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A few things noted about the trip, Orlando and it's theme parks.

• I managed to visit each of the major theme parks. All of which were cool to see once (and I'm glad I went) but not cool enough to visit again. SeaWorld was the most amazing and the intelligence of preforming animals/mammals/fish or what ever you call them was incredible.
• Orlando has never experienced a major Hurricane but gets hit by its 2nd in 3 weeks now that I was planning to be there. The weather channel said Hurricane Frances could possibly be the worst to ever hit the United States due to its slow moving longer impact.
• Weather is random. When the forecast calls for thunder showers, it really means that it will only rain for about 5 minutes at some point in the day. The rest of the day will be unbelievably hot. Over the course of the trip, weather was very warm at 35 degrees every day with constant lightning and small showers.
• There is unbelievable crowd management at theme parks. It's like herding animals through dozens of gates because once you think you are getting to the front of the line, you enter an entire new room of zig zag gates. Fortunately for us, lines were very small but I can't image standing at the back of a line that could easily extend 2 or 3 hours for a 30 second ride.
• Disney Characters are everywhere and attack you from all sides no matter where you go.
• Its common to see small lizard type reptiles in the grass.
• A 15-20% tip is always asked for on your bill.
• Prices seemed to be the same but in US funds. What would cost us $5 CND here seemed to cost $5 USD there. Not too mention we were in a huge tourism area so prices were naturally increased.
• Common jokes with the local residents (including conference staff and park employees) involved changing voting results and bad hurricane weather.
• Hurricane Frances apparently cost Disney a lose of 41 million and Universal about 25 million for being closed Saturday and Sunday.
• Although we were right in the direct path of the hurricane and some areas of Orlando had damage, we actually seen very little of that. Our only experience was steady rain and steady winds for 2 days as people continued to venture outside to the many business that remained open.
• Compared to past trips, airport security seems to have really calmed down.
• Immigration delayed our flight home just long enough to miss our connecting flight in Toronto to Halifax. We were forced to spend one more night in a hotel at our expense and catch a flight home the next day.

Since the reason for going to Orlando was PhotoshopWorld East, I'll write up a longer review for that in my next post.

Update Go to PhotoshopWorld Post.