Diana Elle Blog

We were all set, we had a plan, first things first, Harry Potter. So, as soon as we entered the park we walked straight to: The Wizarding world of Harry Potter - Hogsmeade. We took few pictures during this walk and went straight to the HP & the Forbidden Journey ride. we knew Avi wasn't going to be able to ride it and since it was only us three we decided to do the "single rider" line. The good thing about it is that you don't have to wait so long, but the bad thing is that we didn't get to "tour the castle," instead we took a short cut.  Pablo and I didn't mind so much since we had already been there, but this was Avi's first time so I asked if we could do the tour while Pablo was on the ride (instead of waiting in the child swap room) and they let us. Even though we did it backwards, it was pretty cool. We did a total of 30 minutes in this ride, from entrance to exit.  Once we got out we decided to ride on Flight of the Hi...

As I mentioned before, the first park we decided to visit during our six day stay in Orlando was Universal Studios. We got to the park as early as we could, we had purchased the tickets the night before and picked them up at the kiosks. As soon as we went inside we got our picture taken by one of the many park photographers.  We went straight to Shrek-4D. The attraction was different from what I remembered, the effects were actually pretty good, we all enjoyed it, especially the kids! From there we walked around to the Transformers ride, where everyone except my in laws and the baby got on, they walked around and sat in a nearby park area, while we did our thing. The waiting line wasn't so boring since they had a lot of things to distract us. The ride itself was so cool, we hadn't gotten on this one before, the down side was that I got dizzyish-this was a first! Luckily we had some dramamine and I took tablet afterwards, I wanted to survive the day without this happeni...

We didn't tell any of the kids that we had a secret trip to Orlando planned. We made sure to use code names for the theme parks "Apples" and "Bananas" and had little gifts ready for them for the day-of. But first, let's go back to the day before. Dec 31st, 2015. My mom left Charlotte early in the morning, I'm happy she was able to be with me for some time while we were state-side, and we got to do some sightseeing while she was there. After dropping her off at the airport we went back home to start getting ready for the last day of the year and our trip the next day. Some of the kids new we were going to go on a family trip and were fine with that, they didn't ask where we were going to they were happy to be traveling all together. We had a low-key new years eve celebration, because the plan was to begin our road trip at six a.m. the next day. We had all our suitcases ready-even the ones we weren't taking, since we left for ...

Continuing with our December trip today and talking about what we did on December 27th!  One of the main reasons my mom decided to go to Charlotte was to be with me on my birthday (and to see us, duh!). Naturally, I chose my birthday as the day we go visit First Ward Park.  The one thing that motivated about visiting this park was this video: The video made me feel like there was a lot to see. I convinced everybody we should go, they were a bit skeptical at first since they hadn't been there (or heard of it), But we had a nice time there, it did not disappoint. We spent the afternoon here and even bumped into a nice German family (from Hannover) and chatted with them for a while about how they like it there and us Germany, while Avi played with their girls. It was very nice, we had some great views of the city's skyline  and the kids got to play around while we took pictures, win-win! Welcome to travel Tuesday! U...