- Oct 24, 2000
- 17,254
- 44
- 91
My wife is a teacher so our timeframe for going on trips with the kids is fairly limited (she can't just take off of work, or even extend existing holidays, without repercussions). It's either a major holiday or the summer months where we can take trips, both present their own challenges. With my dad's recent passing, my mom wanted to go to Disney with her grandkids as she hadn't been there in over 20 years. So we planned a whirlwind trip to Disney World flying out late Tuesday the 22nd (after school let out), and returning late Sunday the 27th.
We flew JetBlue which is generally my airline of choice, but early Tuesday we were already getting messages about a delay. Those messages implied that perhaps they'd be able to resolve the problems and to still get to the airport for our regular time. So we did, and of course the delay remained. Instead of arriving in Orlando at midnight, we arrived at 2am. With Disney's cutbacks, they no longer offer transportation from the airport so we arranged for a shuttle through the replacement MEARS. Got our luggage, followed their instructions on where to go after landing and the counter for MEARS was completely empty. No signs, no people. Just silence. After placing an enraged, exhausted call to their support line, we learned that the counter closes at 1am and we needed to go to another terminal... which just so happened to be where the Disney offering used to be.
Finally got to the resort (Port Orleans French Quarter) and because the day rolled over, the security guard couldn't find us as checking in that day but let us through anyway. The Disney app wasn't showing a room number so we had to go to the front desk instead of just to the room and crashing but the employee sped us through and was as helpful as she could be. Eventually crashed at around 5am with my 11 year old son, completely overtired, waking up ever hour to talk to me until about 10 when we gathered and hit Animal Kingdom. Thankfully I had planned to make the first day the "least interesting" park so I wasn't too put out at my exhaustion.
My son has a disability which granted us access to use their DAS pass system, pre-booking certain rides and requesting access to others. Effectively getting Genie+ without needing to pay for it, and it came in extremely handy. I'm really not sure I'd do Disney World without some kind of access to their lightning lanes. I can't imagine waiting in a line for 2 hours, specially with kids... though there were plenty of people there to do just that.
Animal Kingdom was pretty great and I was able to get Dole Whip with rum. Avatar Flight of Passage is still the best ride throughout all the parks. Their safari is cool and has a bunch of animals. I remember liking Dinosaur way more... it was too dark and too violent in the rover. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Thanksgiving day we hit up Hollywood Studios. We'd never been to Galaxy's Edge before and I was geeking out a little too hard. We were able to get reservations for Light Saber building and Droid Building. My younger kids and mom did the droid building and had a bunch of fun. My oldest and I did the lightsaber building which was a great experience. All of it was very expensive... We rode Rise of the Resistance, Smuggler's Run, Star Tours. Rise of the Resistance gave Flight of Passage a run for its money and was really cool.
Outside of the Star Wars stuff, we rode the new Mickey and Minnie Runaway Railway which I liked way more than I expected. They were able to apply cartoon-like animation to all the real-world scenery and characters through what appeared to be lighting effects. Really neat. Muppetvision 3D hasn't changed in seemingly decades. We skipped the show-based things, Rock n' Roller Coaster, and Tower of Terror, but went on Slinky Dog Dash and Toy Story Mania. Both were fun. Back at the hotel we found that one of their options was a turkey dinner, so we had a late, relatively traditional thanksgiving dinner that was pretty good.
Black Friday was EPCOT and intended to be another "slower" day. I woke up before 7am to attempt to get into the Virtual Queue for Cosmic Rewind and as soon as 7am hit, there were no slots available anymore. Looking to purchase individual lightning lane entries showed the earliest was at 8pm which probably wouldn't fly with my family, so I decided to try again at their 1pm virtual queue time. We had some pre-reservations for later in the afternoon, so hit up the Figment ride (also hasn't been updated in forever) then had a time slot for Ratatouille so we made our way though the worlds doing their Cookie Tour (most of the cookies were not great).
Watching the app and wait times throughout the day showed basically all the rides shutting down at some point. We had a LL reservation for Test Track that we couldn't use because it was dead (when we went back to use it, the LL for that ride was probably around a 40 minute wait which we opted out of). Frozen was down for a lot of the day (we didn't ride it). I'm not sure who would be fulfilled if they waited the THREE HOURS for standby Ratatouille. It was a fun ride, but even the 40ish minutes we waited in the LL was too long in my opinion. While in line, the 1pm Virtual Queue opened and closed immediately. Once again we were unable to join it and my disappointment was extremely high. All the other things we did at EPCOT were things we did before. Nemo, Soarin', Spaceship Earth. EPCOT in general was a gigantic disappointment. They're working on some updates in the middle of everything, but unless you like sampling lots of different food items, it's really hard to recommend going there right now.
We wrapped up the trip on Saturday with Magic Kingdom. There was literally nothing new since the last time we went, so we just hit what we could when we could (Peter Pan, Small World, Snow White, Winnie the Pooh, Space Mountain, Buzz's shooting game, Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean). Got more dole whip, had a character dinner at Crystal Palace (my mom is a huge Winnie the pooh fan and loved it), watched the fireworks, shopped during a sea of people exiting the park. While this park hasn't changed, it's comfortable, we all felt less tired despite walking more, and I still think it is my favorite park despite not having any "wow" rides. Maybe I'm a fan of the classics.
Return flight was also delayed, but only after we were already on-board. There was some kind of weather system in DC that screwed things up. Got in an hour+ after we were scheduled to be but made it hope and crashed only to start the work and school week soon after the next day.
Overall it was a pretty good trip! The kids had fun and were surprised (we didn't tell them before getting in the car) and there were only a couple meltdowns. The weather wasn't oppressive like it would have been in summer; we didn't get any rain. My watch told me we walked around 40 miles throughout the parks. Most importantly, I think my mom highly enjoyed herself and the time she spent with her grandkids. We all agreed that my dad would have hated being there.
We flew JetBlue which is generally my airline of choice, but early Tuesday we were already getting messages about a delay. Those messages implied that perhaps they'd be able to resolve the problems and to still get to the airport for our regular time. So we did, and of course the delay remained. Instead of arriving in Orlando at midnight, we arrived at 2am. With Disney's cutbacks, they no longer offer transportation from the airport so we arranged for a shuttle through the replacement MEARS. Got our luggage, followed their instructions on where to go after landing and the counter for MEARS was completely empty. No signs, no people. Just silence. After placing an enraged, exhausted call to their support line, we learned that the counter closes at 1am and we needed to go to another terminal... which just so happened to be where the Disney offering used to be.
Finally got to the resort (Port Orleans French Quarter) and because the day rolled over, the security guard couldn't find us as checking in that day but let us through anyway. The Disney app wasn't showing a room number so we had to go to the front desk instead of just to the room and crashing but the employee sped us through and was as helpful as she could be. Eventually crashed at around 5am with my 11 year old son, completely overtired, waking up ever hour to talk to me until about 10 when we gathered and hit Animal Kingdom. Thankfully I had planned to make the first day the "least interesting" park so I wasn't too put out at my exhaustion.
My son has a disability which granted us access to use their DAS pass system, pre-booking certain rides and requesting access to others. Effectively getting Genie+ without needing to pay for it, and it came in extremely handy. I'm really not sure I'd do Disney World without some kind of access to their lightning lanes. I can't imagine waiting in a line for 2 hours, specially with kids... though there were plenty of people there to do just that.
Animal Kingdom was pretty great and I was able to get Dole Whip with rum. Avatar Flight of Passage is still the best ride throughout all the parks. Their safari is cool and has a bunch of animals. I remember liking Dinosaur way more... it was too dark and too violent in the rover. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Thanksgiving day we hit up Hollywood Studios. We'd never been to Galaxy's Edge before and I was geeking out a little too hard. We were able to get reservations for Light Saber building and Droid Building. My younger kids and mom did the droid building and had a bunch of fun. My oldest and I did the lightsaber building which was a great experience. All of it was very expensive... We rode Rise of the Resistance, Smuggler's Run, Star Tours. Rise of the Resistance gave Flight of Passage a run for its money and was really cool.
Outside of the Star Wars stuff, we rode the new Mickey and Minnie Runaway Railway which I liked way more than I expected. They were able to apply cartoon-like animation to all the real-world scenery and characters through what appeared to be lighting effects. Really neat. Muppetvision 3D hasn't changed in seemingly decades. We skipped the show-based things, Rock n' Roller Coaster, and Tower of Terror, but went on Slinky Dog Dash and Toy Story Mania. Both were fun. Back at the hotel we found that one of their options was a turkey dinner, so we had a late, relatively traditional thanksgiving dinner that was pretty good.
Black Friday was EPCOT and intended to be another "slower" day. I woke up before 7am to attempt to get into the Virtual Queue for Cosmic Rewind and as soon as 7am hit, there were no slots available anymore. Looking to purchase individual lightning lane entries showed the earliest was at 8pm which probably wouldn't fly with my family, so I decided to try again at their 1pm virtual queue time. We had some pre-reservations for later in the afternoon, so hit up the Figment ride (also hasn't been updated in forever) then had a time slot for Ratatouille so we made our way though the worlds doing their Cookie Tour (most of the cookies were not great).
Watching the app and wait times throughout the day showed basically all the rides shutting down at some point. We had a LL reservation for Test Track that we couldn't use because it was dead (when we went back to use it, the LL for that ride was probably around a 40 minute wait which we opted out of). Frozen was down for a lot of the day (we didn't ride it). I'm not sure who would be fulfilled if they waited the THREE HOURS for standby Ratatouille. It was a fun ride, but even the 40ish minutes we waited in the LL was too long in my opinion. While in line, the 1pm Virtual Queue opened and closed immediately. Once again we were unable to join it and my disappointment was extremely high. All the other things we did at EPCOT were things we did before. Nemo, Soarin', Spaceship Earth. EPCOT in general was a gigantic disappointment. They're working on some updates in the middle of everything, but unless you like sampling lots of different food items, it's really hard to recommend going there right now.
We wrapped up the trip on Saturday with Magic Kingdom. There was literally nothing new since the last time we went, so we just hit what we could when we could (Peter Pan, Small World, Snow White, Winnie the Pooh, Space Mountain, Buzz's shooting game, Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean). Got more dole whip, had a character dinner at Crystal Palace (my mom is a huge Winnie the pooh fan and loved it), watched the fireworks, shopped during a sea of people exiting the park. While this park hasn't changed, it's comfortable, we all felt less tired despite walking more, and I still think it is my favorite park despite not having any "wow" rides. Maybe I'm a fan of the classics.
Return flight was also delayed, but only after we were already on-board. There was some kind of weather system in DC that screwed things up. Got in an hour+ after we were scheduled to be but made it hope and crashed only to start the work and school week soon after the next day.
Overall it was a pretty good trip! The kids had fun and were surprised (we didn't tell them before getting in the car) and there were only a couple meltdowns. The weather wasn't oppressive like it would have been in summer; we didn't get any rain. My watch told me we walked around 40 miles throughout the parks. Most importantly, I think my mom highly enjoyed herself and the time she spent with her grandkids. We all agreed that my dad would have hated being there.
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