2 cup)

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Line a large cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Sift together the sugar, cocoa and salt.

Mix well.  Add the vanilla and the egg whites. Stir well.  This is the point where you need to judge if you need to add more egg whites or not.  It does not take much to change the consistency, so don’t add a whole white if you are using the whites.  It is much easier to do this with the liquid egg whites. You want a stiff, brownie-type batter.

If the batter is too liquidy, then the cookies will spread out too much when baked.  Stir in chocolate chips.

Using a small disher, portion out 11 cookie balls onto the cookie sheet.   I use a disher that is probably 1/8th cup?  This size:

You might actually get 12 cookies out of this, but I ate some of the batter

Bake 14-15 minutes until the cookies are cracked on top.  They will spread and flatten a little bit.

Remove parchment paper to a cooling rack. Let cookies cool completely before removing from paper.  Trust me on this.  They are too fragile to move until they set up.

Delicious!

The cookies are very delicate with a slightly crispy outside and kind of gooey inside.  Store in an airtight container on the counter.  I find the next day they are wonderful popped in the micro for 10 seconds before eating.

For 11 cookies, the stats per cookie are:

124 calories, 2.5 grams of fat, 24 grams of carbs, 1.5 grams of fiber, >1 gram of protein.

I am bringing my netbook with me as I have to upload my paysheet for work this week, so I might post if we are relaxing.  I also have the flourless chocolate cookie post queued up as well.

Since we are headed to warmer weather, I thought I would give you a video of warmer times.  This is a slideshow of my gardenfrom 2011.  From the first tulips to the mums!

I can’t wait to see how it grows this year!

And if you haven’t seen the Healthy Heart Weekend sign up – here is the link!

I wanted a nice comforting breakfast today, so I made up some protein waffles with warm apple topping.

After working for the morning, it was back to the eye doc today for a checkup on the old peepers!

I am about 95% back to normal and can start tapering down the steroid drops and be done in about a week.  We may never figure out what could be causing the allergic reaction, but for now it is trial and error.  I have been okay wearing my contacts, so it doesn’t appear to be an issue with that at least.  Plus, my eyes are more red when I wake up. Pixie does not sleep in our bedroom due to John’s allergies, so that probably rules her out.  Time to play detective.  This whole episode has set me back a lot.  The lab work alone was over $600, although I think I have a discounted pay on that for self-pay (I hope, if I read the bill correctly).  Crazy.  Guess I will be working a few Saturdays to catch that up.  So, hair loss, dry skin, weight gain are all symptoms of perimenopause.  Hooray…

I came home for lunch.  Leftover Saag Paneer.  I need to try to make this at home.

We are trying to eat up as much stuff in the fridge as we can before vacation! Work went by pretty quickly today.  I took a break to make the lattes today. That meant a secret Friday ingredient! 

Plus a couple pieces of chocolate.

Both of us had mishmash dinners tonight to use up leftovers.  Mine was cooked beef that I mixed with some taco seasoning and topped with a little sour cream.

After dinner, I went out shopping looking for some capri length pants for Florida.  I normally don’t buy capris unless they are for short people.  Otherwise they just look like highwaters.   Then, there is just the annoyance of shopping for something and getting frustrated finding the right fit.  Ugh.  I did not enjoy shopping so much tonight, but I did find a pair of capris for shorties!  Thank goodness for JCPenney and their petite department -although I am feeling anything but petite in any form right now.  Plus I got a top for $8 and another pair of comfy relaxing pants to wear.

Now is snack time and watching the rest of this season of Downton Abbey!  John is enjoying it as well, so now we have a show to watch together.

Out of curiosity, how do you handle the urge to splurge on food when you are traveling? Do you get hit with that, “Well I’m on vacation so it’s ok to have….” impulse, or are you immune to it now? I always have a hard time when pulled out of my regular environment. It just makes me feel like it’s ok to go overboard, even when I know it is not and I will pay for it later!

 

I started to answer in the comment, but the realized it was going to be a very long-winded answer. 

The short answer is “It depends”.  First off, we don’t really vacation very often.  The last time John and I traveled was at the end of 2010 when we went to visit his family in Colorado.  That trip I was more concerned about eating because when we visit his family, we eat out a lot and they are not usually places that are easy to eat on the lighter side (and not much exercise).  That makes it hard.

I am certainly not immune to the pull of ‘vacation food.’  Heck, I have trouble being immune to peanut butter cups at my sister’s house!

When we go to New Orleans, all bets are off on food.  No restrictions at all there because it is a wonderful city to eat in – especially if you are a foodie.  I eat there whatever I want, knowing that I am going to have to take off weight after  a trip there. And I am okay with that.

For Disney, we aren’t going there for the food.  Let’s face it – large volume theme park food is not going to be gourmet.  The great thing about Disney, though, is that there are plenty of opportunities to eat very healthy there.  It’s just a matter of choosing those options.  I am more conscious about eating on a longer trip because I could do some serious damage in 6 days of eating whatever fell onto my plate.  I do have a plan for this week, which is going to be normal breakfasts of oats or eggs with fruit, and a lighter lunch.  John and I looked online at places to eat to make sure we can get things that aren’t so far removed from how we usually eat and have sort of a plan of which places to go to in the various parks.  That helps so we don’t walk into the first deep fried chicken nugget basket we find.

If you do plan on going to any Disney park some time, check out All Ears.Net.  They have current menus and pricing for pretty much all the restaurants and eateries, which has been a great help when trying to stay on a healthier track, or budget track for that matter.  Also, they have healthy options for snacks in all the parks, like fresh fruit, frozen yogurt, frozen fruit bars, popcorn.  Although I do tend to like my afternoon lattes.

The best link on that site?  Where to find real coffee at Disney   You know I am printing that list out.

So, I don’t plan on snacking my way through Disney.  We will certainly be doing a lot of walking, so I am not that concerned about having some treats in there.  I just have to be careful not to go overboard.  I do tend to expect I will have weight gain from vacations.  Not always because of eating choices, but because of the food being different from what we normally eat.  It usually has more sodium than we consume, so I always get travel bloat.

So, long answer is that yes, I do find I want to just splurge on food on vacation.  I just have to find a way to compromise with it and not make it every meal.

And what if it happens where all my good eating intentions go to hell?  It  is okay.  It’s just so not worth it to beat yourself up over food.  It’s just not.  If I am going to gain weight from something, I damn well better enjoy eating it.

Lots of rain last night. What is up with rain in January? My garden is going to struggle this winter, I think. Rain is not good for gardens in this climate as the roots will rot.  They need to be frozen and under a blanket of insulating snow. Guess that will be an excuse to buy more plants this spring!  I headed out in some foggy weather to the gym.

Then treadmill walking. This was one of those days where I felt huge at the gym. You know those days? When the little women are there jumping around. Even though they are much taller than me, I still feel like a behemoth around them. Ugh. Of course, I could kick their asses if need be, I am sure. I’ll just be smug about that LOL!

Breakfast time was oatmeal!  I just cooked some oats and whisked in egg whites.  Now for a topping that looks like something it isn’t.

This is coconut butter with a spoon of lemon curd!  It either looks like a sunny side up egg or that I opened up a Cadbury Cream Egg on my oats 

It’s been busy at work.  At least on my accounts.  We got an email from Disney today:

You’re almost here!
The Vaughn Party Walt Disney World® vacation is just a few days away! Here are some last-minute tips and info to help you make sure everything’s running on time. We look forward to seeing you again real soon!

(Yeah, it has John’s last name on there since he booked the trip – even though I paid for it – I’ll set aside my feminist nature for a minute on that one.)  One thing I love about Disney is that they treat you right.  Everything has the guest in mind and one reason I just love staying on the property and letting them take care of everything!  I cannot wait for vacation!  John and I did not go on a vacation all last year, so we deserve some time off.

Lunchtime and I had one of my Trader Joe’s items.

This little portion is 250 calories, which is annoying, but it is pretty good.  I need to try making my own paneer because we don’t have any stores here in tiny town that carry it.

Pixie was my lap partner today. Like that is anything new.

It was a warmer day today, but still a good day for a latte.

I cannot even tell you how happy I am that my eyes are normal now!  I am hoping that the redness won’t return with the end of the eye drops.  We still don’t know what caused the reaction, but maybe it was transient (fingers crossed).

John was out in the late afternoon with his math learner and asked me to meet him down the street for a slice of pizza for dinner when he finished.  It was a nice night for a walk!

Hawaiian pizza.  With my date.

Now settling in for some Downton Abbey tonight after I do my literacy lesson plan.  I caught a bit of this on PBS a couple weeks ago and now have it in my Netflix instant queue to watch.  It’s a good show and I just love the setting!  With snack:

Chocolate covered almonds.

If you want to see last year’s results, click here.

On this weekend, do some kind of activity on 1 of the 3 days of Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.  You don’t have to have a blog in order to join, either.

Like last year, I just want this to be a focus on getting healthy. If you want to walk, that’s fine. Elliptical bunny? Knock yourself out! Take a long bike ride? Go for it! The only stipulation is that you need to take a picture of yourself before, during, or after your event and send it to me. I will post the pictures here. Get creative, too! You don’t have to have your face in the photo if you don’t want to, so have fun with it!

Date: Just before Valentine’s, of course! February 10th, 11th, and 12th! Feel free to chose Friday, Saturday, or Sunday to complete your event.

Distance: Your choice. I know many of you are training for an event, so you can use whatever distance fits in with your training plan. It’s all about a healthy heart, not a specific distance or time.

After you complete your event, please email me the photo and what you did at javaqueen01 (at) yahoo.com .

Please post below if you would like to participate and what you plan to do! Feel free to post about it on your blog if you have one and see how many people we can get to participate! You may grab the logo above and link as well. Last year we had 50 sign ups, but only 36 actually did it.  Let’s get at least that many this year!

I will be giving away some prizes, too.  I just have to think of some.  You can be from wherever in the world since I am the one sending – you don’t have to just live in the US.!

I know 1 prize will be some coffee roasted by yours truly. Or some local tea if the person selected doesn’t drink coffee (GASP!!).

I need to come up with a couple other prizes, but I wanted to get this sign up post going.

Also, upon request, here is a shot of me with my glasses.  I actually like how I look with my glasses, I just don’t like wearing them because I don’t see peripherally as well with them on, plus the whole exercising thing.  I can’t just leave them off because I don’t see well enough without them.

My eyes are mostly white again. Just a touch red in the corner of the left eye still, but that was the worst part anyway. Yay!  Plus I am liking the new hair cut.  Quite easy to style.  I only use my fingers when drying and no brush at all!

Enough of that, though.  It was road trip time!  TJs is about 2.5 hours away.  We are slated for one to open in Albany this spring, so that is only an hour away, but we wanted to have some fun and take a trip.

Me and sis:

We did lots of singing to this:

My niece ignored our singing and read her book:

I am so, so happy she is a reader!  Especially with the work I am doing as a literacy volunteer.  I told Logan it was such a great thing that she loved reading.

Crossing state lines for a pitstop:

Then we got to TJs.  They don’t allow pictures in the store, silly peeps.  The one  thing I like about Trader Joe’s is the price on things.  Particularly for chocolates, nut butters,  and frozen foods. I’ll get to the loot later.

After shopping, we were hungry for lunch.  We did shop hungry, oops!  We went across the street to the mall and went to Brio;

It looked really swanky inside, but the prices were very reasonable.

I ate off the brunch menu with crepes stuffed with ricotta and fresh fruit sprinkled with granola.  This had a bit of shredded basil in it, which was a really interesting flavor with the fruit.

Delicious!!  I love crepes.  I would definitely come here again… if it wasn’t 2.5 hours away!

Mother and daughter:

We poked around the mall a bit, more in Rainforest Cafe so Logan could look at all the stuff there, including the big aquarium.

Rainforest Cafe is just too much for me, though. Have any of you eaten there? It’s pretty gimmicky.

We headed on out after that.  More singing and, of course, a coffee stop!

That was good fuel to get home by!  I did miss the whole early football game, which sounded like a good game.  How I wish the Ravens had won!  Stupid Patriots…

Anyway, this is my haul:

1.5 pounds of blueberries for $6.  Yay!  I’ll be eating those all week before vacation. I had brought along a cooler for some frozen stuff.  I got a couple Indian entrees:

Miscellaneous snack things:

Sesame honey cashews are the bomb!!  I picked up a bag for my mom and one for us!  Lots of dark chocolate things for John.

Coffee beans, granola, almond butter (great price!), red curry sauce, green chiles.

Lots of good stuff.  Had to stock up!  It was definitely a fun day