We just got home from WDW [Archive] - Baby Bargains & Baby 411 Community

AngelaS

02-14-2011, 10:01 AM

Okay, you asked for it. Three pages.... LOL GS is my dh, A is my 13 yo, G is 8 and M is 6. :)

Disney 2011
I started planning our trip in December and GSand I decided not to tell the girls we were going. Since we were slated to go over my birthday, I’d spent some time hyping my birthday to the girls. We always have cake for breakfast, go out for supper and generally try to do something kind of fun for that day, so for weeks the girls had been talking about what we should do for my birthday. They had no idea what we had in store for them!

I did some special sewing for the trip—making each of the little ones Mickey head sundresses as well as Minnie-ish skirts w/Mickey head tees. They saw me sewing but never realized what the outfits were for. It was a miracle that we never caught as we planned our trip—since we homeschool, the girls are ALWAYS with me.

And then, our flights out on Thursday cancelled due to the 23 inches of snow we got on Wednesday. Aargh! I had to wait an extra day. Finally, on Friday morning, at 3:30 am, we woke the girls and I excitedly reminded them it was my birthday and we were going to DISNEYWORLD. The video is pretty anticlimactic. My children are not easily excited at 3:30 am. Darn.

We wound up in Baltimore for an extra 3 hours due to a mechanical problem and then finally got to Orlando around 3:30 instead of noon. We had 5:15 reservations at the Polynesian Luau so we were cutting it really close. We wound up taking the bus from the airport straight to the Poly and taking our carry on luggage with us. We checked it with the valet and hurried to dinner.
Dinner was okay. We’d been rushing all day and it didn’t feel relaxing since we knew we still had to get to our hotel, get checked in and all that. After the luau, we took the monorail to Magic Kingdom and then hopped on a bus to Pop Century. Whew!

We’d requested adjoining rooms. As I expected, when we went to check in we learned that our two rooms were in two different buildings. But our cast member talked to a manager and within 5 minutes we had adjoining rooms in the 60s building which was great. We weren’t facing the pool so it was mostly quiet and it was close to the main building and the busses. Having two rooms rocked since we definitely would’ve been overcrowded w/all five of us in a dinky room. The rooms were decent but I really hate full sized beds. Sorry, we need more space than that, Disney! LOL

On Saturday we headed to Magic Kingdom. We got there for rope drop and then walked down Main Street being greeted by all the cast members. My 6 year old just looked around at everything and said, “Wow….” over and over. Aaah, the magic! We headed back to Dumbo and had to wait about 20 minutes. We rode the carousel and saw Mary Poppins too. We also got right on the Peter Pan ride and Small World. We all rode Thunder Mountain and it quickly became M’s favorite ride. We rode it twice since there was no wait. We had lunch at Liberty Town Square Tavern. It was ‘eh.’ In the afternoon it sprinkled on us and we rode the Buzz Lightyear Ride, went to the Laugh Floor (pretty good) and saw the Stitch show (This freaked my kids out!).

Saturday night’s dinner was at the Cape May (at the Beach Club) for their seafood buffet. This was hands down everyone’s favorite meal! My girls ate gobs of clams, crabs, coconut shrimp and seafood tortellini. And the desserts…ooh boy. Yummy! We went back to MK to see Wishes and stood near Tomorrowland so we could see Tinkerbell land. Very cool!

Sunday we got to rope drop at Animal Kingdom. We hopped on the Safari first thing and all the girls loved it. We also did Everest and all the girls hated it. LOL From there we saw Nemo (FABULOUS show! Dori is SO well done that she totally makes the show). We also saw the Bugs show and my kids didn’t really like it. The Lion King show was also good. Lunch was at the Flame Tree BBQ and it was pretty good. The ribs were yummy and so was my turkey sandwich. Since I’d been told to do the safari twice, we did it again and did see a few different animals. Sunday was a drizzly day and rather chilly so we left in the late afternoon and went back to the hotel. The girls swam, we got dinner from the hotel and relaxed in the room to watch the Super Bowl. I fell asleep at half time. Considering that I live in WI and the Packers won...that was kind of an oops. ROTFL

Monday morning we went back to Magic Kingdom since we’d done very little of Tomorrowland and Playhouse Disney. We went right to Space Mountain (no wait, but darker than I remembered!) and the Astro Orbiter and the Speedway. We did the Speedway twice because the girls loved it and again, there was NO line. The girls enjoyed the teacups, the Barnstormer ride, really wanted to play on Donald’s sprinkler boat but it was chillly and I said no, so we caught the train to go back to the front of the park. We had lunch at Tony’s (yummy!) and then GS took the kids to Thunder Mountain why I went back to the Tavern to see if they’d found GS’s missing credit card. We never found it. We then wandered a bit to find a place for the parade. We wound up waiting quite a while for the parade but had a good spot and stayed to see Aaron Rodgers from the Packers in his special parade.

Monday night we went to Boma for an early dinner. We went to Epcot after that and it started to pour down rain on us. We decided to stick it out and went to buy sweatshirts for the little two since they were freezing. The crowds thinned dramatically due to the rain and we were able to walk right on to Test Track twice. We all loved it. We then walked around the countries and stayed for Illuminations.
Tuesday morning we went back to Epcot and went straight to Soarin’ since we knew it’d be busy. There was a 20 minute wait and we all enjoyed it. GS wanted to do Mission Space so we trucked over there and walked right on. GS LOVED the ride and the rest of us hated it. I spent the rest of the day feeling slightly nauseous. :P We then went back over to the Seas and rode the Nemo ride and looked around at the aquariums. Next we walked to the back of the park to find breakfast, but since it was a bit before 11, we had to wait for the countries to open and had pastries from one of the kiosks. G got to countdown from 10 for the guy opening the rope to let us into the countries and we boogied over to Japan for the girls to Pick a Pearl. They LOVED that and I think it was one of their favorite things. The funny thing was---all three managed to pick a silver pearl which are supposedly the rarest of pearls. Hmm… We went to the Tangerine Café and had gyro type things while we waited for the pearls to be put in their settings.

We headed back to our hotel to meet up with our Florida friends and then spent the afternoon lounging by the pool and being a bit chilled. We took the bus to Downtown Disney and had dinner at the Rainforest Café. We had truly dreadful service, the food was rather lousy and I’m pretty sure I never need to go back to another RC. Blech. The girls LOVED the candy store at DD and my friend spoiled them all by buying each of them their own bag of candy. My three kids and her 4 all on a lot of sugar= fun times.

Wednesday we went to Hollywood Studios. We headed straight for Star Tours (which is closed) but that’s where you sign up for the Jedi Academy. We had to wait probably 30 minutes to sign up but we got both little girls into the 11:45 show. From there we headed over to Toy Story Mania and we all LOVED it. We had to wait probably a good 30 minutes there as well, but it was worth it. That was such a fun ride! The girls loved the Jedi training and being on stage but were disappointed in their wimpy light sabers. LOL

We had lunch at the 50s diner and had to wait again. They tell you that you can wait outside, but we didn’t hear them call our name so we waited 45 minutes and then checked to see how much longer and found out we’d missed being called. We enjoyed this restaurant, but the food wasn’t stellar- mostly because my chicken sandwich came without the lettuce and tomato. The girls worried about getting caught w/their elbows on the table and had fun bantering w/the waiter. He made them carry their own dishes to the kitchen which they all thought was a hoot.

After lunch we took in the backlot tour, the Indiana Jones show and the Honey I Shrunk the Kids playground. The playground was PACKED. Since our kids are bigger and I knew there was only one exit, GS and I parked ourselves near the exit and just let them go. They loved it. We watched Beauty and the Beast (always one of my favorites!) and did Toy Story Mania again (someone had given us fastpasses for it while I was milling around in the playground). We stayed for the fireworks and all decided that this is our least favorite fireworks show—it’s rather dark and kind of scary for little ones. Also, there were some tour groups in the amphitheater who spent most of the 90 minutes we waited chanting and being obnoxious. Oy.

Thursday we headed back to Hollywood Studios and headed straight for the Rocking Roller Coaster. After riding Everest in AK, the kids were no longer trusting when we said it wasn’t as bad as Everest so no one was sure they wanted to ride besides GS. The ride was temporarily down and we got fastpasses for later. We went to Toy Story Mania and rode that which we all loved. We also walked thru the Walt Disney Dream but didn’t stay for the show. We went back over to Rockin’ Roller coaster and GS rode with M(age 6, aka 'my baby'. LOL). She loved it. So she, GS, G and I rode (A waited in the gift shop). G loved it. She rode it again with GS. By the time the day was over, the little two had each ridden 3 times. LOL We also rode the Great Movie Ride (which was a bit scary for the little ones), had lunch in the Sci Fi Diner (where you get to sit in cars and pretend you’re in a drive-in. The girls liked it, but during lunch, on the big screen were 50s horror movie clips w/monsters and they didn’t love those). GS said this place had the best burger he’d had all week. We also saw the Stunt Spectacular which was really cool (two cars accidently crashed).

By late afternoon we’d wrapped up that park so we headed to Magic Kingdom. We got right on the train, went to Thunder Mountain (which now felt insanely slow!), the Jungle Cruise, Small World and Dumbo. We then got Mickey ice cream bars and found a spot to watch Wishes.

Friday we flew home. :(

Some random thoughts—the food court in Pop Century is INSANE. It’s always super crowded and checking out takes f.o.r.e.v.e.r! We found that the people on the food plan really slow down the lines because they don’t put their meals together, don’t know what the food plan allows per meal and many didn’t speak English so they were dreadfully confused. They should really have separate check out lines for those using the food plan.

Speaking of the dining plan—we didn’t do it. Several days we had trail mix and granola bars for breakfast and we packed a lot of our own snacks. We ate at several expensive restaurants tho which probably made up for that. LOL Many of the meals we had were big enough to share so I don’t think paying for meals cost us any more than the food plan. I may sit down and do the math on that, but budgeted $1000 for food and I don’t think we went over that.