After the excitement of our 15 minutes of fame in the Macy's Parade, Friday was a chill out day at Blizzard Beach water park - it is also the warmest day we are likely to have for some time (73 degrees today). Blizzard Beach is one of two Disney water parks based on a freak snow storm theme with a lazy river, raft rides, toboggan slides, a one-acre wave pool, intense waterslides—including one of the the tallest and fastest in the whole U.S.A.! (I did not go on this - I stuck to the kiddies raft rides and toboggan slides).

The weather was awful again on Saturday with torrential rain and drizzle for most of the day - this meant another trip to the cinema, this time to see the third Narnia film. We also decided (rather stupidly!!) to visit one of the shopping malls - on the last Saturday before Christmas........ bad idea!!

As we had only managed to get on the Harry Potter ride once at our last visit to Islands of Adventure, we decided to go back on Sunday for another go...... and so did half of Florida (the weather was dry but still cold). There was a 45 minute wait just to get into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter plus a further 75 minute wait to get onto the ride itself - no way!! This gave us the opportunity to go back to Universal and see the Macy's Parade from the public side (we have a 14 day 2 park ticket so we can enter Universal and Islands of Adventure as many times as we like during those 14 days). The visit to the 2 parks was broken up by a couple of drinks in the Nascar Cafe to watch the American Football.

Monday was spent at Sea World (the park we have probably visited the most as we used to have annual passes for here). It was a little sad to see that they had changed the Shamu show since the death of a trainer here in February this year. The trainers no longer get in the water with these beautiful creatures. The shows were still good though and we stayed late into the evening to see the special Christmas shows and lights.

On Tuesday we decided to take a break from the theme parks and crowds and headed north of Orlando to Wekiwa Springs State park where we hired a kayak once again. The paddle was a lot easier than some of our recent ones and we saw alligators, turtles and lots of herons and other water birds. In the afternoon we played a deciding round of adventure golf - the score was standing at 3 each but victory was sweet as I beat Ant!!!

Wednesday we got up extra early for another attempt at the Harry Potter ride - the park opens at 8:00 am and when we got there at 8:15 there was already a 2 hour wait for the ride!!! Looks like our one go will be it. After attempting to get on 2 other rides (one was closed and one had a 40 minute wait), we gave up and went and played golf again - this time Ant beat me and the score currently stands at a very embarrassing 8:4 with appallingly bad scores for me!!!