As we walked into the Magic Kingdom on Sunday, Ben was approached by a cast member who asked him if he wanted to be a sorcerer for the Magic Kingdom. Of course he did, and so our adventure began!
If you are not familiar with what the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom is, it is an interactive game played at Walt Disney World, using maps and special trading cards that cast spells and open portals, which are located throughout Adventureland, Liberty Square and Frontierland, Main Street USA, and Fantasyland. It currently is in a soft testing phase right now, only available on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday; however Disney announced today that it will officially open sometime in late February.
We walked into the Fire House to sign up, and were asked for our room key. We received a map, 5 spell cards, and 1 key card and were instructed to wait for a training mystic portal to open, that allows you to meet Merlin the Magician who instructs you on how to play the game.
Our first adventure occurred on Main Street USA; here is the portion of the map that shows Main Street and the location of the different portals.
The key card opens the portal by holding it up to it, and you then need to make sure you are standing on the Sorcerer’s symbol on the ground, to play the game effectively.
You cast your magic spells by holding up your card to the portal. You may use more than one spell card at a time for now, but it is uncertain whether that will continue once the game is in full operation. There are currently 70 spell cards available, with more rumored to come once the game has officially launched. If you plan to play regularly, you may want to consider taking a picture of your cards with your phone (thus eliminating the need to bring them with you) or enclosing them in plastic. After you defeat the villain, you may stop playing, or follow the directions to continue playing.
What did we think? We all enjoyed playing the game, though as residents we had the luxury of being able to walk from portal location to portal location at a leisure, and wait in line for our turn. If you will be visiting Walt Disney World on vacation, you will need to consider setting aside approximately 25-40 minutes per game quest you plan on playing. We discovered it’s not as much fun to play on Main Street USA, as we were simply just going back and forth to portals; there’s no attractions to break up the walking. We observed just as many adults playing as families, and we only encountered one portal that didn’t read a spell card. Our opinion is that this game will provide a huge merchandising boon to Disney, as people will want to buy cards and accessories in the stores to maximize their playing potential.
If you have a chance to play, comment here and let us know what you think!
We passed the one year anniversary of our decision to move to Florida a couple of weeks ago, and it felt a little strange that we didn’t even think to recognize it. We now have been residents of Florida for six months, so in recognition of both anniversaries, we thought it a perfect time to update our readers on how life is progressing for us now.
We love the city of Clermont. It has everything we need within a five-to-ten minute drive, and the people here are very friendly and welcoming. I don’t believe we have encountered one rude person here yet. We love our apartment complex; it was a little unnerving when we first moved in, because we have always rented houses in Wisconsin, and were a little concerned about noise and privacy issues. However, we never hear our neighbors, so it’s totally not an issue at all. We really have embraced apartment living–we love not having the responsibility of lawn care and pool upkeep, and maintenance is extremely efficient when it comes to repair issues. The apartment is a little smaller than we’re used to, but we have plenty of room for the four of us, and when our lease is up in October, we plan to renew. We may consider purchasing a home in the future, but for the time being, we are content here.
A favorite saying of ours is “Toto, we’re not in Wisconsin anymore”. As much as we love the area, it becomes obvious that there are definitely different attitudes and experiences that are prevalent here. Some experiences are very good, such as 80 degree weather in January. What northerner wouldn’t absolutely love that! We’ve had a couple of chilly evenings (30s and 40s), and cooler days, but we’re proud to say that we have not yet turned the heat on, nor have we needed to use a winter coat.
Unfortunately, the middle school experience we have to put in the negative column of attitudes and experiences. The school Ben attended is very strict, and really not supportive of children with special needs. It was so detrimental to him that we made the decision to pull him out and homeschool him the rest of the year. It was very discouraging to us to think that all schools in Florida may be similar, but we recently learned of a middle school in Orlando that is autism-friendly, so it really gives us hope that not all schools are deficient in addressing the needs of students with special needs. We will not be able to send Ben to this school next year; it would require a three hour daily drive just to take him and pick him up, and that’s simply not feasible. We are in contact with another middle school in Clermont, and we are hopeful that it may give him a more positive school experience for seventh grade.
Another regional difference is the availability of our favorite foods. In Wisconsin we shopped at one store, Festival Foods. In Florida, we shop at five different stores: Publix, Sweetbay, Winn-Dixie, Super Target and Walmart. Each store offers something unique that the others don’t, in terms of products and specials. Prices on groceries do tend to be higher here than in Wisconsin. Our most-missed snack products from Wisconsin, apart from the variety of cheeses available in the dairy department, were bagel dip (from Festival), Baker string cheese and Johnsonville Summer Sausage. Festival Foods, bless their hearts, gave us the recipe for bagel dip, we’ve discovered certain brands of string cheese that are an acceptable substitute, and we believe we may have found a store that sells Johnsonville Summer Sausage. We will say that the Florida citrus is amazing! We’ve never cared for grapefruit, but when it’s fresh off the tree, it’s a whole new experience.
You may be wondering if we have any regrets. We need to be honest with our readers and say yes, there have been regrets. It was extremely hard to say good-bye to Nick at the airport after Christmas. We know that Ben would have had no issues with the middle school back in Wisconsin, and he would have been successful there. It’s very difficult to walk away from what is familiar, and it is very easy to look back and say “what if”.
However we wouldn’t trade the moving experience for anything in the world. Nothing can recreate the atmosphere in the car as we drove through the state of Florida towards Clermont. It was absolutely amazing. The kids are settled and happy, Ben a lot more so now that he is away from the negative school environment. Really, who suspends a child for being autistic? They have a lot more experiences here available to them: we’ve been to both the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, Walt Disney World numerous times, a Disney Cruise is in the works, as are passes to Sea World and Lego Land. It’s been amazing to meet people we’ve known only from Facebook, but meets are so hard for our son Ben that we don’t make as many of them as we’d like.
Will we consider moving back? For us, it’s not an option. We believe that when you allow it to be a possibility in your mind, you always have one foot in the past and one foot in the present. You will not make a concerted effort to acclimate yourself totally, and eventually will rationalize the move back. Will we look back on Wisconsin? Of course, we have friends and family there, and it was our life for several years. However, we are Floridians now. We embrace the Floridian life, all that it has to offer or not offer. We hope our blog provides some insight and perhaps even wisdom as to what a relocation a thousand miles away looks like, and we hope our readers know that even though our posts are now infrequent, we still welcome any questions regarding the relocation process. Thanks y’all for reading and following along!
A few days ago a FB Disney friend let me know that they had seen a comment on FB about Jen and I being ‘stand offish’ about meeting people when they visit Disney. I wanted to clear things up a bit. For those who don’t know, our youngest son Ben is autistic. For us this makes meeting people a little more difficult as part of Ben’s autism is that he struggles when he needs to ‘wait’. This is especially hard for him at his favourite place…Disney. So, we do often have to keep our meets shorter than we’d like and sometimes have to miss meets, like Lou Mongello‘s Meets of the Month, on short notice; or leave them very quickly. It also makes it harder to plan meets on a short notice as we can never tell what level Ben’s autism will be at on any given day. And we always do our best to explain why.
We do love meeting our new friends and the time we do get to spend with you all, no matter how short it may be. So, we hope you’ll understand and keep our full situation in mind if we do have to cut a meet short or cancel one; if we do it’s only for Ben’s sake.
As we usher out the old year and ring in the new, we thought it a perfect time to update our readers on our life in Florida. It seems unbelievable that last year at this time we had no idea that we would be spending our next Christmas as Floridians. It’s funny how a dream seems to kick into gear just when you least expect it to.
Is Florida life everything we expected it to be? Yes and no. The weather is as incredible as we imagined and knew it to be, and really, the weather in late July and August is not unbearable. There’s something very satisfying knowing that the temperatures will not drop into the 60’s in August. Wisconsin summers can be very fickle, with 90’s one day and 60’s the next. We have definitely been enjoying the ability to walk outside and not worry about grabbing a coat.
We approach visiting Walt Disney World differently as locals, rather than tourists. There is no need to visit every day, nor attack the parks commando-style. When we go, it is at a leisurely pace and we simply do what we want to that day. We’ve learned that it is not necessary to go when it is raining, or when it is crowded, because the parks will always be there for us to enjoy. This week in central Florida all the theme parks are extremely busy, and have even closed due to capacity issues. We originally were thinking of attending this weekend, but have since reconsidered. Why put yourself in the middle of the insanity if you don’t have to?
So what’s there not to like about Florida? We have been struggling with the school system with both our children, but most specifically our youngest son. We’ve discovered that there is very little tolerance here for children with special needs. One of their beliefs is that the student needs to adapt to the classroom environment, and there is no consideration for accommodations being made for the student by having the classroom environment adapted for the student. Any kind of physical contact is prohibited and results in instant suspension. High-fiving another student will result in a week long lunch detention. Hugging another student is considered sexual harrassment. And in Ben’s case, if you involuntary swing your legs in the classroom and unintentionally kick another student, it is considered careless and malicious intent. We have discovered that even with an IEP, parents have very little leverage in the process, and we feel right now it’s best to remove Ben from public school and homeschool him the rest of the year. This was not a decision we took lightly, but at this point in time we feel the public school is doing Ben more harm than good and he definitely needs to be removed from that environment. We’re not sure what the next school year holds, if we will try public school again, but we have time to make that decision.
We were blessed that our oldest son Nick was able to fly down and visit with us for a few days over Christmas. It was very hard to say goodbye, however. The past couple of days we have been questioning our dream, if it was worth it, with the issues with the school (none of which would have happened in Wisconsin), and the heartache of having Nick leaving and not knowing when we’d see him again. There have been other smaller concerns not discussed in our blog (mainly because they were to some point expected and not a major concern for us, such as the lack of dairy items in the stores and the higher cost of living) and it all kind of struck us at once.
We have come to realize that our dream did not end once we arrived in Florida. Our dream was not to move to Florida and enjoy Disney. Our dream is to move to Florida, enjoy Florida and live our lives out here. It would be easy to give up now, justifying moving back to Wisconsin citing various reasons. However, God did not move us to Florida for a few months to enjoy Disney. His plans are purposeful, and as much as we love Disney, we’re fairly certain that’s not the reason we’re here 🙂 A dream is not always a bed of roses, even when you live 22 miles away from the magic of Walt Disney World. Life still happens, and not how you planned it. You can either embrace it, or you can run away to where you feel safe. We are still in the adjustment period, and it may very well take another year before everything seems normal. Our mantra is to embrace what we have, enjoy life to the fullest and erase the doubts. We will always look back to Wisconsin, because we have friends and family there, but Florida is home now.
We will be shutting down our Facebook presence on December 31. We will be keeping our blog open here and posting occasionally. A huge thank you to all our readers who have followed our journey and supported us through the planning of the move and the relocation itself. We have been blessed to meet a few of you and make new friendships; it’s nice to know we’re not alone. (Sometimes it sure feels like it!) May God bless your families and give you a prosperous and healthy New Year! Y’all are in our hearts.
When we were first planning our move to the beautiful state of Florida, one recurring theme that kept surfacing was the anticipation of being able to visit the parks at a moment’s notice. As we’ve mentioned before, what we envisioned as a short drive to Walt Disney World can actually take us anywhere from 35-55 minutes to arrive, depending on traffic. We try to schedule our Disney trips in on Wednesday afternoons/early evenings (kids have early release from school) and the weekends. School and homework commitments always take priority over our fun time at the parks, and there really isn’t sufficient time on a normal school day to drive over two hours round trip for an hour in the park. This past weekend was a three-day weekend (end of the first grading period for the kids), so we were able to squeeze in an extra day at Walt Disney World. It was not our intention to visit all four parks this weekend; just happened to work out that way!
We rely on the WDW Lines app (downloaded to our smartphones) when we decide which park to visit. (Please see touringplans.com for more information). It is an excellent resource and well worth the small investment: it rates the individual parks based on how crowded they are expected to be, list show times, and estimated wait times for all the attractions.
We decided Saturday to visit the Animal Kingdom. Believe it or not, this was our first visit to AK since our move in July, mainly because we didn’t feel a need to roast ourselves in the hot Florida sun. For us, Animal Kingdom is by far the hottest park. We know others may disagree, but we knew there would be plenty of cooler temperatures in the upcoming months, and we were fine with delaying our visit. We were thrilled to see how close the parking lot tram brought us to the entrance, as we were used to quite the hike when we stayed on property and used Disney transportation.
[As a side note, one of our ‘wants’ is to stay on Disney property at each of the resort hotels. We have decided that when this happens, we will use our own vehicle and not the Disney bus transportation service. We much prefer using the parking lot and trams: it is more convenient and less stressful.]
Ben faced his fear of Expedition Everest: he first tried it in 2007 and quickly placed it on his list (of things he was afraid of!). It is now a must-do attraction at Animal Kingdom! He absolutely loved it! Yay Ben!
Sunday was a Magic Kingdom and Epcot Day: Epcot, because of Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, MK closes at 7:00. We chose to take the monorail over to Epcot for a couple of hours. Magic Kingdom is by far our favorite park, and while it can be an inconvenience to have to take a ferry boat or monorail from the TTC to the Magic Kingdom, most days we enjoy the magical approach as the way Walt Disney wanted it to be.
Naturally, this left Disney’s Hollywood Studios for Monday; this is our second favorite park: Rock N Roller Coaster, the Tower of Terror and Star Tours are absolute must-dos. We went into the 5 & 10 store on Hollywood Boulevard for the first time ever, and discovered a lot of things that we would love to have for Christmas…:=) Thought you might want to take a look too!
Toy Story Mania is also one of our favorites: we always joke with Ben that he so needs to stop coloring on the walls, and that we’re going to have to take his crayons away :=)
We have been asked: what is the best thing about going to the parks now that we live here? We would say the ability to enjoy the parks and really take in the theming of the attractions and surroundings, without feeling the need to rush around and do it all. Walt Disney World isn’t going anywhere, and neither are we–we have plenty of time to explore and enjoy everything it has to offer.
Wishes And Pixie Dust 