At some point I need to stop eating

The food and wine festival fun has continued at Epcot. I just keep eating, and eating, and eating.

There was the cheese plate from the Irish booth.

There was also Kiwi lamb meatballs, German sausage and pretzels, Brazilian pork belly and Greek spanakopita. There was even a dessert lap trying the Irish chocolate pudding and the chocolate cherry mousse.

That nights concert was Sister Hazel, you may remember them from their one hit 'All for you' back in the '90s. I officially knew only the one song from that show. 

Friday morning was more food (just for a change). As part of the Food and Wine festival I had a ticket to go and have brunch with the Cake Boss himself, Buddy Valastro. 

After a lovely brunch of quiche and pork belly, Buddy came out to talk about his family, and the show and answer questions from the audience. I didn't know a lot of the backstory, so it was interesting to learn about how he came to take over the family business and just how much he has taken Carlos Bakery from a family business to an empire with 11 bakeries, three tv shows and now a restaurant in Las Vegas. The best part was we got to try the famous Carlos Bakery cannoli.

Turns out the secret is in the special mix of cheeses in the cannoli (oh and the fact that the cannoli is fried in LARD!).

Knowing that I had the Wine & Dine half marathon coming up on the weekend I hit up the Kona Cafe at the Polynesian Resort to try the famous Tonga Toast. Never had it but they rave about it on every Disney food blog and message board. It. Was. NUTS.

That is a two inch thick piece of bread, stuffed with bananas, fried, and then covered in cinnamon and sugar and served with bacon and maple syrup. Even for me this was taking French toast too far. I'm not ashamed to say I couldn't eat the whole thing.

I wandered past this in the same hotel and wondered if they were borrowing words from Melanesia at the Polynesian hotel, or if some words were common across the Pacific...

Last week was also the launch of the Osborne Family Christmas Lights at Hollywood Studios.

The display includes around 3 million lights. The lights were started back in Arkansas. Mr Osbourne started with around a million lights on his own house in respond to a request from his daughter to light up the whole house. She liked it so much he eventually bought the houses on either side and had a three million light display. He ended up taking is down in 1995 after six neighbours sued him and the Supreme Court shut it down. DisneyWorld heard the story and offered to take the display and put it up on their backlot residential street in Hollywood studios. It has been there now for 20 years, but this year will sadly be its last, with the area about to be demolished to make room for the new Star Wars land.

So Saturday night was the main event - the runDisney Wine & Dine half marathon. The weather has been insane. Mid-30s and humidity over 90%. Whilst the 15,000 of us were in the waiting area a lovely cool breeze appeared (the weather change was dramatic). Suddenly the locals looked a little panicked. Before we knew it the entertainment stopped and staff were announcing an evacuation. We all got shifted out of the field and into the building that houses the baseball field. Apparently a pretty intense lightning storm was on its way. As per Disney policy, everything within ten miles of a lightning strike gets suspended for safety (fireworks at parks also got delayed). We spent almost an hour locked down, the whole time pretty sure that the whole race would be cancelled. We were eventually let out and told the race was going ahead, but when we got to the start line we discovered it had been cut short and we would only be going 7.1 miles and not the expected 13.1. The heat had come back for the race though, so it ended up being a good thing we didn't run the whole distance. In completing this race I also completed Disney's Coast 2 Coast challenge, so there was a bonus medal at the end for me.

Sunday was the first Mickeys Very Merty Christmas Party of the year.

The whole of the Magic Kingdom had all its Christmas decorations out.

Where the Halloween party had the trick or treating, for the Christmas party you needed to look for a candy cane.

Where you got to a candy cane you got free and endless hot chocolate and cookies (snicker doodles!).

Elsa had again taken over the castle and made it all icy for the festive season.

There was also a pretty impressive Christmas fireworks show.

And with that, another trip to DisneyWorld was over. Time to head to Miami.

Food & Wine & the Mouse

I'm not always on holidays, I swear. I know, hard to believe me when I say that whilst I am on holidays...

Anyway, that aside, this time around I jumped on four planes and flew 21 hours to get from Port Moresby to Orlando. As a single unbroken journey, it's long. Really, really long. I was wide awake the whole way to LA. I hit up the movie selection on the plane. Note to self, don't watch movies with the words 'dying girl' in the title on a plane. I sobbed through the dinner service. The flight attendant called over the purser (exact words '2K is a mess') who in turn made sure I had an ample supply of tissues and made some film suggestions from the comedy section. For the rest of the flight the crew referred to me as 'the crying girl'. Ate the worlds most expensive doughnut at LAX (AUD$9.70 or PGK21) and then managed to sleep the whole way to Miami. Turns out you see some weird things flying on Halloween. Like this woman at LAX...

She also put on fluffy flamingo slippers after security (TSA mustn't like fluffy slippers...).

Fianlly made it to Orlando, and headed out to Walt Disney World first thing the next morning. Turns out daylight savings ended the night I arrived, so got an added bonus of an extra nights sleep (and puzzled looks at breakfast when I apologised for being an hour late...).

Day 1 was a Magic Kingdom day. It was also the final Mickeys Not So Scary Halloween Party. Now here is my question, why must all women's Halloween costumes be the slutty interpretation? I think I saw the slutty variation of every Disney Princess that ever lived. There was also slutty angels and Devils, slutty villains, even a slutty butterfly (which perplexed me a little). Where I drew the line was seeing a kid that couldn't be more than 10 or 11 wearing a slutty Alice in Wonderland costume. Child services should be called at this point. There were some great costumes. Steampunk Tinkerbell was awesome, and there were lots of families where Mum was the 'before' shot (provincial belle, Cinderella in rags etc), Dad was Prince Charming, and the little girl was the Princess version of Mum. Lots of families doing the Inside Out thing too (bizarrely Dads were all Anger...).

The best part of the Halloween parties is the trick or treating. You go find an organge orb in the park like this one

And they give you candy. Lots of candy. This is MY candy.

So far I've only eaten one. Mostly because I had already overdosed on sugar. Like this guy.

The whole park was decked out for the event, however I am assured it will all be Christmas decorations by the weekend.

The evening was capped off by fireworks at the castle.

15 hours in my feet and I crashed into bed, only to get back up today to do it again. I had breakfast at the drive in theatre at Hollywood Studios.

Followed by several hours riding Toy Story Mania (new high score - 190,800!). Then it was time to head to Epcot for the International Food and Wine Festival.

This year, you can buy a tasting pass, which gets you 8 dishes of your choice and reserved seating at that nights concert (they have one act a day who do three shows a night).

Food choice were tough today - it was a billion degrees. I saw two older people collapse during the course of the day and at least one baby that was so overheated it looked like it had been boiled. It was not pleasant. 

I found the cheese booth and tried a trio of cheese...

Next up, needing something cold, I headed to the Chew Lab for their liquid nitro dessert. It was okay, others were raving about it, but I've never been a fan of chocolate ice cream (seriously).

I hit up China for some chicken pot stickers...

Then some kielbasa at Poland...

A croissant stuffed with snails from France...

Then a festival fav, the Canadian cheese soup (which is surprisingly spicy)...

And then finally, on the recommendation of Melissa, I tried the Farm Fresh booth loaded Mac and cheese, which was a winner.

Still got tons more to try when I head back on Thursday.

The concert tonight was Boyz II Men. They are well and truly past the boyhood stage at this point.

I spent some quality time cooling off hiding in the on site aquarium (it's airconditioned, I didn't try to hang with the Sharks - just to be clear). I was there for feeding time to watch the fishies mob the poor handler trying to feed them all. There is a diver in there somewhere...

They have an Australia booth, which I will be boycotting. Two things. Firstly, we eat PRAWNS. WTF is a 'shrimp'? It has no place on the menu at an Australian booth. Also, what is 'yellow cake' and what is it doing in a lammo? Sponge is what you put in a lammo...

Time to head back to the hotel and the comfort of airconditioning (and get accosted on the monorail ride home by a hyperactive five year old dressed as Princess Jasmine who wanted to tell me all about her birthday - parents were a little embarrassed about her harassing a stranger and apologised profusely). Tomorrow is Animal Kingdom day. Goodnight!

Jo (anne) vs the Volcano

When you come to visit PNG, you don't come to visit Port Moresby. Sure, you can go to Duffy and have their eggs benny, check out the amazing new exhibition at the Museum (seriously, it is awesome), maybe even check out a flick at Vision City (yes, we still think that's cool). But all every visitor really wants is to get out of PoM and see the real PNG - the Provinces.

Jo had already experienced all of the above in the space of a week (how lucky is she?) so it was time to hop a plane and head north to East New Britain. I am pleased to inform everyone that Air Niugini didn't let us down. Jo got a true PNG experience at the airport - complete with the system being down (how's a handwritten boarding pass for a souvenir?) and the traditional flight delay.

Thankfully though they were (following my definition) 'on time' (my definition: If Air Niugini gets you to the place you want to go on the day you want to go there, the flight is 'on time') and we arrived in Rabaul on Friday evening.

Saturday morning we set out to explore. We went into Rabaul to check out the tunnels. These are pretty amazing. The Japanese built them when they occupied the area in WWII. They had a series of tunnels at sea level which they used to unload supplies from their submarines and boats (sneaking the sub in the tunnel at high tide then unloading at low tide and the allies would be none the wiser). They also had a series of tunnels up higher on the cliff to help them spot and shoot planes.

We got to have a bit of fun crouching through the tunnels, and the Japanese troops had an awesome view.

It also proved the old adage that there really was light at the end of the tunnel...

We then kept with the lofty heights and headed towards town to get a birds eye view of Rabaul harbour.

Two cute little volcanoes really just make you want to break out into the Lava Song. Now keep in mind the volcano on the right sank the town of Rabaul under an estimated 4 meters of ash back in 1994 when she got a little cranky. In turn, the town moved down the road to Kokopo, though a lot of people have moved back (as you can see in the picture). Fittingly, this photo was taken from the spot where the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory observe the volcano.

Town was pretty packed on Saturday, with everyone lining the main road.

Rabaul was celebrating the Frangipani festival, which is turns out involved a parade. Not a crappy Cairns Festival parade (nope, not over that yet), but an awesome parade, which our car decided to gate crash. We ended up IN the parade. This was my view out the back of the car.

There was a common theme to the floats, with the volcanoes featuring heavily.

Though, there were some floats that seems to be trying to win the award for the largest number of people on the float at any one time.

We headed out over towards the volcanoes to check them out up close. Despite the fact that I was that close to an active volcano, with someone named Jo, I resisted the urge to throw her in as a ritual sacrifice (If you don't get the reference, we can't be friends anymore). If you look closely you can see the steam coming out. Her most recent eruption was only a few months back).

The volcanoes come complete with some hot springs, where you can even go and watch the locals cook megapod eggs.

Next up was the New Guinea Club, which is now a quasi museum of Rabaul's history. It has some of it's own WWII history....

This guy summed up my thoughts on that...

Outside is a Japanese bunker. The most amazing part of the bunker (where Admiral Yamamoto ate, slept and strategised during his time there in WWII) is the map room, where there are still Japanese hand drawn maps of the New Britain's and New Ireland provinces and Bougainville.

We had missed the post-parade sing sing, which disappointed me a little, as I'd been hoping to see a duk duk. later in the day, we were driving along the road after having been up at a lookout and guess what happened to be strolling down the street? Everyone in the car got excited, and as soon as we wound down the windows he rewarded us with a dance on the side of the road.

After a great day on Saturday we got up on Sunday looking forward to a big day out on the water. It started out as a lovely day.

Little did we know the ride would be a hairy one. Jo was okay, she likes roller coasters. Me, I like the little kiddie rides at Disneyland, not Space Mountain! There is no photos from the trip to and from the island. Mostly because it was not possible to hold the camera, and hold on to the boat for dear life at the same time. I managed to compose myself enough for a pic of the island (we were in calmer seas at this point).

If you want to visualise the ride, picture the opening credits of Miami Vice crossed with an episode of Deadliest Catch. At the same time, you have a high pressure fireman's hose filled with seawater pointed directly at your face for twenty minutes. Twice on the trip home the boat started to roll like it might capsize. You know when the locals on the boat look nervous that you need to start to worry.

The snorkeling was amazing though. Lots of fishies, even a shark! Sadly, they hadn't checked the tides, and it was too low to get to the island itself, which meant we needed to jump in from the boat, which was fine. Problems came getting back into the boat (which was not designed for mid ocean boardings). We both have some great bruises to show for our efforts getting back on board.

Back at the resort, we were happy to be back on solid ground. Nature however still wanted to mess with us and chose that moment to throw an earthquake or two into the mix (just to keep us on our toes).

Facing down a 6am flight back on a Monday morning (anything for solid ground at this point), we settled in for a drink and a sunset over the volcano, all in all pleased that it didn't decide to make the weekend anymore exciting than it had already been.