This is the view from his hotel room in Colorado Springs. The mountian with the snow is Pike's Peak
This is a view of downtown Seattle from atop the Space Needle - I think he was 520 ft. up here.
It was a beautiful clear day - not to common in Seattle.
Mt. Rainier in the distance covered in snow. It's an active stratovolcano in the Cascade Mtn range.
Another shot of the skyline - I love skyline photos.
Next up is St. Louis and the Gateway Arch
As always, more photos are available on my flickr site
Tonight's girls night at my house - chick flicks, playing puppies, popcorn, and homemade pizza!
A Top Fuel dragster accelerates from 0 to 100 mph (160 km/h) in as little as .8 seconds. The cars can reach up to 325 mph in a quarter mile. And that's just Top Fuel dragsters. We also saw funny car, pro-stock, motorcycles, pro-mod, top alcohol dragster and funnycar and a few others. Here's top fuel dragsters Antron Brown (blue) and Brandon Bernstein (red). Antron was leading the points on Friday when we were there.
We mostly stayed in the stands for the races but checked out the pit area afterward. We saw Antron Brown and Doug Kalitta hanging out near their pits. Here's Doug's top fuel dragster getting loaded into the truck.
Today my Aunt and I went over to Orlando to check out the AmCon show, a contact manufacturing trade show. So first we took lovely I-4 through Orlando and arrived at the HUGE Orange County Convention Center. It actually took us longer to drive there and walk from parking to the hall than we were actually at the show. There were maybe 100 exhibitors, most from around Florida. Being a job shop show, there were plenty of machine shops, both milling operations and stamping and forming to plastics and gasket mfgs, software and enclosures - a good mix of industries offering prototypes to production parts.
This is my nice big salad with some of the bread options and a really tasty new drink, pomegranate green tea. I was hesitant to get anything other than my beloved strawberry lemonade, but it sounded good and it was. In addition to everything seen here, I also tasted the french onion soup, creamy tomato soup, tomatoe basil penne, andouille sausage penne, mac and cheese, sourdough bread and topped it all off with red grapes and a little chocolate fro-yo with heath bar, peanut and caramel topping. Gosh, when I write it all down, it's no wonder I'm still feeling full! I wish there was a Sweet Tomatoe's closer than Altamonte, which is a 45-60 minute drive away. Oh well, it's something to look forward to when we go to Orlando.
Next line was Will Call to pick up my ticket and get DH's free birthday ticket. It's a promo Disney is doing this year, free admission on your birthday. Then the line to actually get into the park. We went back to get on the Safari, but there was a long wait, so we got the fastpass and took the train out to the Conservation Station which is where the petting area is. Here's DH petting a big sheep.
We rode a few more rides including the river rapids where we got soaked, ate lunch at Flame Tree BBQ and then it was time for Expedition Everest. This is a pretty cool roller coaster that is partially in the dark and sometimes goes backward. I think I did pretty good, but in the below photo, DH is posing but my scream is real. It was fun!
All in all, a great day and we'll probably be back again next year! For more of the photos from our day, check out 
When we get in, we'll get our rental (SUV from Avis - got a great deal through Hotwire), and head up the 5 to Oceanside. We'll meet DH's sis on her way out to work and hopefully unpack and take a breather. Then we may go out with DH's sis's husband or some other friends. Hopefully just a relaxing easy night considering all that flying time, the hour we're waking up tomorrow and the 3 hour time change. Note, get some Red Bull on the way to Oceanside!
And then Sunday of course is the Superbowl. I don't care who wins this years, we'll just be having a great time at our friend's party. As for the rest of the week, that's when we'll be visiting the attractions. I probably won't post until we get back next weekend, but don't worry, I'll have plenty of pics and blog pages to fill!
We rode the ferry over to the Magic Kingdom. The park was packed, but everything was organized so it didn't feel that way. We made our way over to Tomorrowland and waited about 10 minutes to ride Buzz Lightyear. That ride is great, but hopefully they'll update it with the improvements they designed into Toy Story at MGM/Hollywood Studios. Then we waited about another 10 minutes to ride Space Mountain, my favorite ride. I got to sit in the front and loved it! Then to TTA and the rest of the park. The longest listed wait time was 20 minutes, but I don't think we ever waited more than 10 minutes. It was great. All of the kids must have been at the Christmas shows and parades. After several cheesy rides in Fantasyland, we headed over to Frontierland for Thunder Mtn RR and Splash Mtn. Just after the big drop on Splash Mtn, we saw the fireworks were starting. We walked over to near the Jungle Cruise waters and watched the amazing fireworks show. The whole production was set to music and the finale, oh, what a finale! The main fireworks were over the castle, but during the finale, the whole park was surrounded with fireworks. It was amazing! 
At designated areas throughout the park they offered complimentary refreshments which included apple juice, apple slices, sugar cookies with sprinkles and delicious hot coco with marshmallows. (who knew marshmellows were spelled with an A?).
And then came Santa! Jolly as ever.
Last year we also visited Gaylord Palms ICE exhibit which was cool. Literally. It's a walk-through attraction hand-carved (carved by a team of 40 artisans from Harbin, China) from nearly TWO MILLION pounds of ice and they keep the temps at 9 degrees F! At the end there were slides made of ice that were FUN! I think I have a video of me on the slide somewhere. We won't be going this year, so here are a few pics from last year's trip. That whole candy land house was made out of ice and smelled like peppermint!
