Monthly Archives: January 2010

For Halloween 2007, Julie and I were in Disney World.  TopCoder invited me to be a reviewer for the TopCoder College Championship design track.  I reviewed software component designs submitted by “college” students.  While it does say “College Championship”, “University Championship” would be more applicable, as I believe a majority of the competitors were post-graduate.  The competitors did a bunch of qualifying work for a month and a half before the competition, focused on 3 designs.  If you want to be bored, you can read the synopsis here.  I wrote the description of the Faceted Classifications design.  Fascinating stuff, I know.

Anyways, Julie and I got to go to Disney World where the “finals” were held.  We were at the Contemporary Resort, which the monorail comes right into, and I only had a couple hours of stuff to do a day, so we had plenty of free time to explore.   Our room was awesome, but it overlooked the themed restaurant about 6 or 7 floors below and every 15 minutes from 7 AM to 10 PM they sang the same song about how great it was to be at Disney World, or something like that.   Awesome.  I was singing that song for like 2 weeks after we got back.

On one of the days I finished a bit early and there was a PGA event in town, so we took a taxi over, bought some tickets and got to watch the pros golf for a few hours.  Definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip

One of the nights, TopCoder bussed everyone over to Epcot where Disney had a dessert spread and open bar set up for everyone, right on the lake where the fireworks and laser light show happens every night.  This was definitely one of the more posh events we been a part of with TopCoder.

The last day we were there, TopCoder treated all the competitors and reviewers, including Julie (thanks Jessie), to full passes to the Disney ecosystem.  We got a card that got us into everything at the resorts, including Epcot, the Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom and MGM.  So, to get full use of the passes, we hit everything except for MGM in one day.  We started at Animal Kingdom.  When we there, my only goal was to pet a goat, so we set out for the petting zoo.  Turns out it’s hidden in the way back of the park, so we had to walk like 6 miles and take a weird train to get there.  Once we were there, all you can really do is pet goats, but it fulfilled the goal.  On the way out, there were employees with a giant bag passing things out, so we each grabbed one.  Turns out they were passing out “Dream Passes” for the park for that day.  Each pass had little pull off tabs that took you to the front of the line on all the popular attractions, so we got to do pretty much everything at Animal Kingdom without waiting line, which was awesome!

After Animal Kingdom, we popped over to Magic Kingdom for a little while.  I had been there when I was 8, and we found it was definitely geared a little more towards younger kids than we expected.  It was still fun to do the haunted mansion and just walk around and see all the Halloween decorations.  My other goal for the day was to eat a turkey leg, and that happened at Magic Kingdom.

Finally, we took the monorail back to Epcot since it was the Food and Wine show, so there was food everywhere and we really just wanted dinner  We ended up eating Turkish food since it had the shortest line and we were dying.  It was probably one of the best meals we had all week.  We then stumbled back onto the monorail and crashed in our room for a very long time.  All in all it was a really fun “bonus” trip that we wouldn’t normally have done otherwise.

In April of 2006, Julie and I went on a cruise .  We left from Galveston and went all the way down to the Panama Canal, halfway through the canal, back out again, and then all the way back to Galveston.  We stopped in Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands.  Overall it was a great trip.  We sailed on Celebrity Cruise Lines, which we both agreed was not exactly catering to our demographic.  The entertainment was definitely skewed a little older than what we would have liked, but we had fun nonetheless.  Luckily, we were paired at dinner with a honeymooning couple – Theron and Ann Marie.  They were both extremely nice, and Theron was a bit of a computer geek – he worked as a computer programmer for a nuclear facility –  so we definitely had plenty in common.

We flew into Houston the day before and then took a cruise line bus from the hotel to Galveston, where we made it onto the ship.  This was our second cruise, so we knew a lot more what to expect for things like embarkation and the muster drill.

The first stop was in Cozumel.  It had recently been hit by a hurricane, so the port itself was in disrepair.  There were large, damaged piers that used to be for getting on and off the ship, but we had to tender since they were in such bad shape.  We didn’t really have anything booked for excursions, but Julie had researched this port a bit before we left, so we got off the boat, into a cab (thankful for Julie’s 6 years of Spanish classes) and made it to a beach where we rented some snorkel equipment and got into the water.  This was our first vacation with our waterproof case for our point and shoot digital camera, and it has been great.  If you go on a lot of vacations to beaches, it’s worth the $100 – $150 investment to be able to take pictures in and out of the water without worrying about the camera.

The snorkeling was great, the water was warm, and there were fish everywhere.  Definitely one of our best snorkeling experiences.

After snorkeling, we just got right out of the water at a restaurant and ate lunch.  Definitely the way to do lunch.

The next stop was in Costa Maya, where we didn’t really do anything – it was a pretty short stop.  After that, we sailed down to Costa Rica, where we went on a riverboat tour.

The riverboat cruise was definitely entertaining.  There was wildlife everywhere and we learned a lot about the area.

After Costa Rica, we made it to Panama.  The whole process of going through the canal was definitely interesting.  There were trains on either side of the canal that pulled the boats through.  There was only about 2 feet of clearance on either side of the boat to the canal walls.  When we stopped in Panama, there was a guy painting the boat where it had scraped against the walls.  We went through at about 7 in the morning, but even then it was extremely hot.  I think it was literally like 500 degrees out.

After the canal, it was time to start heading back to Galveston.  Our next stop was in Jamaica where we did a waterfall climb.  They warned everyone pretty strongly that this was fairly physically demanding and that you definitely wanted to dress for getting wet, with good shoes.   It was amazing to see how many people showed up in dress clothes, with dress shoes, khaki pants, etc…  Needless to say, they didn’t really get the full experience.

The last stop was in the Cayman Islands where we just took a short ride to the 7 mile beach and hung out in the water all day.  It was a somewhat cloudy day, but still very warm, and the water was perfect.

Overall, it was a great trip, and cemented cruising as one of our preferred vacations.