The Rock. We were fortunate enough to have a beautiful, clear day and tickets for the 9:30 am ferry. Note for future visitors: there are no places to purchase food on the Island, but the ferry does sell provisions for a picnic lunch. Alcatraz is now a National park, and as such, there is a Junior Ranger program for kids. Be sure to ask the helpful volunteer about it and help your kids answer all the booklet so they earn their badge. It is taken fairly ser...

San Francisco! I love it after only one day. We had a fairly vile Australia Day, starting off at 6:00am (when we left our Orlando villa to go to the airport), and ended over 12 hours later when we arrived in San Francisco. We had to catch two flights and one was delayed. The kids were exhausted, and we had ten bags with us (all that shopping in Florida!), but as soon as we got there, we all felt quite excited. Even the San Francisco airport restaurants and c...

Since we came back from the Cruise and the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday 19th January (Happy Birthday Clare!) we have been making the most of our multi use passes and have been revisiting the Theme Parks to make sure we saw things we missed last time or to have one last ride on our favourite roller coasters. First we revisited Disney's Hollywood Sudios which ended up being a huge day, to my surprise - the first time we were there Joe and Imogen only lasted un...

Disembarkation Day from Port Canaveral. After an early breakfast and some fond farewells, we were off the boat by 8:00am......and at 9:00am it was established that Paul's bag had been accidentally taken by a hapless Brazillian tourist on her way to New York. Seriously. So, a little irritated, we decided to take a trip to the Kennedy Space Center at nearby Cape Canaveral. It turned out to be just the tonic we needed to turn our irritation into inspiration. ...

Ah, this is more like it! Yes, it is an island resort owned by Disney. Yes, it is completely sanitized. But so far, they haven't done too much to it. There is a waterside, there are a couple of gift shops, there are two open BBQ shelters for our buffet style lunch, there are opportunities to have photographs with characters like Captain Jack Sparrow and Donald Duck, but mostly there is the beautiful beach and the ocean. There are rows of banana lounges and...