Lodge ladies! Hope you don't mind a much overdue trip report from our trip to the Lodge back in December. (Things got pretty crazy after our return home.) If you'll remember, DH and I and our two sons (aged 5 and 7) were staying at the Lodge for a week back in early December. We'd never visited the Lodge before, and had stayed at the Poly on our previous trip in December 2011.
Let me say: our trip was FANTASTIC. We got a "bear-face" room, which I loved. Great view of the lagoon and the ground from the balcony, and a wonderful view of the lobby and the tree when we exited the room. Convenient to the elevators, too. I didn't realize how big the place was until I decided to use the back elevators when I was doing laundry and had to walk through endless hallways! WE did not have a great view of the water pageant. Thought we would, but a tree blocked much of it. Still, we sat out and watched it once and my kids enjoyed themselves, and I really liked that when it was over, they could just hop straight into bed from the balcony.
The CMs were by and large very nice. We had a cast member who was part of the international college program when we got off the bus, and she was very attentive and kept on talking to us while we waited for a spot at the front desk check-in to open up. After about five minutes, she said she didn't want to keep us waiting, and checked us in herself. She remembered us when we ran into her several days later, too. Alas, no Flag Family spots were available -- guess we'll have to go back.
We enjoyed using the pools and the hot tubs and playing on the beaches. My sons got a huge kick out of swimming with the ducks. We spent a few hours every afternoon doing this, and we had a lot of nice conversations with other families. The geyser was also a big hit -- we must have seen it erupt about 10 times over the course of the week.
Good reviews for Roaring Forks from us, too. We ate several lunch/dinner meals there and had a hot breakfast there three or four times, too. Liked the Mickey Waffles with strawberries especially.
We had no problems with Mousekeeping. We tipped every day but did not get any towel animals, or even a Mickey towel on the bed upon arrival. However, one day, our "Elf on a Shelf" was moved onto the bed with a pile of shredded paper next to time. He was holding a handwritten note that said, "[The names of my kids] did this!" My kids LOVED it and it really intensified the magic for them. I still can't believe that someone took the time to look up their names and do that for them. It was awesome. (The bunk beds were great, btw, and we thought the bed was very comfortable.)
The only complaint we had about the Lodge, really, was that the bus service seemed a bit slow, especially to and from Epcot. We had to wait a long time both going to and from Epcot. Once, we even gave up and took a cab. We had no problems going to the other parks and thought the boat service was great. Maybe our timing was just bad.
We were personally underwhemed by the new TT (Kook, I know you asked about that). My kids liked it a lot. However, we felt the machines to design the cars were very buggy. At last half of the terminals weren't working. We didn't see how they were incorporated into the ride itself, and even though I know the track didn't change, the ride "inside" seemed a lot less fun to us. I would have liked it to remain the old way, dated and all. Sorry to be a downer, but that was a disappointment to us. We enjoyed the parts of FLE that we saw. Lines were very long for BoG and Enchanted Tales (and were literally walk-ons in the rest of the park), so we could not justify waiting 90 minutes to experience either of those. Had a great time everywhere else.
I'll post pictures in the next post. Any other questions I can answer? Thanks for all the advice I received from posters here. Can't wait to go back! We'd stay again in a heartbeat.
Kristen to the DIS and the WL/VWL thread!
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. You'll have to make a dinner ADR at BOG as soon as you book your next trip
. Your TT review sounds like some others I read - underwhelming, but at least now that it's back open it will help draw some guests away from Soarin' which seemed to have even longer wait times than usual in August.
