Day 1287: Don't Get Sick

A word of advice: If you're traveling, try your hardest not to get sick. 

Unfortunately, I ended up doing just that, contracting some minor food poisoning on our very first day. I somehow managed to get us to Colorado Springs, but by the time I got there all I wanted to do was sleep and stay in bed...and not eat anything. Ultimately, I spent the majority of the trip suffering from the food poisoning, forcing myself to eat whatever bland food I could find, and urging myself to continue enjoying my trip despite the fact that I wasn't feeling 100%. 

Thankfully, it was just minor food poisoning. so I was able to continue going about my trip...although I definitely had to stop to take extra breaks and spent one entire morning in the hotel room while everyone else headed to the top of Pike's Peak. Really, the best thing you can do when you're sick like that is to just stay in and get some rest. It'll mean less time before you can rejoin your family and friends, and also allow you to enjoy more of your vacation. I didn't have much of an option, since we were changing hotels everyday and never spent more than one night in the same place, but by keeping hydrated, getting enough sleep at night, and taking more frequent breaks, I got through the trip just fine. 

And while I took my breaks, at least I had the mountains to keep me company! 

Have a magical day!

Day 1286: Off We Go

The above view was pretty much my view for endless hours on our trip to Colorado...only instead of a rest stop, it was actually just the road and the occasional changing landscape. Our first day consisted of around nine and a half hours of driving from Green Bay, Wisconsin out to Lincoln, Nebraska. It seemed like forever after we stopped for gas for the first time, and my legs cramped something fierce. After that first day, however, the driving seemed to get better. Where a two hour drive once seemed excessive, now it almost feels like just a few minutes. 

Our second day was the third longest driving day, from Lincoln out to Colorado Springs. It took about eight hours, and aside from a thirteen hour driving day back towards Missouri at the end of the trip, the longest we drove in one sitting was three hours. Much less than the original nine. 

The question, however, is how one keeps interested [and awake] during such long drives? It was just the two of us in the car, which was sort of nice because it gave us more space, so we looked both inside and outside the car for entertainment. As fans of musicals, we listened to a whole list of soundtracks, including Hamilton, Hercules, Chicago, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hairspray, and Finding Neverland, among many, many others. 

Looking out the windows, we kept a track of the various Disney references that popped up throughout the trip, yellow bugs we saw, and, of course, played the license plate game. We almost won the license plate game too, only missing Connecticut and Rhode Island. We also, of course, played a few good old rounds of "I Spy," a classic on long road trips like this. 

Let me know how you like to pass the time on long trips in the comments below! 

Have a magical day!

Day 1285: Frantic

I've been all over the country on a bus with my high school band, so I like to think that I've gotten pretty good at road trips. However, nothing could really prepare me for the challenges and excitement that would go into preparing for an actual road trip with my own car and best friend. Our first band trip was six years ago, and we just happened to go out to Colorado, just like we were this summer. 

It's roughly a 16 hour drive from our home to Denver, and from there we'd drive hours on end across Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois. However, leaving for ten days doesn't come without responsibilities to prepare before hand. Alongside preparing the car for thousands of miles of travel, contacting the bank to alert them I'll be traveling, and packing my own suitcase, we had to find someone to care for our plants at our apartment and our cats back home. Plus, with another trip so soon after Colorado, I wanted to make sure Everyday Disney was caught up at least until this point. 

Basically, before this Road Trip to Colorado I spent a good couple of days running around frantically to make sure everything was done. In reality, we've been planning this trip for months, ever since we found out that we would actually be joining my parents and brother in Colorado. It meant a lot of research, and then a lot of thought about what we might like to experience on our trip. We had to pick and choose to make sure we had enough time to see the sights on the top of our list. 

Long story short, these days before driving were insane...and I'm not really looking forward to repeating them before I leave for Florida. 

Have a magical day! 

Day 1181: Positives and Negatives

There's something to be said about a Disney vacation in comparison to pretty much every other trip. When you combine the pure magic that is Walt Disney World, or any of the Disney Parks around the world really, with your closest family and friends, favorite characters, and world class attractions, it usually turns out pretty great. Yeah, we definitely all have our meltdown moments, and who wouldn't with the heat and crowds that the parks are so well known for, but somewhere along the line, I've found that I rarely remember those low points. 

Something goes wrong on every trip. It doesn't matter where you're going or how many times you've been there - something goes wrong. From there on out, you can try to enjoy the remainder of your trip, and usually that works out rather well, but upon returning home you're left with the bitter distaste of that terrible experience, whatever it may be. For instance, when I went to Colorado years ago, I had the absolute worst day of my life, and it just happened to be my birthday too. I had intense motion sickness on the bus, only made worse by minor altitude sickness, and when we finally got the amusement park we were heading to, security was terrible (we ended up walking back to our bus multiple times) and there wasn't much for me to do in the park anyway. Likewise, when we went to Chicago the following year, the trip was sort of a hot mess, and left most of us feeling like we'd wasted a couple hundred bucks. In either case, I still to this day remember those negative moments of the trip. 

With Disney, on the other hand, things are a bit different. My trips sort of start to muddle together, but I certainly don't remember the downsides of most of the trips, other than maybe the more recent ones. And in any case, they don't really define the trip, at least not the way those other memories defined the other trips. Bad things definitely do happen - I've gotten sick at Disney before, had arguments with family members, and so on and so forth - but I just don't seem to recall many of them. So why is it that anytime I travel somewhere else I remember those struggles, but I don't with Disney? 

Could it be a subconscious effort to make Disney consistently the ideal vacation destination? Or rather, an effort to make sure Disney is never tarnished in my mind, regardless of the bad things that might happen? Maybe the good moments just outweigh any less than favorable memories? Or maybe, because it is Disney, the magic just turns everything around? It's sort of hard to say, but it is an interesting debate, and no matter what, really we should be focusing on the good moments anyway, like seeing the Rocky Mountains for the first time or hanging out in a giant hotel room in Chicago with my friends. Those are the memories worth focusing on anyway. 

Have a magical day!

Day 1127: Not In Europe

It feels like this picture is the closest I'll ever actually get to Europe, what with half my friends off on European adventures this spring! In fact, the one country I'd love to visit more than any other, Ireland, seems to be the hotspot for SNC Study abroad, not that I can blame them all for wanting to go there! However, despite the fact that some are studying in one country, they often travel all over Europe, as they should, meaning that now I'm seeing pictures from Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy all almost daily. Talk about twisting the knife, right? 

As for me, I'm still here in Wisconsin, where we're expecting a huge snowstorm (classes even got canceled for me...amazing!) and living out the regular old college life. I did realize today that maybe I can't complain too much, because I've certainly spent a life traveling while others spent time like I am now: home rather than off on some epic adventure. Plus, my annual pass promises another trip to WDW in the near future, and while it may not be the real Europe, World Showcase certainly does an excellent job of taking you around the world. 

I will say that exciting things do happen here at home, and aside from keeping up on reading the any number of travel blogs I'm making an effort to follow this semester, I'm shoulder deep in plenty of projects to keep me busy! However, remember that you can check out my friend Jessica's travel blog detailing her semester in Italy HERE, which I read religiously and inspired this particular blog post. Gosh what I wouldn't give to be with Jessica right now! 

As I mentioned, I'd love to go to Ireland if I could visit somewhere in Europe, but where do you want to go? Let me know in the comments!

Have a magical day!

Day 1101: Traveling HAL

By now I think we're all familiar with my dear laptop HAL9000, and if you're not, long story short, he's the perfect embodiment of his name. Constantly dying in some way or another (our current struggle is the battery), but when it comes down to it, I love HAL, because without my laptop, life gets pretty hard, and aside from a terrifying finals week experience, few moments showcase this more than when I'm traveling.

Back in High School, I'd almost always have my laptop with me when I headed on a vacation, regardless of where I was going, and now, when I head on Band Trips, the laptop comes along so I can gather all the pictures and video on my computer and back them up day by day. However, for the past few trips to Walt Disney World and Disneyland, I've left good old HAL at home. After all, I have plenty of other stuff to carry anyways, and with me spending as much time as possible in the Disney Parks, I don't really have time to sit down and do any work on my laptop.

This does, on the other hand, mean that it's pretty hard for me to blog. I do bring along Honey Lemon, my iPad, in an attempt to get some work done (and usually that amounts to work on video scripts if anything), but blogging is much more difficult on an iPad than it is on a laptop. It just doesn't function as well in that format, although I can make it work. Usually, I turn around and put the blog on hold until I return and then I go back and bring in some key highlights of the trip to make up the blog posts that correspond with the days I'm away, and I like to think it works pretty well.

I debated bringing HAL this trip, but eventually decided against it for one key reason: I do have work to do while in Florida. There's videos to film and pictures to take, but I'm also there for a chillcation with one of my best friends, and I've been reminded time and time again over the past few days that I should just have some good old fun. I've spent the last week and a half staring at my laptop all day long, so me leaving HAL at home is me leaving the work behind too. I can deal with real life later.

Have a magical day!