Ten night/ 11 day mom-daughter trip report! May 10-20, 2015

Hi everyone! My mom and I recently returned from a ten night/ 11 day trip to Disney World, with one day at Universal Studios thrown in! This is my first ever trip report, but I really enjoyed reading others' trip reports on this forum while planning for our own trip, and hope that others will enjoy reading mine as well! My name is Ari and I am 23 years old, and my mom, Dev, just turned 60! We planned this special mom-daughter trip to celebrate my mom's 60th birthday and my recent college graduation, and had an absolute blast. We stayed at a Little Mermaid room at the Disney's Art of Animation, and had the following basic itinerary:
Day 1: Arrival, Magic Kingdom, California Grill dinner
Day 2: Full day at Animal Kingdom park (Tusker House lunch), resort night
Day 3: Full day at Epcot (morning EMH), Coral Reef lunch
Day 4: Full day at Hollywood Studios (morning EMH), Mama Melrose Fantasmic Lunch package, Sci-Fi dinner
Day 5: Fully day Magic Kingdom (morning EMH), Be Our Guest lunch, Wishes Dessert Party
Day 6: Blizzard Beach, Whispering Canyon dinner, Magic Kingdom evening
Day 7: sleep in, Sanaa lunch, Epcot Day 2 (Teppan Edo dinner), explore the boardwalk
Day 8: Universal Studios and IoA
Day 9: Typhoon Lagoon, Ohana dinner, electric light parade
Day 10: Magic Kingdom Day 2, afternoon tea at the Garden View Tea Room
Day 11: Half day at Hollywood Studios (morning EMH), 50's Prime Time Cafe lunch, departure day

I plan to provide detailed accounts of each day of our trip, and am determined to finish the trip report! I am happy to answer any questions that you all might have, and will also try to provide lots of food pictures along the way

Sounds like a wonderful trip! Subbing in

Thanks for subbing in LashesandDashes! I look forward to recounting my trip to you and any others who choose to follow along Things have been crazy this last week as I have been preparing to go on a two-week long trip to Israel (I leave tomorrow!!) but I will have of time when I return to work on my trip report!

Awesome itinerary....can't wait to read more!

Hi everyone,
I have finally returned from Israel and (mostly) recovered from my jetlag, so I am excited to continue sharing my trip report with you all! After so much planning and anticipation, it is sad to think that our trip is already over! However, hopefully writing this trip report will help to preserve all of our incredible memories, and will also build excitement for those of you who are lucky enough to be leaving for WDW soon
When we arrived at Logan, we saw the very biggest line to check bags for Jetblue that I have ever seen on any airline!! Thankfully, we had arrived to the airport almost 2.5 hours early, made it through this line in about 40 minutes, and breezed through security. Multiple gate changes later (ugh), we flew out of Logan at around 8:45 AM, and arrived in Orlando just after 11:30 AM! We excitedly stumbled off the plane... so excitedly in fact that we got lost trying to find the airport tram (but only for a few minutes )! After all, it had been five years since our last Disney World trip. Since our arrival day (May 10th) was Mother's Day, my mom was handed a pink flower just before we walked into the Magical Express area!
I know that the magicbands have been quite controversial among Disney visitors, but I will start by saying that we LOVED the magicbands. Upon arriving to the Magical Express area, we quickly scanned one of our bands and were on a bus within 10 minutes (more on the bands later). Fortunately, Art of Animation was the first Magical Express stop, and we were pulling into the Art of Animation at exactly 12:36 PM, according to my iPhone (approximately one hour after landing in Orlando)! We have stayed at the All Star Music resorts in the past, and hands down, much preferred AoA. The theming, pools, and food were all incredible! We had the regular dining plan for this trip, so dining was an important aspect of the vacation, and I tried to take a lot of food pics! My mom and I are both vegetarians, however, so sorry to disappoint all of you meat eaters!
Here is my mom in the AoA lobby with her flower shortly after arrival:

We had done online check-in 10 days prior, and opted to have our room number texted to us rather than doing a formal check-in when we arrived at the resort. Since we were both hungry, we headed right to the food court at this point, happy to skip the front desk! As I mentioned above, the food at the Landscape of Flavors was among the best of the Disney quick service locations that we have experienced. I ordered the caprese sandwich with housemade chips, while my mom opted to make make her own veggie burger. Both meals were very good, and are pictured below!

We finished up our sandwiches around 1:15, and started to explore the resort! As I mentioned, the theming of the resort was incredible. I particularly liked the cars section of the resort, even though this was only film represented at AoA that I had not seen before! As amazing as the resort was, this was a HOT today to be wandering around outside- about 94 degrees at this point- and we were ready for a swim. While exploring the cars section, I got a text from Disney telling us that our room was ready, and so we headed right over. We had requested to be in building 7 of the Little Mermaid section, as close as possible to the front desk, and with a view of the lagoon. Our requests were mostly granted, which was awesome! We were in room 7635 (2nd floor), which was fairly close to the LK section. It did not have the best view of the lagoon out the windows of the room, since our room was slanted away from the lagoon (toward the LK section), but had a very nice view from the outside walkway. We signed up for a Touring Plans subscription, and they faxed our room request to Disney about a week before our trip, which probably helped with our requests! While we were happy to not be in the furthest building in the LM section from the main lobby, the walk was not as bad as I was expecting based on other reports that I had read. I'm sure after a long day with little children, it would be a completely different scenario, but for my mom and I, the walk to the lobby never took more than 6-7 minutes. This seemed trivial to us after all the walking we were already doing on the trip, and did not strike as us being much further than some of the walks that we have had at the all star resorts.
After finding our room, we initially had a little trouble with trying to open the door with our magicbands, but were able to get in after a few attempts. The green light on the door didn't flash as clearly as I was expecting when the door was unlocked, and it was a little bit of an awkward angle to match up the mickey on the band to the door. However, I am still a huge magicband fan, as I mentioned before!
We both thought that the room was adorable when we got inside- not very large, but exactly what we had been expecting. Our bags had not been delivered to the rooms yet, so we quickly changed into our bathing suits and made our way around to each of the pools! I was surprised to find that we liked the LM and cars pools best- they were quieter, less crowded, and a little bit warmer, which made them more pleasant to swim in. Of course the Nemo pool was cool as well, but a bit too hyped up, in my opinion! I was surprised to find that the underwater music in the Nemo pool was completely random- I listened several times and could not find any sort of Disney theme to the music!

The music was still a very cool feature though, and I spent a while swimming underwater in the Nemo pool trying to figure out which songs were playing. After only a couple of minutes of going into the Cars pool, I was unfortunate enough to be stung by a yellow jacket! Thankfully, the lifeguard had some sting-stop gel that was incredible, and almost instantly made the pain go away! I highly recommend this if any of you ever get stung in a Disney pool as well.
A little after 3:00 PM, we decided to head back to the room, where we found all of our luggage waiting for us! We started to unpack, and changed into clothes that would be appropriate both at the MK and for our dinner at the California Grill.

This is me standing in front of the Ursula building right before we headed over to the bus stop:

We were at the bus stop stop around 4 PM, and waited just a few minutes before the next bus to MK pulled up! By 4:40, we were inside the MK, and by 4:50 PM, we were riding the Liberty Square riverboat It was only a crowd level of 4 that day at MK according to TP, but the most popular attractions still had 30 min.+ waits at this time in the afternoon, and it was still so hot outside! The breeze and shade on the riverboat provided such nice relief from the heat. We got off the boat around 5:00 PM, and by 5:03 were in line to ride the Pirates of the Caribbean! This was one of the first attractions that I wanted to do after we arrived, because I had heard so many reports of the ride breaking down frequently and being in horrible shape. I wanted to make sure that we got on it at least once during the course of our trip! However, the ride seemed perfectly fine to me when we rode it the 5-6 times that we did during the trip. Some of the effects that I was told would be broken (e.g., the fog screen effect) were fully functional, we never got stuck on the ride, and we never even noticed it being down when we were in the park (it probably was occasionally, but never when we were attempting to ride it). We rode standby this time on Pirates, and the wait was only about 15 minutes. We then headed over the jungle cruise, where we used our 5:10- 6:10 PM fp+! The standby wait was only about 25 minutes at this point, so it wasn't an enormous time savings, but was still quite pleasant to skip the hot cue and immediately enter the next boat! After JC, it was time for a delicious dole whip float, our favorite Disney snack

We still had a little time to kill before our 6:15 Splash Mountain fp+'s, so we decided to take a boat over to Tom Sawyer Island. A boat was already there waiting for us, and we enjoyed taking a nice stroll around the island/ over the draw bridges/ through the caves!

At about 6:30, we took a boat back to Frontierland, and rode Splash Mountain with fp+! FP+ again worked seamlessly with our magicbands, and we really enjoyed having our fastpasses pre-booked, rather than needing to backtrack to get them, and having an unknown amount of time between them when planning our days.

Splash Mountain is one of our very favorite Disney rides, and we went on it quite a few times this trip! We were off at 6:50 and still had some time before our 7:20 PM BTMR fp+. The next Country Bear Jamboree was just a couple minutes away, so we decided to pop in, even though we remembered it being very cheesy! While it is cheesy, we surprisingly both enjoyed it this time around, and decided that it's a cute show We rode BTMR with fp+ and then again in the standby line, since it was only about 20 minutes long. Man, that ride is so much better in the back car! We then hopped on the train and took it to the main street stop, where we got on the monorail to go to the Contemporary Resort. We arrived at about 8:30 PM for our 8:45 California Grill reservation, and were taken right up to the dining room area. We were happily surprised to be seated right on time, as I've heard reports of really late seating around the time of the fireworks! Unfortunately, we were both very disappointed by the rest of our meal. We found our waiter to be inattentive and to frequently try to hurry us along, and found the food to be mediocre compared to our last visit in 2010. In addition, the menu had just changed the day before, so the vegetarian option that I had planned to order was no longer available! The waiter said that I could order a vegetarian platter with four random dishes that the chef decided to whip together based on what they had in the kitchen (he could not be any more specific than this), and I decided to give this a try. This is what I was served:

The flatbread and salad were both quite good, but the other two dishes were mediocre (and kind of unidentifiable). The right bottom dish tasted like asparagus, zucchini, mushroom in a cream sauce, and the top right dish I can't even guess at! It looked like mashed potato but was extremely salty and had a very bizarre, thick texture (not like potato at all).

My mom got a tuna dish, but wasn't too impressed by it. She asked for it to be medium-rare, but said that it was extremely undercooked (almost raw). It wasn't bad, but wasn't great either, from what I gathered.
The creme brulee, however, was amazing! Yum...

My mom's came with a special birthday candle too

We ended our first day in Disney by watching Wishes! from the outside viewing area of the CG, which offered a very unique/ less crowded perspective of the fireworks, with the music piped in and everything. My fireworks pictures never come out well, but here is a mediocre picture of the MK from the viewing area
Stay tuned for our first full day at Disney: Animal Kingdom!

Welcome back from Israel! Loved the update! I'm sorry you had a less then best experience at Califorina Grill!

Thanks, LashesandDashes! We were definitely disappointed by the California Grill- it wasn't bad, it just paled in comparison to our last experience there!

I'm joining in! I look forward to the rest of your TR

Glad that you're interested in following, LanaBear-ox! Alright, back to the Animal Kingdom day trip report...
We woke up at 7:00 AM that morning and were at the AoA bus stop by 7:45 AM to get to the park early for rope drop! We were fortunate enough to catch a bus to AK less than 5 minutes later and arrived at the park right around 8:00 AM! We were almost the only ones on the entire bus. We found that a bus generally came for the parks about 10-15 minutes before the one-hour mark prior to park opening (e.g., about 1.25 hours before park opening), which was helpful to know. We arrived at the AK and were first in line at one of the turnstiles! While waiting in line, there was a very nice couple behind us who had a day pass to the park, and could not figure out how to link their tickets/ select their fp+ selections on the My Disney Experience app. I helped them do that, which was actually really fun, and passed the time before park opening! The turnstiles opened about 10 minutes before 9 AM, and people started making the mad dash towards Everest and KS. We headed towards Everest first, hoping to ride that a couple times before hitting Dinoland. We arrived at Everest at 8:55 AM after, what we liked to call, "walking excitedly," towards the ride. We were one of the first people there, and made it on the very first car, which was exciting! We were on and off the ride in 5 minutes, and were ready to go again. My mom was a little hesitant to go again, since she hates the backwards part of the ride, and says that it makes her sick! We both rode again though (it was equally awesome the second time), and had only about a five minute wait. We then headed over to the Primeval Whirl, and were there by 9:15 AM. While fun, we both found this ride to be unpleasantly jerky at times! We basically walked right on this ride with no wait, and were entering the Dinosaur ride at 9:23 AM. We had basically no wait on this ride either, and walked right into the pre-show. I personally love this ride, and really enjoy the theming of it. However, after riding Everest twice, PW, and Dinosaur, my mom was feeling very nauseous. People with motion sickness- beware of riding all of these jerky rides right in a row! We were off Dinosaur about ten minutes later, and took a couple minutes to sit down and breathe, since my mom really wasn't feeling well at this point. Kali River Rapids was up next on our itinerary though, which motivated my mom to get up and head over, since this is her favorite ride! We arrived at KRR at 9:43 AM, and there was only a 10-minute wait time posted at this point (so much less than some of the waits later in the day!!!) However, despite the very short line, we soon realized that the line was not moving at all, since the crew members were neither letting people off the ride or loading people onto the ride. While this is never a good sign at theme parks, thankfully it was only a short delay, and the line started moving about 5 minutes later. I decided not to wear my poncho on the ride even though you can get absolutely drenched, because the high for the day was supposed to be about 94 degrees! However, it did take my skirt quite a while to dry, since it was not as fast drying as I was expecting. This ride is fun, but not amazing in my opinion- it is very quick and mainly about getting drenched! We were off the ride and passing the monkey exhibit by 10:04 AM, where we saw some monkeys climbing around and swinging on ropes! We then headed over to the Africa section of the park, passing the Tam Tam drummers of Harambe on the way. My mom went right up to watch, but I stayed back and semi-hid, since I had read online that they select people from the crowd to come up and dance, and I did not want to be selected for this! We then continued over the Pangani Forest trail, arrive at 10:15 AM. I had read that this trail becomes very crowded later in the day, once KS is in full operation. However, it was still relatively empty and pleasant to walk through at this time in the morning. We got some great views of gorillas on this walk!

We took about half an hour to walk through the exhibit, and then headed over to Kilimanjaro Safaris for our 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM fp+ reservations at 10:47. We found that fp+ worked seamlessly on this (once again)- our mickeys immediately lit up green (so cool!) and we were on the next vehicle within five minutes, skipping what was already a 40-minute wait. We know that a lot of people prefer to do this first thing to see more animals earlier in the day, but it's hard for us to justify spending so much time on this attractions at rope drop when we could have done so many more attractions in Asia/ Dinoland during this time! In addition, we found that we still saw nearly all of the animals posted in our safari vehicle during our drive through, so mid-morning seems to be a good time to do this attraction as well. We had some amazing, really close-up encounters with elephants, zebras, and rhinos on this safari ride! We returned back from our safari trip at about 11:10 AM, and walked over to the Tusker House for our 11:25 AM lunch reservation! We checked-in at about 11:15 for this reservation, and were seated right on time! I had read reports online of the restaurant getting really backed up for later lunch reservations, so we intentionally booked an earlier one. We really enjoyed this buffet- especially as vegetarians! The salads, breads, samosas, and tofu/ couscous dishes were all really good. This was what my plate looked like:

The desserts were a little bit lacking, but were made up for with the incredible atmosphere of the restaurant! The African market theming of the buffet area was very cool, and we saw Goofy, Donald, and Mickey within half an hour of being seated. It was a very enjoyable meal! We were back outside the restaurant about one hour later, and headed back over to Asia to walk the Maharajah Jungle Trek! I really enjoyed the incredible theming of these tiger exhibits, and we took about 20 minutes to walk through these trails. We were back out front by 12:58, and ready to get wet again on the KRR! I actually decided to wrap my poncho around my lower body/ skirt this time, since my skirt had FINALLY just dried out, and I didn't want to be cold later in some of the air conditioned shows. We had fp+ for this ride scheduled from 12:55 to 1:55, which saved us a 90-minute wait in line! It was seriously hot out at this point- about 95 degrees- so we did not mind getting a bit wet. We were off the ride and watching the pre-show for Flights of Wonder by 1:32, which ended up being one of the highlights of the day for us! We saw the 1:45 PM show, which involved some truly magnificent birds, and also featured a very entertaining bird trainer.

Sorry for the long delay- life has been crazy! I was just offered a new job and moved to a new city. Anyways, I plan to pick up where I left off with the trip report and finally see it through!
AK continued: The bird show ended around 2:15 PM, and we made our way over to the Finding Nemo stadium for the 3:00 PM show. This has always been a show that me and my mom are divided on- I enjoy it but she is not a fan of the "fish puppets!" It is fairly long... I will give her that. When it ended around 3:45, I headed back over to Dinosaur, but my mom sat this one out. Since she did not want to use a fp+ for it (or any other rides at this point), I borrowed her bracelet and rode Everest with the other fp+ right after! We then walked all the way across the park (lots of walking) back to Africa to catch the 5:00 PM Festival of the Lion King. I would highly recommend watching one of the last two shows of FotLK- we walked into the stadium about 5 minutes before the show started and got an awesome seat! No waiting necessary! This show had changed a bit since the last time we had saw it and we really enjoyed the newer component with the monkeys jumping on the trampoline! We were out of the theater by 5:35, and headed straight to Kilimanjaro Safaris. There was no wait (the sign said 10 minutes but it was actually walk-on), and we saw a lot of animals, despite the guide claiming that fewer are out later in the afternoon. This was an awesome way to the spend the day! We were off the ride just after 6:00 PM, and got to walk through a nearly empty park, which was also a pleasant experience. We decided to head back to AoA to explore the resort a bit more, since we had never stayed there before. I went to the make-your-own pasta station and my mom opted for the make-your-own burger station. We enjoyed both meals! My mom found her traditional Disney souvenir (a dated sweatshirt) in the gift shop, and we took another relaxing stroll around the resort. Even as adults, we really enjoyed soaking up the theming of AoA!