Vlogging Disney’s Port Orleans Resorts

When I’m wearing one of my many other social media hats (actually, there’s not that many chapeaus in my closet; I Facebook and Insta and that’s pretty well it) I’m a Disney vlogger.  I wouldn’t say this is a tremendously serious effort on my part.  If it were, I’d be running around Disney World with a monster vlogging rig, filming the newest and the best and the shiniest.  But I actually like to enjoy my vacations, and the thought of being chained to my camera when I should just be carpe diem-ing is nothing I wish to do.  I also have a really terrible habit of singing along – badly, loudly, and probably off-key – to whatever music is playing.  This actually becomes a very big problem when you can hear me singing the Fall Out Boy version of What is This? from The Nightmare Before Christmas – complete with a lot of bluesy, Patrick Stump-esque vocal runs – right over top of the fireworks soundtrack (seriously, I had to bin just about the entirety of my footage from last year’s Jingle Bam show because I could NOT shut up.  Somebody tell the broad down front to can it!  And maybe not drink five cocktails immediately preceding the show.  As a for instance.) 😉

But one thing I do enjoy filming when I’m on vacation is footage of whatever incredibly themed Disney resort we’re staying at on that particular trip (small, incredibly lame confession in these bizarre, social media-driven times: despite having favourite resorts, we stay at a different one every time because a) there’s a lot of gorgeous resorts, and we like explorin’ ’em, but mostly because b) we like to vlog it.  There, I said it!  I feel so dirty now.  I’ll just go and stand over here in shame by this Instagram wall.)

Ahem.  As I was saying, I like filming footage of our resorts – the landscaping, the architecture, the pools, the food, the rooms.  I recently put together a video that incorporates multiple stays at two of our favourite Disney resorts, the Port Orleans French Quarter and, just on down the river bend, the Port Orleans Riverside, and I thought it turned out really well – a solid vlogging effort!

And so I’m sharing it with you!  Hopefully you’ll find some useful information here to help you if you’re in the midst of planning your next Disney vacation.  And even if you’re not, it’s just fun to scheme and dream, isn’t it?  Happy Disney-ing, friends!

Down, But Not Out

Goodest of mornings, friends, from the Reno Zone, population: still my husband and I!  But against all odds, we had a lovely long weekend – thanks in large part to the great, Fishbowl-enhanced time we had at the wedding of a couple of old friends (I’ve known the bride since grade 6!) – so despite the fact that everything is still quite torn up (you try navigating a floor full of ceramic tile clips at 3 am, especially if you’ve been drinking something called a Fishbowl!) we’re feeling slightly more optimistic about the renovations.  There’s even been appreciable progress made on the bathroom, and at the risk of jinxing things further (but really, could we get more jinxed?) we may have a semi-functioning bathroom by the end of the day.  Yup, totally jinxed it!

But I haven’t been so out of it that I haven’t had a bit of time to work on another Fave Food of Disney video for our YouTube channel, Park or Perish! – need something to occupy my time whilst tiled into my livingroom for the next five to seven hours of adhesive-setting time (I now know far too much about ceramic tile adhesive and underlay materials – wasn’t exactly an area I felt I needed a lot of edu-ma-cating in, but I suppose it’s always nice to learn something new.)

And so here’s the five-minute result of all that time-wiling!  As always, I hope you enjoy this video and don’t become too fixated on some Disney nibble that’s only available at the Magic Kingdom for Five Days in May – that’s a Blue Rodeo joke, and one of my favourite songs – because that’s totally Disney’s jam.  But these snacks are available all the time, so, you know, just a hop, skip and a jump down to central Florida, no big. 😉  Thank you – always – for watching!

The Director

That’s me, the Scorcese of hotel room tour videos!  You know, just with fewer brutal gangland murders, epically long tracking shots and Rolling Stones cues.

But I don’t know what to tell you – I really like putting together these room tour videos, everything from the filming to the editing to the nitpicky little adjustments that have to be made before it can see the light of streaming day.

And I positively LOVE getting the opportunity to stay in these fabulously themed Disney resorts.  I’ve always been a little enchanted by the Disney hotels.  We all know the biggies across from the Magic Kingdom, the Grand Floridian, the Polynesian and the A-frame Contemporary.  These resorts have been there since I was a kid (and in the case of the Polynesian and the Contemporary, there since my parents were just kids themselves, vacationing at the brand new World of Disney in Orlando, Florida in 1971.)  I can’t have been more than three years old, but I remember my parents taking me over to the Polynesian during the blazing heat of a July afternoon for a fortifying nap.  Before conking out with my head on my dad’s lap, I remember thinking of the palm tree-shrouded pool, “That pool is awesome and I want in there with all those kids!”

Polynesian prices being what they are (A LOT) we’ve never stayed there, even though it remains a pretty major item on my Disney accommodations bucket list.  One day, gigantic passholder discount willing.

But for now we’re quite content to work our way through the moderate resorts that also occupy space on our bucket list, like the Port Orleans French Quarter, where we recently stayed.  This is one that I’ve wanted to stay at since it was built over 20 years ago, and I’m delighted that it lived up to my admittedly pretty high expectations (that’s what happens when you dream about something for two decades!)

And our room was lovely, so I filmed a video of that for our YouTube channel, Park or Perish!  I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed filming it, and also getting the opportunity to stay at the French Quarter. 🙂

Pests Be Pestin’

“Sandra,” you are most likely not thinking, “it has been an eternity since you’ve yammered in our faces about Disney.  Why so taciturn?”  Or something to that effect. 😉 Well, that’s because I’ve moved the majority of my Disney blindness over to both Instagram (find me at park_or_perish, or click on the IG link in my sidebar) and YouTube.

I’m particularly proud of our little YouTube channel, Park or Perish!, because I am notoriously tech-unfriendly.  I have accidentally destroyed more expensive electronics than my parents definitely would have preferred (on our wedding day, my dad pulled Mr. Finger Candy aside and, in his usual droll manner, said, “Well, she’s “yours” now.  But you do know she destroys electronics, right?”) and in university an emergency infusion of McDonalds was the only thing that held off a complete breakdown during the Online Editing Session From Hell, 1999 edition.  Holy crap I’m old.  Anyhow, I’m bad with tech.  Basically, if it deals with “stuff,” I will find a way of accidentally trashing that stuff and, I dunno, stapling it to myself or something.  I’m really kind of an incredible klutz for someone who took dance lessons for 20 years.

But I digress.  As always.  What I was trying to say is for someone so inept at the “business” side of blogging, and just generally anything having to do with tech, I’m super proud of myself for learning a little video editing program so I could launch our YouTube channel.  I’ve pulled off some not totally unfortunate edits, and I love to edit sound – it’s nitpicky work, but so satisfying when your timing finally snugs into place seamlessly.  YouTube also represents its very own particular little publishing quagmire; it took me more than a couple of test runs to work out the bugs.  None of this stuff comes naturally to me, so I’m really quite pleased that I’ve been able to jump in with both feet regardless.

So that’s where the Disney has scampered off to – it went off to seek adventure in the great wide somewhere known as Instagram and YouTube!  I made this video this weekend, and I thought I’d share it with you.  It’s all about the Disney nevers you know we’ll probably never actually respect; Disney has a particular knack for dulling one’s sense and reason, or at least our sense and reason.  I hope you’ll check it out, and thanks so much for being a great virtual neighbour!

Be Our Guest!

Oh, we WILL, and in just a little under a week’s time, too!  Guesting at the Be Our Guest Restaurant at the Magic Kingdom, that is, one of our favourite spots to dine on Disney property.  We love it so much (actually, Mr. Finger Candy is, somehow, the real Beauty and the Beast nut in this household) I made this little video all about our experiences there for our YouTube channel, Park or Perish!  So as Lumiere might say, I invite you to relax and pull up a chair as the diningroom and I proudly present…your dinner!  And also your breakfast, as many times as we possibly can.  Happy watching, and bon appetit!

Every Day I’m Hustlin’

Quick bit of shameless self-promotion here (although can it be shameless if it’s on your own blog?  Suppose that depends on the definition of “shameless” you’re working with!)  But we posted a new video to our vlog, a kind of introductory thing, and I’m really super proud of it.  I am notoriously TOTAL CRAP when it comes to audio-visual editing.  Like, if it even still exists, there is an editing booth at Carleton University where the tears I alone shed in 1999 probably kept the ancient wood of the desk hydrated for use by another two generations of frustrated J-schoolers.  May there be mercy on your souls if you know the particular analog hell of trying to physically – with tape and scissors! and blood and tears – edit an audio clip.  It’s soul-crushingly bleak.

So seriously, obnoxious self-horn tootage aside, yay for me!  Because I think this video turned out pretty well visually (and aurally) and I like that it explains where we’re coming from with this Disney thing we’re harping on about all the time (it’s okay, I’m not offended, I know it’s harping!)  So please do click on the above video and check it out; I’d love to hear any comments you might have or any feedback you’d like to give. 🙂

UsTube

So this is kind of new and potentially sort of embarrassing, but guess who has a new YouTube channel?  This blogger!  And her husband.  It’s called Park or Perish!, our rallying Disney cry, and it will document our Disney adventures (among other hopefully fun things) so I can stop bothering you all with it over here!  VIC-TOR-EE!  Plus you’ll also get to see our first hesitant attempts at filming, vlogging and video editing, so that’ll be fun and enlightening. 🙂

So if you’d like to put a voice and a constantly moving face to this blogger/vlogger (seriously, I never realized how very elastic my face can be while I’m talking, which I also do constantly.  Whilst making weird faces and doing all sorts of odd things with my voice.  Filming myself has been very eye-opening in some regards!) please do stop by our burgeoning little site, we’d love to share the fun with you. 🙂

Arteries of the Sea

This manicure started out life as a coral design.  I was going to make a bunch of The Walking Dead Carl/Coral jokes, too (the filthier and more unhinged Rick gets, the more he defaults to bellowing for his son, CORAL!!! Please watch this short YouTube video that inexplicably makes me nearly pee my pants every time I see it for further explanation and laughter:)

All was going well with the CORAL!!! design until I added the dark orange and yellow shading along the branches of the you-know-what, turning this CAWWWWRRRLLL into something more closely resembling the diagram on page 74 of your grade 11 biology textbook.  Still pretty, although also sort of icky.  I don’t like it when my nail art gets too real.  Cotton candy zombie unicorns, yes, the inner workings of the human form, lord NO.

And so I changed the title of this post to better reflect the reality of these nails, although I’m glad I was able to work in that Walking Dead joke regardless.  Bless you, Rick Grimes, you incompetent bastard; never stop losing your sh— CORAL?!?

Let’s Go Crazy

This is going to sound like crazy talk to some of you, but in keeping with my Celtic heritage, I believe I have a touch of extrasensory perception.  I’m no Madame Leota (hell, I’m not even Miss Cleo) but both my mother and I have these moments when, for lack of a better term, we get brief admittance to the theme park that is the other side (or sides) of this mostly unknown universe.

But never with anything approaching regularity or precision, and I couldn’t direct it if I tried.  That would be too useful!  Instead it’ll be something totally innocuous, like when I recently thought about a beloved old book for the first time in decades, only to be inundated with references to it, and a current reworking, practically non-stop for the remainder of the week.

Sometimes it’s not so innocuous, like the morning in high school when my grandfather passed away.  I woke up that day bolt upright in bed, screaming my head off, torn out of a dream in which my boyfriend had died.  I found out later that my grandfather had passed right about the time my mom was rushing into my room while I thrashed around and clawed at my blankets.  This is clearly something passed down from my mother herself, who has, on more than a few occasions, dreamed of the death of a friend or relative, only to find out later on that that person or someone close to them is actually quite ill or experiencing some other downturn of fortune.  It’s a highly imprecise sense.  No one would ever confuse it with prophecy – it’s many levels removed from that, but it does live in the same neighbourhood.

Two weeks ago I dug this older polish, Deborah Lippmann’s Let’s Go Crazy, out of my collection.  I hadn’t worn it in about two years, and with my nails in prime swatching shape, I thought I’d take a run at its pretty purple glitteriness.  Then I got caught up with other things, and put goin’ Crazy on the back burner for a bit.

I woke up this morning with the urge to watch a Prince video, specifically the blistering guitar solo he delivers in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame group performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.  Since his passing two weeks ago, I haven’t sought out any of his material or really made note of his death other than to mourn the loss of an amazing performer and creative phenom.  His Princeliness was just never quite my bag, Batman soundtrack notwithstanding (that album was my JAM when I was 12, even though it’s so weird and ALL ABOUT SEX.)  But I wanted to lay eyes (and ears) on that performance myself, and I thought I’d finally take a run at Let’s Go Crazy while I did precisely that.

Mid-mani, something about both “Let’s Go Crazy” and the lush purple of this glittery jelly twigged in the back of my brain.  Heading off to Google, I learned that Let’s Go Crazy is indeed a polish inspired by the 1984 Prince song of the same name.  I had had no clue as to the connection; couldn’t actually remember the name of this polish at all.  I then looked back through my polish planner (just my general day planner, but I jot down lots of stuff about my nail art activities as well) and noted that I initially pulled out Let’s Go Crazy on April 21st – the day of Prince’s death.

So there’s that weird, not-the-least-bit-useful, twice removed, extrasensory thing once again coming into play, this time with a polished twist.  And who knew this simple mani was going to turn into such a serious discussion about quasi-prescient death?  Not me! And probably not you either!  So my apologies for getting all heavy on you there. 🙂

Rubber Duckie, I’m Awfully Fond of You (With an Assist from the Boogie Woogie Sheep)

Here’s a plucky little ducky manicure (I think the -ie suffix is reserved for Ernie’s yellow bath time pal and duckies, plural, as opposed to one individual ducky…and I may have already given this more thought than seems reasonable!) for week two’s theme of rubber duckies in January’s N.A.I.L. Challenge. Great song, although if we’re going to rank favourite Sesame Street ditties, my money’s on Ernie’s Dance Myself to Sleep song. Everybody sing it now! “And with the help of our friends, the Boogie Woogie Sheep, we’ll dance ourselves to sleep/We’re in our jammies!/We’ll dance ourselves to sleep/And thank you lambies!”

Aw hell, I can’t let this one go. I’ve never linked to a YouTube video before, one of my own or anybody else’s, but everybody needs to share in Bert’s incredulity when tap dancing sheep invade his bedroom and soft shoe his bed straight out the door so Ernie can get to sleep. Enjoy. 🙂