Travel with the Whitakers

 Do you have someone in your family that loves to camp?!  Three of the four of us love camping. Bella has never been camping, but that will change soon, hopefully. Christian went real camping for the first time in October 2019 with Cub Scouts and he loved it! Before that he had been camping in a tent, but in the house. Since last year he has camped in the tent in the house, we’ve camped in the backyard, and last month he went camping with his Cub Scout Pack again.  He loves camping so much, that he kept the tent up in his bedroom for almost five months, one weekend a month I would camp in there with him. Last month I got to go camping with his Cub Scout Pack the weekend after I got back from Disney, and we had a lot of fun.  What is your favorite thing about camping? C – Being at the campsite, and playing games and sleeping in the tent.  H – The opportunity to unplug. M – Being in nature, and eating food that’s cooked over an open fire.  What is your favorite campfire snack? C – S’more

 When Can We Cruise Again?! This is a question that has been on a lot of minds, including my own, since the middle of March. The answer is, sadly, not simple. There is no specific date for when cruising can resume, but there is a list of requirements that will need to be met before cruise ships can set sail with passengers again.  When cruises first started to get cancelled there was hope that things would get better quickly. Here we are, eight months later and things are most certainly not better at all. For a while the CDC had a no sail order in place, and CLIA had one of their own as well. The CDC’s order was no renewed at the end of October, but there are restrictions that are in place and requirements that need to be met before cruising can begin again.  What are these requirements? • Successful simulated voyages with crew members only.  • Enhanced cleaning on cruise ships. • Lower ship capacities. • Shorter sailings. • Enhanced air management.  • Testing for crew and

t’s hard to believe that it has already been a month since I was getting ready for my trip! I had such an amazing time, and I can’t wait to go back again at some point with the whole family. I also highly recommend taking a solo trip to Disney World if you have a chance to do so. I hope to do so again at point in the future, too!  During my trip I was able to enjoy some tasty treats from the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival! This year’s festival is running for the longest ever. It started back in July when the parks first reopened, and it is still going on right now! It will end just before the Epcot Festival of the Holidays starts on November 27, 2020.  Part of planning for my trip was reading over all of the Food and Wine Festival menus and decided what options I couldn’t pass up during my day at Epcot. I decided on five options, and I enjoyed all five. I’m here today to tell you about each of those items and which on I enjoyed most.  If you’ve never been to a festival at E

 I hope that everyone had a fun, safe Halloween yesterday!  I have been back from my trip to Disney World for two weeks now, and I figured that it was time to talk about what it was like to take a solo Disney trip for the first time.  Let me start off by saying that we have taken quite a few trips in the last nine years. We have taken trips as a family with the kid(s), we have taken adult only trips before we had kids, and we have taken trips with extended family including grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. Each trip to Disney World is different, and each is what you make of it.  This trip was different, even in the planning stages, because there wasn’t too much planning that could go on once the trip needed to be rescheduled. When I started planning it was weird to pick dining locations and attractions to Fastpass without consulting others. Normally we let everyone that we’re traveling with weigh in on the dining conversation. Once the Disney Dining Plans were put to t