"Happiest Place on Earth"

When your last child gets married, it's a really strange feeling. It doesnt matter that she hasnt lived at home in four years. It's just strange, a very hard thing to explain.  Maybe part of the big "depression" that hit me was because I had worked day and night for 6 months preparing for the big day... and during all this time communicating on a daily basis, and even sometime an hourly basis, with whitney --and nathan... so this drew us closer. 

So anyway, the first few days after the wedding, I was on cloud 9 because I felt like everything went so well and whitney and nathan were really pleased with everything.... then after they returned from their honeymoon and stayed one really quick night and left at 6am the next morning with all of their belongings... it just hit us both like a ton of bricks.  I dont think I felt even this bad when the girls moved to Nashville for college. Weird, I know. Soooo, anyway, when Fred's trip to Manilla got cancelled, I mentioned to him that I really needed to go somewhere and get out into the sunshine.

So we tried to go Memphis to visit Mike & Sandy Forbis since I haven't ever been to Memphis, but my husband refuses to "drive" anywhere, and the flights to Memphis were around $1,000, so he suggested we go to the "Happiest Place on Earth," Orlando, since there are three really close friends/pastors of ours that we havent visited concerning our new work with PCL.  So I quickly made the arrangements and we left the next day for Orlando.

It was a great trip. First we visited Randy and Deanna Eaton. Fred has been a "friend/mentor/teacher" to Randy for about 13 years now. Randy did his internship at Heritage in Oak Ridge. They have five sweet & beautiful children (all under the age of 10). They have done an incredible job remodeling an old Florida church and it is thriving very nicely!  Then we visited John and Lori Alexander.  They followed us as Pastor at Harvest Ministries in Lehigh, FL. The first time we ever met them, they showed up at our house in Lehigh (after we left the church) and helped us re-roof our house and make repairs so we could sell our house after some renters destroyed it.  Needless to say, we think a lot of these people who came to help us and had never met us. John has a history of taking churches in trouble and turning them around to a very large congregation and they are well on their way at the old Orange Av church. We tried several times to get with Scott and Lori Pilkington, but their schedules were crazy and it never happened.  Anyway, those meetings were very uplifting and I think will prove to be beneficial for PCL as well.

So, here's the rest of the story...  we made reservations at the Fairfield because it had a really high satisfaction rating on expedia and was a very reasonable rate.

Upon checking in, however, the manager gives us a letter stating that we can spend up to $25 per day at the restaurants, snack store, etc... and then hands us three day passes to the Disney parks!!  So, after we added up all that they gave us, our room was more than free.  All I can say is, thank God for the "bad economy."

So, we went for half a day to Animal Kingdom since we hadnt been there before (and I must say that I plan to never go again, way too slow and boring for me.) But I did get a good picture of this giraffe.

and then we acted like kids and got some shots with these guys

Then we went over to our favorite park, Epcot, where they were having a "food & wine" festival.

It was a beautiful day and turned into a beautiful night!

But my Favorite part happened by accident... we found out when we got to Epcot at 6pm, that it closed at 9pm, but we decided to try to walk all the way around it anyway and sample the food. When we got to the USA Pavillion, they were having a concert by "Starship," an old 80's band and it was Awesome!!

It was a Beautiful full-moon night and this band was incredible. You'll recognize these songs:

1. We built this city on Rock n Roll

2. Sarah

3. Don't you want somebody to love

4. Jane

5. Set the night to music

6. Heart to Heart . . . nothin's gonna stop us now