Surprise!!

Last week we were busy preparing ourselves for our annual trip to visit family in Olympia, Washington. Phil had a crazy work week and I was doing my best to get us packed. Phil checked our flight information the morning we were getting ready to leave and discovered he had accidentally bought the tickets for the wrong weekend! Thank goodness we had travel insurance! We called to see if there was anyway we could switch the tickets and found out it was going to cost us around $4000 in addition to what we already had paid. Since we weren't willing to stomach that price we canceled the trip. We're planning on trying our Olympia trip again this summer if not before. Phil and I had to decide what we should do since we still had a week of vacation ahead of us. We also had two excited little girls sitting in the living room with their carefully packed carry-on's ready to get on an airplane to go see Aunt Carol and Grammy. They had been talking about this trip for weeks. So we had Phil's dad come sit with the kids while we went to AAA to talk to a travel agent. And we planned an impromptu trip to Disney World!!

I thought Megan was going to cry when we told them we weren't going to Olympia.

 Now take a look at the reaction we got when we told them we were going to Disney World!!

Even though we were already packed, there was some work that went into getting us ready for this new destination. We were packed for Seattle and Olympia, Washington where it was rainy with highs in the low 50's and lows in the 30's. The forecast for Orlando was sunny with highs in the 80's. So it was out with the raincoats and pants and in with the shorts and sunscreen. I had to make a quick trip to Target to get a couple of pairs of shorts for Makena since I hadn't done a lot of Spring/Summer clothes shopping yet.  Megan had plenty to choose from thanks to hand me downs and I had found a lot of great warm weather clothes for Everett at consignment sales. I impressed myself by switching out the suitcases in about an hour. We loaded up the car and left around 7pm. We stopped and spent the night in a hotel on the way. Early Sunday afternoon this is what we saw....

 The girls are clearly ecstatic and Everett doesn't know what to make of all the excitement.

We stayed at the Polynesian Resort which is one of the hotels on the monorail. We didn't stay a whole week so we wanted the added convenience of the monorail. For what it was, the hotel was definitely overpriced, but the location was great. We could even see the Cinderella's Castle from the hotel property. The Polynesian is Hawaiian themed which Phil and I really liked. I took the kids to watch the TV in the lobby while Phil checked us in.

 We all got leis at check-in.

 We took a boat from our hotel over to the Magic Kingdom.

 This was our first view of the Magic Kingdom...

 There was a lot of hand holding going on when we got there. :) 

 Here we are in front of Cinderella's Castle. Megan was so excited she couldn't take her eyes off of it!

The girls have been to Disneyland in California twice and there are a lot of similarities between the two parks. They both remembered the Dumbo ride from CA and chose that as our first Disney World ride.

We rode The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh next. Megan is a huge Pooh fan so we couldn't pass it up. 

The ride was kind of fast and jerky and Everett didn't appreciate that at all.

 We had a big day of driving and playtime at the Magic Kingdom and Everett passed out on the monorail on the way back to the resort.

 Makena wanted to have her picture taken with one of the Polynesian "guys" at our resort.

 And look what was waiting for us when we got back to our room......milk and cookies! Now that's how we say Aloha!