Tag Archive - vacation

Orange Beach

June 1, 2011 in Travelogue with 2 Comments

We spent a few days at Orange Beach on a mini vacation. White sand, loud tourists, free breakfast, relaxing waves.

Loud tourists.

Local Native

But it’s Orange Beach and I get to meet folks from all over: We ran into a group of kids on their senior trip from Missouri and in the last few years, I’ve also meet people from Russia and Ukraine.

This will likely be the last time at the beach for us for a long while. With both of us starting new teaching positions at Harding soon, we will likely do our vacationing somewhere close to central Arkansas.

Like Branson.

It is interesting to me where people chose to vacation. I grew up in South Alabama, so I naturally migrate to Gulf Shores and vicinity.

But I’m not against vacationing in, say, the Swiss Alps or the South of France, or even Alaska. South Alabama beaches are just convenient.

I cannot count how many times I’ve been here. This time we are staying at the Holiday Inn Orange Beach. I thought we’d never stayed here before, until we walked back to the swimming area and I remembered that we spent one night here about a year ago.

Breakfast is always a bonus with Holiday Inn. I didn’t have to stab too many of the loud tourists to get to the sausage this time either.

It wasn’t more than a mile or so to the east of here that I’d given my bride, Inna, the engagement ring. We were visiting Robin and Dana Dickerson at Innerarity Point church of Christ at the time at the same time when Hurricane Andrew was also beating down on the Florida panhandle.

Somehow I had managed to struggle onto the beach long enough to give her the ring. True to the Russian mindset, she didn’t want me to just give it to her without something special as a background (like fireworks, a Blue Angels flyover, or even a hurricane).

The hurricane sufficed. We stayed there about 11.5 seconds before realizing that these weren’t optimal conditions for giving away small items that could conceivably be carried by the wind and land in Tacoma.

We headed back to Robin and Dana’s and Inna shared the news with them.

It probably would have been smarter to give her the ring when I asked her to marry me, but I can’t say that planning was my forte back then.

Next month will mark 18 wonderful years of marriage, so I guess it didn’t matter anyway.

Disney World

December 2, 2009 in Miscellaneous with 0 Comments

I love the smell of gunpowder at midnight.

It’s 10:45 Eastern Standard Time and my new bride and I drove to Orlando to pick up my sister-in-law at the airport. She had flown from Russia and was joining her sister for a new life in Alabama. What better way to celebrate than to spend 15 fun filled hours walking the streets of Disney World. In July.

Twelve hours in, and the blood in my feet no longer flowed. After standing in line (the days before the coveted “fastpass” tickets), consuming fried Disney, being tossed around on various rides built ostensibly for humans, my feet – the ones with no feeling or blood – rebelled and I sat down on the curb.

That was July 4, 1994.

No other rational person would have gone to Disney on that date, so the other (roughly) 40,000 were also insane to some degree.

Close to midnight, we watched colored flying gunpowder explode into magical shapes and designs. Neither my wife nor her sister had ever seen these kinds of fireworks before growing up in the polar region of Russia. (She would say that it wasn’t the polar region. But I say when it snows from September to April – it doesn’t matter).

I can’t say these fireworks were worth the previous 15 hours of hard labor, but they rate with some of the best I’d seen.

November 2009

A few months ago, I read that Thanksgiving would be a good time to visit Disney-World as most folks would be at home celebrating turkey. So, last week the (now) four of us (absent sister-in-law) loaded up the van and my two daughters and my still lovely princess bride headed for the magic castle in Florida.

Disney had graciously provided a complimentary 5 day (military) pass for me and reduced rates for the others in my family; thank you Mickey.

And all those people who wrote that it would not be all that crowded during Thanksgiving week

LIARS.

I suspect the author was a blogger anchored in the depths of some Disney data center because once you’re there – it’s just tough to turn around and go home.

We spent two days at the Magic Kingdom, two at Hollywood Studios (which I can’t help but refer to as MGM Studios) and one day at Epcot Center. I can’t name all the changes, but things were different from 1994; the light parade especially. I think in 1994 it was called the Electric Light Parade, which used light bulbs as opposed to the LCDs. I like the new better.

On Thursday night we stayed long enough to see the light parade and then the fireworks. They too seemed bigger and more costly.

Halfway through the show, clouds of smoke from the fireworks almost enveloped the crowd. This reminded me of a 1995 fireworks over the Mobile River in Mobile, Alabama where the entire show was obscured by low clouds and fog. We heard the boom and saw some flashes, but the fireworks were pretty much ruined. Had it not been for a relative’s flatulent gag toy, the whole evening would have been wasted – I think.

This year’s Disney fireworks also reminded me of the aforementioned 1994 Disney trip and my church youth group’s 1983 Disney trip (which was the summer my father died).

From Tinkerbelle’s spectacular gliding down the zip line to the grand finale neither I, nor our girls, were disappointed. The girls stood on the handrail behind us for as long as they could, mesmerized at the exploding lights; oohing and ahhing appropriately.

I stood, keeping them balanced, enjoying the moment, pushing back the thoughts of going back to work, inhaling the smell of gunpowder.