By Popular Demand: 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.