What time is the eleven o’clock duck parade?

The hotel they have us shacked up in is for this event is the Peabody Orlando.
It’s pretty posh, but not exquisite or anything. Convention rates put the rooms at $200 a night (company is paying) so I am sure they’re more expensive for the average visitor.

The “mascot” of this hotel is the Peabody Duck and since opening its doors on November 1, 1986, The Peabody Orlando has continued, in unbroken sequence, the traditional March of The Peabody Ducks which began at its sister property, The Peabody Memphis, many, many years ago.

Each morning, promptly at 11 a.m. the ducks ride in a special elevator that descends from their $100,000 penthouse Royal Duck Palace.

When the elevator doors open, The Peabody Ducks, accompanied by their crimson-and-gold-braid-jacketed Duck Masterâ„¢, take up their positions on a plush red carpet and begin The March of The Peabody Orlando Ducks to the strident tones of John Philip Souza’s King Cotton March.

Oh the huge manatee!

I have been dispatched to Orlando, FL to support the companies annual sales rally. It the one time each year all of our sales critters are brought together to be educated and hyped on the corporate sales strategy.

Overall, it’s not a bad gig for me. Good food and a luxury hotel combined with an endless stream of sale people who each owe me a drink, or WILL owe me a drink so let’s just get it out of the way thankyouverymuch.

My Internet friend Suzanne lives out on the coast in nearby Melbourne. She and her husband recently moved there from Lansing, Michigan. Since I was in the neighborhood I dropped her a line and we arranged to meet up for lunch at a pretty cool tiki bar and grill called Bonefish Willies. Great place!

From there went by her art gallery and checked out some of her painting and then moved on to a local park where you can go out on this small pier and actually pet a manatee. When we arrived there were around 6 or 7 of these odd creatures milling about.

Apparently they’re quite common around these parts. Regardless, I was very excited to see them for the first time and to actually get to pet one on his grizzly little manatee head.

Thanks Suzanne for showing me a little slice of life in Florida I would not have otherwise seen on this business trip!

I was pretty beat after I got back to the hotel but I snapped this from my hotel room window before crawling into bed and getting some sleep.

Lizardo – King of our yard-o

I spotted Lizardo as he was leaping onto a palm frond in the front garden. It’s the first sighting of him since acquiring the new camera. I quickly affixed the Tamron AF 28-75mm f2.8 XR Di in the hopes of getting a macro shot of the big fella.

Oddly enough, he did not retreat as I moved toward him and took aim. In fact at one point he started to move toward the camera. I supsect he saw his reflecting in the lens and perhaps saw it as a rival lizard trespassing on his domain.

Whatever the reason, he allowed me to get quite close.

Lizardo
Click for full size

Lizardo
Click for full size

Long distance information

For the last two days Cynthia and I have woken up an hour earlier in the morning so we can make overseas calls to Madrid, Seville and Granada to book hotels.

Yesterday we secured our hotel in Seville but there were no vacancies at Los Tilos in Granada. Not totally unexpected as we will be in Granada during Fiesta Nacional de España or Día de la Hispanidad (aka: Spanish National Day; aka Hispanic Day) which is a Spanish national holiday commemorating the exact date when Christopher Columbus first set a foot in the Americas.

We went back online yesterday and did some more research and found Carmen de la Alcubilla del Caracol, a charming 7 room hotel on one of the slopes of the Alhambra. It’s rated #4 out of 132 hotels on Trip Advisor and all the reviews are quite glowing. We called them this morning and successfully made our reservations. I’m actually very excited about this hotel and am rather glad Los Tilos was unavailable as it lead to this discovery.

So far, not one of the hotels we have booked or tried to book have had any English speaking employees. This is not a problem since Cynthia speaks Spanish quite well, but it is something to consider if you are planning a trip to Spain. I am sure that any of the larger chain or luxury hotels can easily accommodate non-Spanish speaking guests, but getting a room in one of these smaller, private/family owned or “boutique” hotels could be a challenge if you don’t speak the language.

The proprietors of these places seem wary of non-Spanish speaking people seeking to make reservations, probably as a result of misunderstandings about rates, dates, services, etc. That’s understandable. The hotel in Madrid would not even take our reservation over the phone and will only work with us via e-mail. I am sure that is probably so there is a record of what has been agreed upon and way to avoid any misunderstandings that could be caused by the language barrier.

I have to say, it was pretty cool listening to Cynthia negotiate our reservations and doing it all in Spanish. I think her language skills are going to allow us to have an even better experience than we would if neither of us spoke the language.

Up next, finalizing Madrid hotel reservations, more research on Barcelona hotels, more research on rail passes and possibly booking a flight from Granada to Barcelona. No way I am taking a night train again.

Travel resources

One of the things I am liking about blogging our upcoming trip is that the posts are being quickly indexed into the main search engines. This is producing an increase in random visits to baldheretic.com from people all over the world searching terms related to travel to Spain. Besides the helpful and much appreciated comments from my friends and other known readers of this blog, I’ve also received some random e-mails and comments with suggestions about what to see and what to expect on our upcoming vacation from total strangers who seem eager to share their own experience, strength and hope.

It’s also resulting in people being able to benefit from our experience and efforts which is pretty cool.

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After a marathon planning session that lasted from 11:00 am Saturday morning till 5:30 pm that afternoon, we’ve pretty much nailed down our itinerary and are in the process of booking hotels in all the cities we will be staying in.

We have been using a fantastic web site called Trip Advisor. The feature most helpful has been the hotel reviews. Trip Advisor allows visitors to the web site to post their own experience with any given hotel directly to the site along with pictures.

This type of site can be subject to some fraud. I’ve heard of companies sending their employees or appointed P.R. folks to sites like this to write canned positive reviews and I am sure it happens here with some of the bigger hotel chains, but it’s easy to spot. Plus, we’re focusing on smaller hotels that are privately owned and don’t seem to have the where-with-all, much less the budget, for such chicanery.

On the site you have the ability to sort the reviews by best and worst. You filter through about a dozen or so of these and you end up with a good feel for the potential of the establishment.

Even if a hotel has several negative reviews you can often eliminate a good percentage of those when you read things like “hotel staff did not speak English” or “Inadequate parking” or any of a host of other so-called problems that just won’t apply to us or can be overcome with a little common sense.

The site is very user friendly and we have located most of the hotels we are interested in. Now it’s just a matter of getting up early and making some overseas calls. Fortunately Cynthia’s Spanish has gotten so good we should be able to negotiate our reservations without any trouble at all.

We’re going to get up early in the morning and call Hotel Los Tilos in Granada and and the delightful and musically themed Hotel La Musica in Seville for reservations.

We’ve believe we have found a suitable hotel for the Madrid leg and even our one night hit-and-run whirlwind visit to La Linea/Gibraltar. Barcelona is a challenge as it seems to be the most expensive leg of the trip with the most options. We’ll finalize those in the coming weeks along with a few others.

IT (special) Olympics

So my boss came up with the idea of having a team building exercise call The IT Olympics.
Basically we’ve broken into teams and are competing on a Nintendo Wii for bragging rights.

Jeana (my manager and teammate) prepares to knock one out of the virtual park

Home run!

To be honest, I was a bit sceptical of this activity, but I’m actually having a pretty good time.

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