Land Trips – Page 4 – Wanderlist Vacations

Another Trip to Florida, Part 1

Even with our daughter away at college, the past couple of months have been incredibly busy. My wife and I are starting a new business, and the prep work (combined with my existing job) has kept me otherwise occupied. We’re actually down in Florida for the final training on it as I type, but I’ll hold off on posting any info on just what it is that we’re doing until after the week is over and we return home.

This trip requires us to be in Fort Lauderdale for 6 days of training that started on Monday. We decided to leave early Saturday morning and stop in St Pete for a day to see our daughter. With everything else going on, we didn’t get around to booking a hotel until a couple of days before we left, and thanks to Hotwire’s Hot Rates, ended up getting a pretty good deal on the Holiday Inn Harbourside in Indian Rocks Beach. For those afraid of booking a hotel you can’t see until you pay (Hotwire Hot Deals, Priceline, etc), there’s a good site you can use to narrow down the possibilities – betterbidding.com (no, I’m not affiliated in any way). Through the local information in the Hotwire forum, I was able to determine what hotel it was before we bought the deal.

Upon checking in, they upgraded us to a suite at no additional cost, which was a bit of a surprise considering I’ve never had that happen when using a Hotwire or Priceline fare. When we saw where the room was, I admit I was concerned. We were in 143, which was a first floor suite near the outdoor bar. We were on the waterfront side, so not right next to the music, but close enough. Fortunately it wasn’t an issue. The band shuts down by 10pm, so even on a Saturday night it was never a bother. It also gave us (well, me) a great spot to watch the sunrise the next morning:

Anyway, on Saturday night, we took her and a couple of her friends out to dinner, and let her pick the place. She absolutely loves a good Japanese steakhouse, and chose Tsunami in St Petersburg. We’d made reservations for the hibachi side, so when we got there were seated pretty quick. The meal was very good, definitely one of the better Japanese steakhouses we’ve been to, and we had a great chef. Can’t say the same for the group at the table next to us, as they had all kinds of issues (improperly cooked chicken, people not getting what they ordered, etc). We were glad we got the chef we did, as he got everything right from the start, and all items were cooked to perfection. I always get filet mignon at places like this, and was very happy with the quality of the meat. We’d definitely stop again.

Sunday was spent mostly at a local beach on Treasure Island. The weather was great, water was warm, and the beach wasn’t busy at all. We hung out in the water most of the time, until a whole lot of small fish started swimming past us trying to escape the ever-growing flock of birds trying to eat them. At that point it was almost time for us to go, so we hopped out and watched the birds dive-bombing the fish for a bit, then packed up our stuff and headed back to our daughter’s dorm. The plan at that point was to pick up her best friend (who she’s been in school with since 3rd grade) and grab some dinner before my wife and I headed across the state for our week of training.

For dinner, we’d decided on Tijuana Flats, which is sort of a guilty pleasure for us due to the cookie dough flautas. The food’s pretty good for a chain, too, but it’s really the desserts that make the place. Her friend had never been there before, and fell in love with the desserts, too. Probably a bad idea to take him there when we did, as he had a flag football game not long after, and frankly I can’t even imagine the sugar crash that must have hit him during that game. Sorry 😉

After dinner, we dropped the kids back at school, said our goodbyes, and headed out. I always hate leaving her, but she’s been busting her butt so far this semester, and shown that she was ready for the challenge and to live on her own. I couldn’t be more proud :).

As we get further along in the week, I’ll post more on the places we’ve eaten here, along with the hotel we’re in. After we get home, I’ll cover what exactly we were doing down here, as it directly pertains to the theme of my blog, and represents a new and exciting chapter in our lives.

More to come!

Four days in Florida

Mid last week, we headed down to Florida to drop our daughter off at Eckerd College to start her freshman year (if you’re interested, more on that here). Being that her best friend of 10 years is also going to Eckerd, we decided to caravan down there with their family a little early and spend a day at Universal Studios. Before we get to that, however, I’ll mention a little about where we stayed.

Thanks to my daughter’s competitive cheer schedule over the years, we’ve stayed in several hotels in Orlando over the years, usually ones associated with Disney. With this trip not including a Disney stop, we decided to go with a house my wife found on AirBnB. We’ve used AirBnB in the past, most notably last summer when we spend a couple of weeks in SoCal touring colleges, and have never had an issue. This trip was no different. The house is located in a gated community in Haines City, and fit the bill perfectly. We aimed for something outside of Orlando in the direction of St Petersburg on purpose, knowing we’d be making a couple of trips between the house and her college. In hindsight, we probably should have booked something a little closer to St Pete, but considering we paid $500 for 4 nights in a 4 bedroom house that had a pool and hot tub, and were splitting the cost with another family, we were pretty happy.

Back to the trip itself. We spent last Thursday at Universal, and it pretty much lived up to our last trip there. The last visit was right after the Harry Potter section first opened in Islands of Adventure, and suffice it to say the park was way too crowded that day. So much so that it took 20 minutes to walk from the Hogsmeade entrance back to the Forbidden Journey ride. For anyone who’s been there, you know that walk should take closer to 2 minutes, if that. On that day, I think we maybe got 3 rides in across the entire park due to the lines. This time around wasn’t much different.

Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of Universal, but we all had one day left on our passes from that previous visit, and had to use them before the end of the year. For the money, I’d rather spend the day at Disney. At $136/pp for one day, it’s a pretty steep ticket. Yes, that single day price gets you in to both parks, but even with that, I think we only managed to get in 5 rides this time around (total, in both parks) due to lines. We never did try out the new Gringotts rode, as the wait was 240 minutes. None of us were interested in waiting 4 hours for any ride (an employee told us the longest she’d seen so far was 7 hours. Yikes). We did jump in the single riders line, but in the 20 minutes we were in it we never moved, so we cut our losses and headed for the Hogwarts Express to have some fun over in Islands of Adventure.

The positives for us when it comes to Universal:

Butterbeer. Yum 🙂
The Harry Potter sections themselves are pretty cool. Very well done on Universal’s part:

The negatives:

The lines. At Disney you can deal with this by utilizing the fast pass. At Universal, they do have an express pass, which brings me to the next negative:
The express pass: When we first got to the park, I asked about this, and was quoted $89/pp for a one-time pass, or $109/pp for an unlimited pass for the day we were there (apparently this price fluctuates). Uh, you have to be insane. Not a chance. I know certain hotel guests have that included, but I’m not going to pay more to stay at the Hard Rock just to get an express pass. I made my choice and voted with my wallet, and the likelihood of me going back to Universal is slim in part because of this.
The staff. We live close to Carowinds, and rarely go in large part because the employees just don’t seem to have their heads in the game. Universal seems to be approaching that same level of employee discontent. As an example, we ate lunch in the park at Mythos. The wait was about 40min right at lunch rush, no biggie, but as our waitress was walking us to our table, our waiter saw he was getting someone new seated in his area, and very vocally said “you’ve got to be kidding me!”. I get that you very easily could have been overloaded with customers, but as someone who’s in front of customers all day, there’s simply no excuse for complaining like that in front of them. Just one example of what seemed to be a huge difference between the staff at Disney and those at Universal.

All in all we spent around 12 hours at Universal that day, minus heading out to the City Walk area to meet up with a few other people for dinner. Wasn’t a bad way to spend our last day together as a family before dropping my daughter off at college, but as mentioned, I think we all would have preferred Disney 🙂

Weekend Trip to Woodward

Earlier in the week, my wife decided she wanted to go up to Woodward, PA for the weekend to see our daughter. It’s been almost a month since we dropped her off there after our Bermuda cruise, and she was missing her quite a bit. I admit I was against it at first, since she’s headed off to college in Florida next month, and being away from her for more than a month at a time was something we all needed to get used to. In the end, I lost the battle, and I admit it was one I was fine with losing. I miss her too 🙂

Camp Woodward is a cheer / gymnastics / action sports camp about 30 minutes outside of State College, PA. She’s been going there for six years now for cheer, first as a camper, then as a junior camper (basically low-level staff who work the cost of camp off), and now as staff. We generally stay on the south end of State College, as it’s an easy drive over from there. This time was no different, as we booked a last minute deal on Hotwire for the Courtyard. There really weren’t many hotel options to choose from, as the town was pretty booked up for some reason (more on that later). The night before we left, we also decided to rent a car for the trip, as we’ve been putting a ton of miles on my wife’s car lately, and I’m getting ready to sell mine, so I didn’t really feel like putting 1200+mi on it right before doing so. Fortunately, Priceline had a pretty good deal on a full size that made it worth the money when comparing fuel costs of that one vs my wife’s Ford Flex. The only downside is that the fairly well loaded Chevy Malibu we ended up with wasn’t nearly as comfortable on a long drive as her Flex. We had the same car for two weeks last summer in SoCal when we were out there touring colleges, and really didn’t find that one comfortable either. Oh well, it saved money, as well as wear and tear on her car.

Friday afternoon, we headed out of Charlotte around 2:30pm. It’s generally an 8-9 hour drive to State College with stops, but thanks to some heavy traffic on I-81N just past Christiansburg, it ended up being around 10 hours. We generally take the same route to Woodward for a couple of reasons. First, my dad lives in New Market, VA, which is about half way there. If something happens, or we get a late start or decide to stop for any other reason, we’ve got a place to stay. The second reason is that Harrisonburg, just south of him, is home to one of our favorite ice cream stops, Kline’s Dairy Bar. My dad wasn’t working Friday, so he met us at the Wolfe St location for a treat. I got vanilla in a pretzel cone, and it was absolutely delicious (I love their pretzel cones)

After finishing that, we moved on. The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, and we crashed hard after arriving at the Marriott Courtyard around midnight. The room itself was a standard Courtyard room, and the staff were very helpful and friendly. Not really much to report there 🙂

The next morning around 7:30am, we headed to Woodward to pick up our daughter and her boyfriend (he works there too). As soon as we saw her, I was pretty happy to have lost the battle on whether or not we should have gone, as I hope the picture conveys

After a couple of long hugs, we loaded up in the car and headed for Hershey. In all the times we’ve driven up to Woodward, we’d never stopped to see the sights in Hershey, so we decided to head over there to see what we’d been missing. We wanted to keep the costs down, so we weren’t headed to Hershey Park itself, just to Chocolate World (free admission) and to Zoo America ($11/pp).

We chose to go to Zoo America first while it was still somewhat cool out. The place was pretty cool. It’s not a huge zoo, but a good enough size to keep you occupied for a couple of hours. We walked the loop, and even managed to catch the scheduled 11am feeding of the wolves.

After a couple of hours there, we headed for the car to drive over to our next stop, Hershey’s Chocolate World. As mentioned, you can get in for free (including parking), although they do have different activities inside that they charge for. We stuck with the basics, just doing the free Great American Chocolate Tour ride, and walking around checking the place out. We did buy a couple of things in one of the stores, and even got some milkshakes. The shakes were incredible. Most of us got the dark chocolate peanut butter shake, which was excellent, and incredibly filling.

After a couple of hours there, we hopped in the car and headed over to the Museum on Chocolate Avenue for a quick bite of lunch at Café Zooka before heading back to State College.

After the long drive back to State College, we decided to relax a bit at the hotel. The kids didn’t have to be back at camp until later in the evening, so we still had plenty of time to do other stuff. After resting for a bit, we decided to head down the street to the People’s Choice Festival, situated near the Pennsylvania Military Museum. This was one of two arts festivals going on this past weekend, as Arts Fest was also going on in the downtown area. These were the reason for the hotel shortage in the area apparently :). The People’s Choice Festival was closer to the hotel, so we walked around that for a while. Cool stuff, plenty of homemade art and other items to buy, along with some traditional carnival food options. We had dinner plans, so we avoided the food, but enjoyed the walk through the festival nonetheless.

After we finished up there, we finally headed to dinner. We already had a place in mind, somewhere we stop every time we’re in State College, Hi Way Pizza. They offer an excellent flaky crust pizza that the wife and I really enjoy. We’ve tried some of the other popular pizza places in town, but always end up back here :).

After a delicious dinner, we had one last stop on the schedule, Berkey Creamery on the Penn State campus. This is another staple for us in State College, as they make some really good ice cream. As usual, the line was out the door, but they do a good job of getting people through quickly with the way you order and pay. We definitely recommend stopping here if you’re in the area for any reason.

Our ice cream gone, it was time to drop the kids back at camp and head back to the hotel for some sleep. They both had to be up early to greet incoming campers, so they needed their beauty sleep as much as we needed to rest before the long drive home. Before we headed out of town Sunday morning, we picked up a dozen donuts for her group and drove to Woodward on the way home. Well, it’s not exactly on the way home, but gave us one last chance to see her 🙂

Once we said our goodbyes, the wife and I headed home. The drive back was pretty uneventful, and we managed to do it in less than 9 hours, stopping only for lunch. For now it’s back to reality, but we’ll be doing that drive again in two weeks when we go up to get her and bring her home. Yea, it was a lot of driving to only see her one day, but in the end it was well worth it. I love hanging out with her, and as mentioned, will miss her immensely when she’s away at school, so I relish any time we get to spend with her before then. Considering she’ll only be home from Woodward for 10 days before we have to take her to Florida, there’s not much time left. We definitely appreciate the staff at Woodward giving her the day off to spend with us 🙂

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