I’m Dreaming of a Not-So-White Christmas

When I left last Sunday for Orlando and Disney World, the drive from the hotel to the airport was made with an inch of solid ice on the roads, and I encountered several hours worth of weather-related delays along the way, first from deicing the plane before it could leave Sea-Tac, and then from a missed connection that resulted in several hours of extra waiting in Chicago, which added up to get me into Orlando about four hours later than I expected.  Of course, the weather down there was pretty much perfect the whole time, with temperatures in the upper seventies and low eighties, no daytime rain at all during the trip, and basically just a whole lot better weather than we seem to get around here during any month that isn’t July or August.  Of course, I thought that by getting away from here I might be able to dodge the wintry weather up here, but it seems that I got back just in time to hit the worst of it.  I also ended up getting back into Seattle about eleven hours later than I originally planned, although ground transportation would have been a problem at that time (not to mention the commuting mess on the icy freeways,) so it ended up working out reasonably well. 

Fortunately, this last round of storms seems to have not been quite as bad as predicted (for one thing, they were predicting winds powerful enough to cause widespread power outages that seem to have luckily been avoided,) but it was still enough to add another 3-5 inches of snow on top of the stuff that’s already here, and continue to make a big mess out of things (unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to make the obscene snow sculpture next to one of the adjacent apartments disappear though.)  Church has been cancelled today (given the fact that the church building is on top of a hill quite a few people were having trouble getting up yesterday, I can’t say I blame them) and yesterday I had to get my car towed out of my parents’ driveway and up their street in order to get it out.  Fortunately, the car seems to be OK in this weather as long as I don’t try to go up anything too steep, but at this point I don’t think I’m going to be taking any chances on that until things clear up a bit.

As for the trip to Disney World, it was great, although I found that four days is a rather short time to try to get everything in there (in fact, I completely skipped Animal Kingdom on this trip, since I just didn’t have time to get to it,) and there are quite a few things that I’ll be sure to do differently on the next trip, whenever that may be.  I will have plenty to write about from the trip, but for the time being I am still trying to get things back in order up here, and I have more than 1,100 pictures to sort through from the trip.  Not so sure I’d want to deal with the airport hassles of going near Christmas again, but I’d definitely go back there somewhere along the line.  Watch for more on the trip during the next couple of weeks or so.