Today we had a fun family day at Disney's Hollywood Studios. We set off early to get there by 8:45am (official opening time is 9:00am, but we'd heard it is best to get there up to half an hour before) and went straight in. It was really cold this morning. 4 degrees celsius, which was a shock after the mild Tshirt weather we've had here so far. We gritted our teeth and made straight for the most popular rides so we could avoid the long lines when the Park ge...

We were considering Disney today, but by the time we were all ready to get going we realized it would still be too crowded, so we decided to visit Sea World. Due to our previous experiences driving around Orlando getting lost, we knew exactly where to go - 30 minutes later we were pulling up in the car park. Turned out it was the perfect place to visit today - the weather has started to cool (temperatures as low as 1degree Celsius predicted for tonight) and the...

Today we had a quiet day, as we all needed some downtime. The kids had a swim in the pool (for winter, it was really hot today! Tshirt weather) and played together beautifully. We did make a short trip to Walmart because Matty has been keen to find out if it really does sell everything. Siobhan was broken hearted when she learned that the iPod Touch is more expensive at Walmart than at home. After dinner tonight we were treated to fireworks by our neighbors ...

We tried our hand at outlet mall shopping at Orlando Premium Outlets, International Drive. There are three or four Premium Outlet Malls, relatively close to each other, but this is the biggest of them. Unfortunately, it took us a long time to get there as we were going off the stupid tourist map with terrible scale instead of the GPS. The upside to getting lost was that we accidentally drove through DisneyWorld! They laughed and waved us through when we expla...

Yee ha! Today we drove to Fort Worth (over an hour, slow traffic) to the Stockyards, a slice of the cowboy side of Texas. Every day at 11:30am and 4:00pm they drive cattle down the main street - which we missed by 10 minutes this morning. We did however see cowboys, rode in a horse drawn carriage, the kids has pony rides and fed goats in a petting zoo and were given multiple Deputy badges by the friendly Visitor Centre staff. We had lunch in a lovely rest...