Walt Disney World, 2011

I am so excited to finally be starting a blog!  I want to start talking about my journey through life, both good and bad.  I recently took up half marathons so will start with an exciting one that I just recently accomplished.  It was in Walt Disney World Half Marathon in Orlando, Florida on January 9th, 2011.  What an accomplishment for me since it was the most difficult one to date.  I will embellish a little bit later...

I flew down to Orlando with 2 great friends, Tony Nguyen, a.k.a. Endorphin Dude (www.endorphindude.com) and Sandy Verdier on Wednesday morning, January 5th.  Sandy's mom was kind enough to let us stay the prior night at her place and take us to the airport early that morning.  As a side note, I was feeling under the weather due to my depression for about a couple weeks before this trip.  I thought this trip would definitely be a great help for me and it turned out to be just that!

We got on out flight early that morning and it was perfectly on-time.  

This I believe is a pic flying over Denver area, check out all that snow!  Our layover was at Midway, Chicago, Illinois and to pass the time the three of us decided to play cribbage, OF COURSE!


They also both decided to play with their food, such children!  I was trying to bring order to our aisle without a lot of success.
We landed at Midway on time and decided to grab some food at the food court.  We had yummy sandwiches, including PB & J.  Only $7.50 for a PB & J, what a deal!  NOT!  We had to soon board our next flight and I was starting to have some sort of panic attack.  My heart was racing and I started sweating and I seriously considered not going onto the plane.  I told myself to go as far as I can and see how I feel.  Luckily I did continue on though because it did eventually go away.  I feel it had to do something with the depression I had been going through in the previous weeks.
We were on our second flight and Tony and Sandy got so excited they were raising their arms up like they were on a roller coaster going in for our landing.  Also....btw - I won most of the cribbage games in the air!



We soon arrived at Orlando International Airport....

and Sandy had everything so organized we went to pick up our luggage and brought it directly to our shuttle for transportation to the hotel.  Even Tony had luggage that he had to pick up, although it was our breakfast food for the hotel.  This is the three of us on the Disney Shuttle listening to the on-board Disney World Video.

We arrived at our awesome hotel, Port Orleans, Riverside near Epcot in Disney World.  As soon as I walked into our room I found our first hidden mickey.... (on the comforter!)

Disney is very Green, just check out this sign on our room door...

Tony immediately got to, you guessed it,....

Facebooking!

The next morning we got up after breakfast (purchased in the hotel store)...

and headed to.... Guess Where?  Magic Kingdom!

We were very lucky to be introduced to Magic Kingdom by getting to see the parade immediately upon entering.  It really got me into the Disney mood!  It was very vibrant and full of life.

Boy these people were TALL!

And here is Tony in front of Toy Story!