December 6 December 7 December 8 December 9 December 10 December 11	Saturday December 8 Saturday, we slept in, then had breakfast at Perkins again. Today was a shopping day. Our first stop was a new shopping center not far from the kids’ house. We had wanted to find a large Best Buy to see if we could check out a piece of equipment live. Their web site said they had it, but we didn’t want to order it without a live check. This store didn’t have it. The clerk checked and none of the Best Buys in Orlando carried it! We also wandered the Sports Authority for a while. We went in looking for a light weight barbell set - one where the bar weighs less than 10 pounds, like they use in the gym for the Body Pump classes. No luck. Their lightest bar was close to fifteen pounds and had really tight clamps to hold the weights on. I found a couple of workout shirts on sale, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time... From there, we drove to Downtown Disney, a collection of shops, most of which are Disney merchandise related. I usually like strolling around specific stores, but this day was a madhouse! The stores were elbow to elbow people with a gazillion strollers, wheelchairs, and personal people movers thrown in so that it really wasn't very much fun. Not only were the tourists there in force, but there were a lot of locals there, too, doing their Christmas shopping. The checkout line for the main Disney store took over 45 minutes for us. Carl observed that they needed to move some of the wandering people (who were handing out coupons) to the checkout desks. It would have gone faster if there had been two people at each checkout counter - one ringing up the sale and another wrapping the fragile stuff and bagging it. Instead, there was only one person at the counter doing everything. And the one at our counter was moving in slow motion..... When we stopped in the House at Pooh Corner store, Carl took a seat in the middle of a display of Winnie the Poohs. I just had to take his picture (left above). Then I had him move over in front of the Tiggers.... We had lunch at Captain Jack’s at the wharf there. It was the only one without a mile long line outside... Small selection and overpriced. We split a tuna salad sandwich with cups of clam chowder. Found out that the cup was the only size soup they had, yet the price for the “bowl” of soup was what one would expect a bowl of soup to cost, not a cup of soup... Oh, well. ‘Tis Disney.... I hit the rest of my Downtown Disney stores after lunch and they were messes, also. The Christmas shop was so full that you couldn’t even turn around! I did find an ornament that I really liked, but wasn’t sure I liked it enough to stand in line for. So, after we had moved on, Carl offered to stand in line while I went back and got it. He hadn’t moved very far by the time I got back. And this checkout counter was being manned efficiently - two registers, two sales clerks, and one person wrapping stuff for the other two. The line moved as well as it could have under the circumstances. We should have known the stores would be crowded. We had arrived by 10:30 and most of the main parking lot was already full. We finally left and, enjoying the quiet of the car, drove over to another shopping center. This one was near the outlet malls, but is a new one that we had never been to before. The main pull here was Shepler’s. I get my jeans from them online and I wanted to look around. Carl was the only one to buy anything here, however. He picked up two more pairs of jeans - they carry his favorites, also. We walked around the mall for a while, looking into stores that caught our eye, until Kelly got off work for the day. She called and then drove over to meet us. We stopped in the Cricketer Arms for draft beers (they carry Bottingers!!!) and some nice conversation. After a while, we got up and drove over to the nearby Sweet Tomatoes for dinner. Wish we had one closer to where we live.... Then Kelly went home to finish up some Titanic work and we returned to the motel for an early evening. Next...