On a random Tuesday night, Alana was allowed to pick any one place to have dinner. We drove down International Drive and Alana selected Mango’s Tropical Café, a new restaurant that recently opened to major fanfare. Mango’s is extremely popular down in Miami and is currently building buzz in Orlando, so we took a chance and stopped for dinner without any clue what to expect. And we were blown away by what we found.

After valeting the car, Alana stopped to meet some performer friends at a photo-op on the way into the restaurant. Floor seating requires reservations, but the manager was kind enough to invite us to a table that hadn’t been reserved.

The venue is incredible. There’s a large stage with live music and a rotation of singing, dancing and variety acts – all with Central and South American flair. The outfits are extravagant and beautiful. The dances are so impressive to see live. And the best part is that the show continues throughout the evening so you’re free to join or leave at any time. We intended to only visit for a bit but ended up staying for hours.

Occasionally, performers work their way through the crowd and greet guests while they continue to perform. Alana seized every opportunity to say Hi to friends as they passed by.

We even recognized a few familiar faces from our visits to the theme parks!

Overall, Mango’s is beyond impressive and we highly recommend to everyone we know. It’s become a monthly tradition for us to hit up the shows and we’ll be back again soon.

Alana’s favorite event of the entire year is Mardi Gras at Universal Orlando.  Besides Macy’s Parade, there’s really no other event like it during the year.  The streets are lined with performers doing meet-and-greets for hours.  Beyond pictures, the performers get park guests to dance, tell jokes and play games.  Alana loves spending hours going up and down the street visiting with all the different performers – easily more than 30 in any given night.  And by visiting week after week, Alana gets to see all of her Mardi Gras friends before they dance down the streets in the nightly Mardi Gras parade.

All of Alana’s (or, in this case, Spider-Alana’s) Mardi Gras friends are so sweet to always stop to take great photos with her.

Matching Green Bows with this Musician!

Alana impressing all the Italian guys with her peacock dress.

Walking down the street with two of her favorite performers.

Big kisses from Alana’s Mardi Gras friends!

Apparently Minions have the power to shatter slap-bracelet swords!

This friend was so happy to see Alana in her Minion dress.

Alana was especially happy to wear her peacock dress and meet this performer wearing her peacock outfit.  Twins!

We’ve always had a lot of fun during our visits to Nick Hotel.  The hotel was filled with fun activities and unique characters that you couldn’t meet other places in Central Florida.  Unfortunately the hotel never catered to locals, requiring an overnight stay to partake in the on-site activities, so our visits were few and far between.  The hotel recently announced daily passes, which worked perfect for us as locals.

Nickelodeon Hotel recently celebrated their tenth birthday, but unfortunately it appears this will be their last.  The hotel recently announced they would be converting to a Holiday Inn and removing all characters from the property.  This is a huge bummer because all these unique characters would be going away.

So we took one last opportunity to visit Nick Hotel and meet as many characters as we could.

Before meeting characters, Alana and Ella shared a slime shake.  It was really great!

Our first meet was with Marshall and Chase from Paw Patrol.

Big kisses for Chase!

Alana has met SpongeBob SquarePants many times at Universal Orlando, but it was nice to find him at Nick Hotel.  Alana even brought her SpongeBob outfit for the day.

One of the cool perks at Nick Hotel is a great pool with a daily sliming.  A giant bucket of slime is filled and dumped on all the kids waiting at the bottom.  Alana and Ella kept their distance so they stayed dry.

Another great perk of the resort is nearly-daily productions of Double Dare.  The show chooses random families from the resort to participate in trivia and challenges to win big prizes.

Alana was chosen to participate in the audience challenge!

We started wrapping up the day by meeting her friend from Team Umizoomi.

And finished our day with our main objective, a meet with Sandy Cheeks from SpongeBob SquarePants.  Alana even had the opportunity to practice her ninja skills.  Nick Hotel is also home to Mrs Puff and Mr Krab, but unfortunately these characters were retired before Alana had the opportunity to meet them.  But seeing Sandy was a real treat.

Overall we had a great experience this day.  We’ll miss the resort and wish we had the opportunity to have visited more in the past.  If you are interested in visiting the resort before it closes in mid-April, be sure to visit NickHotel.com.

Club Villain is a limited-time event at Hollywood Studios that combines villains with live entertainment.  It was a perfect night that we recommend to everyone interested in this type of event.  The event is held in a sound stage behind Rock’n Roller Coaster.    Dr Facilier is the host of the event and brings together Cruella De Vil, the Evil Queen, Maleficent and the Queen of Hearts to perform songs and meet with guests.  Dinner is also included in the event, with most of the food based on Dr Facilier and desserts based on his four villain friends.

Dr Facilier’s voodoo charms adorned the walls.  They were animated and sang along with some of the songs.

Dr Facilier also brought two dancing girls with him.  Alana loved hopping in and dancing with them.

After dinner, the meet and greets began.  Of course Alana brought a costume change for each villain.  She was especially excited to meet the Queen of Hearts because she dressed like her for Halloween last year.  Also, this is the first time we are aware of the Queen of Hearts appearing as a face character.

Alana absolutely adored Cruella De Vil and would have spent the entire evening with her if allowed.

Maleficent was a little scary, but told Alana that she could take a picture because she knew that Alana wasn’t the real Princess Aurora.

The Evil Queen was taken aback by Snow White’s beauty.  Alana also pointed out that we forgot to bring her red apple for the event.  Apparently five costume changes weren’t enough.

Speaking of apples, this amazing disco ball floated above the middle of the dance floor.

Dr Facilier didn’t offer formal meet and greets.  He offered to take a picture with Alana, but she was a little afraid of him – which is ironic because she loved him at home and has met him several times before.  He organized a dance party and waved at Alana as he danced by.

At the end of the night, Alana and all of her new friends danced for the rest of the event.

Overall this event was so much more than we expected when we originally bought tickets.  There are limited scheduled dates and the show has been extended so definitely try to get tickets if there are any left.

When Alana turned three, we drove to Universal so she could purchase her very first Annual Pass.  So it felt appropriate to do the same on her fourth birthday.  Once renewed, Alana had free reign to choose anything she’d like in the entire park.  And of course she chose her two favorites – Straight Outta Food Truck and the Superstar Dance Parties.

Dora is so excited that Alana is now four years old!

Patch and Bit from the movie Hop gave Alana extra snuggles on her birthday!

All of Alana’s fish friends visited her for her birthday.  It’s the first time all four took a picture with her at the same time.

She finished the afternoon with her Minion recruit friends.  All in all, a really fun day doing Alana’s favorite things at Universal.

When Alana and I started hunting characters back in early 2014, we would read websites and see pictures of characters that we never imagined we would actually find in the parks.  The top of our Wish List had to be Scuba Mickey.

It seemed like the perfect storm of impossibility.  He has only been seen in the rarest of occassions, usually disappearing for a year at a time.  All water conditions need to be right for Mickey to enter the water.  Once he’s there, he can only stay underwater for a limited time.  And once he appears, a swarm of people will fill the glass, making it impossible to get the perfect picture.  All these things made the task seem impossible.

After a sighting last week and another this week, Alana and I decided to check out the saltwater tank at Nemo & Friends.  After a 45 minute wait, it suddenly happened.  We saw yellow legs lowering into the water, and before I could say anything, a child screamed “It’s Mickey Mouse!” and the glass flooded with people.  Mickey swam by the last for two minutes before heading over to the windows at Coral Reef Restaurant.  Eventually Mickey came back for a few minutes of pictures and underwater backflips before heading back to the surface.

Huge thanks to Molly for entertaining Alana and holding her in these pictures.  And thanks to Willy The Artist for taking much better photos than I could.  We’ve met hundreds of characters but this has to be the best meet ever, right?

Mar 2015:  Got extremely lucky when we found Scuba Mickey swimming in the tank outside Nemo at Epcot.
Photo Credit:  www.instagram.com/willytheartist

Mar 2015:  Another great shot with Scuba Mickey.
Photo Credit:  www.instagram.com/willytheartist