This trip report was some years in the making. The first thing that may have slowed me down in writing it was that upon returning from this trip in 2000 within a few day my first wife let me know that she was leaving (now that it's far enough in the past that I can joke about it I usually mention at this point that Our marriage must not have been y2k compliant), but additionally there were other reasons. I took a lot more photos on this trip on previous trips, and I had not yet discovered the convenience of having photos put onto CD at the same time you had the film developed, so it would have been a big job to scan all those photos, in 2007 I realized that if I checked around I might be able to find a photo lab somewhere that had some kind of "prints scanner" that would scan large batches of prints, checking with the closest walgreens to my house I found that although they did not have such a service at that store some other locations did, and so I took my enormous stack of prints from this trip in to them. Another bit of labor in making trip reports is re-sizing photos down from the original sizes to two other sizes one for including on the individual pages and one for linking to those as "larger size" that are still smaller than the originals, in 2007 I had slowly started to use Flickr on occasion in addition to my web site as so often when I get back from a trip it is months or years before I post the photos to my own site well after a while of testing this out and seeing just HOW convenient flickr is (and for such a reasonable per year cost) I decided that instead of resizing all these photos myself I'd use the flickr links in the trip report and see if this is the way to go, this will also give folks who click on the photos to view the larger version more choices in photo sizes (all the way up to original).
Very shortly after discovering the world of Disney parks fandom on the internet I discovered #RADP-friends (more about just what that is at http://www.travelswithtigger.com/wdwig/irc.htm) one of the friends I made through that group is Peter "filminfo" Schouten http://www.geocities.com/filminfo/ . When it finally came time for him to visit the US parks in 2000 I of course wanted to meet my friend by June of 1999 planning for the trip had begun and I was able to commit to joining him for the trip, all these years later it's actually hard for me to recall all these details but luckily in addition to my own memories of the trip I have Peters trip report! http://www.geocities.com/filminfo/fab2k.html Very shortly into the planning Peter settled on Fab2K as a nice short nickname for the trip, the irc chat we use is big on abbreviations and this seemed like a nice fun one, of course the phrase y2k was in heavy use at the time as the fears that many computer programs might not be ready to handle 4 digit year dates, EGAD! As we all know now though since so much effort went into correcting those problems in those last few years of the 1990's things mostly came out alright in the end. Anyhow the fab2k trip name plays off of that and I seem to remember fab being used a fair bit around that time though the clearest example of it I can come up with now was that there was a member of the Disney fan community at that time who referred to her self as the Fabulous Disney Babe or Fab for short and she used it a lot, actually this woman is now probably known to more of the newer Disney fans on the net simply as Jim Hills Ex-wife, but when I first heard of her it was actually some years before I heard of Jim, she was the much more prominent one in the fan community back then.
| Peter Adds... a simpler explanation Fab2k was a take-off of Feb. 2000 going to be Fabulous. |