Our Garden Grill ADR wasn't until 10:15 the next morning so the boys were able to sleep in a bit. Our plan was to check the wait time at character spot after breakfast since we'd missed it the day before, then head over to MK where we had FP's scheduled for early afternoon.
Steve was up early as always and had showered already by the time I got up around 8:00. On my way to the shower I
again noticed wet spots on the floor- pretty much all over the faux wood which was in front of the kitchenette, in the entry way, and in front of the sink area and closet. FINALLY Steve admitted there did seem to be a little bit of water there........after my shower it was worse. We woke the boys and they both showered since they hadn't the night before, and by the time all 4 of us had showered there were beads of water popping up like crazy! Mickey, we have a problem.......since it seemed to increase after each shower, Steve was convinced the problem was coming from the shower. In some cases it even looked like the glue or whatever the floor had been secured with was coming loose/up. We couldn't walk anywhere near the bathroom/sink/front door/kitchen area without our feet or socks getting wet.
Steve went down to the front desk while we finished getting ready. About 10 minutes after he returned, a handy maintenance guy named Tony came in to check things out. Tony must have been doing some landscaping prior to arriving at our room, because when he stood on the edge of our shower and then IN our shower, Mr. Tony left nice muddy footprints all over. Thanks! He said they'd had this problem in some of the other recently refurbed rooms and he'd notify plumbing. He said we should check with the front desk in a couple hours to see what the deal is, but that most likely plumbing would have to come in the room and do quite a bit of work. Rats! Well, this was our 4th stay here at BWV and on all previous stays we'd had very positive experiences as far as CM interactions and being accommodated, so our expectations were high that this issue would be handled in the same manner
We headed over to Epcot and arrived to a very long check-in line about 10 minutes before our ADR time at
No worries though! Chris and I were very excited to try the breakfast. We'd eaten dinner here back in 2007 when the boys were 5 and almost 2, so Chris didn't remember. I'm a big breakfast eater and the menu sounded awesome! They only started breakfast a couple weeks before our trip but the few reviews I'd read were all positive.
There were a number of people trying to get in without reservations and all being turned away. Most of them seemed clueless as to the whole ADR idea, I felt bad for them. We were given a pager at 10:10 and only had to wait 5 minutes past our 10:15 ADR time, so before we knew it we were led to a table
with this sitting in the middle
Cute, right? Even though I knew the breakfast menu by heart, I took a quick look just to make sure nothing had changed since I last checked the website:
Nope! Sticky bun still there. Our waitress Anna came quickly to take our drink order, which was coffee for Steve, chocolate milk and apple juice for the boys and diet soda for me. Right after she left a manager stopped by to let us know that we were one of the last tables to be seated, so Mickey, Pluto, Chip and Dale would most likely be stopping by real soon. We could see Mickey and Pluto down on the level closer to the Living with the Land ride and Chip and Dale were both at tables right behind us. We got our phones and camera ready! I can't remember the last time the boys met those rascally chipmunks!
Both Chip and Dale came by real quick. Mickey actually walked by and waved on his way to a couple tables on our level who were seated around the time we were, so we figured he'd be back. In the meantime Chris and I got busy with some old-fashioned tic-tac-toe
We did this in just about every restaurant during the trip. Chris isn't into coloring, word searches, playing tic tac toe or anything like that normally, but when we're in Disney he always wants to do those things with Steve and I while we're waiting to eat. Even Ricky will sometimes ask for a kids menu and do a word search or tic tac toe. Love it!
Before too long our sticky bun bake came out. It was delicious! Reminded me of Cinnabon but better, with LOTS of sweet frosting on top. We each had 2 decent size pieces and there was still some left. A fruit bowl was brought out at the same time. I can only remember strawberries grapes and pineapple but I think there was cantaloupe, too. Mickey passed by a couple more times without stopping, and then Anna came again with this
I had everything except the ham, but Steve said it was very good. The tater tots were nice and crispy and had a bit of seasoning to them; the bacon was typical Disney bacon but also crispy. The eggs were actually better than your normal Disney eggs and a lot less watery. And the Mickey waffles......what can you say about Mickey waffles? Are they ever anything besides fun to eat?! The one different thing here is that they gave us a melted Nutella-like "syrup" for the waffles instead of regular syrup. Ricky is the only one who likes Nutella; we requested regular syrup and Anna brought it right over.
I didn't get the biscuits and gravy in the picture, either. They gave us one biscuit pp. I'm probably not a good one to judge how these were since we don't really eat these. Steve said the gravy was pretty good. I tried it but wasn't a fan. It was pretty salty and tasted heavily of sausage; not sure if that's how biscuit gravy is supposed to taste. I like sausage and I like salt, but it just didn't do it for me.
One final thing on the breakfast; it's all you care to eat so you can get more of anything you want! We were good, but the table in front of us asked for more bacon and they got a plate with like 3lbs of bacon. Seriously, it was piled as high a 3-tier cake. I think they ate about 5 pieces of it and left the rest!
We took our time eating but unfortunately, Pluto and Mickey still hadn't found us when we were done. We only saw one other table left in the restaurant (as far as we could see) and we noticed both Chip and Dale had wandered in to the kitchen and hadn't come back out (we were seated right by the kitchen entrance). When Anna brought our check, we mentioned having not seen Mickey or Pluto yet and she looked quite freaked out. She said she'd see if she could track "those playful critters" down for us, and while we waited Steve and I came to the conclusion that all our furry friends were done for now. Remember, we had been one of the last tables to be seated at 10:20 with a 10:15 ADR, and breakfast ended at 10:30. She came back with a deflated look and informed us that indeed, Mickey and his pup were "out to lunch". She felt horrible and wouldn't stop apologizing; I'm pretty sure she was afraid we'd be mad and throw a fit. I saw a bit of disappointment on Chris's face, but I let her know it was ok and certainly not her fault. Truthfully I was disappointed too as I was looking forward to Mickey in his overalls, plus we'd missed character spot the day before, and I thought there'd be a long wait now that it was close to 12. But it truly wasn't her fault and there's no use crying over a melted dole whip! She thanked us and took our TiW card. I was totally surprised when she returned with our card and this
Woo-hoo! The infamous "golden fastpass"! I'd heard tell of these but had never been given one and was starting to doubt their very existence! It may not have been for the most thrilling attraction, but it was a very nice gesture that worked well for our family. I realize other people may have been more upset and not settled for the character spot, but Chris perked up and I knew it would save us time if the wait was long.
We thanked Anna and walked out. At that point we
were the last ones to leave! TIP: if you're ADR is one of the last seatings at a character meal, don't wait until the last minute to tell someone you haven't seen all the characters.........
We headed over to the "new" character spot where we hadn't been since 2007 and saw a 35 minute wait. Not terrible, but our family's wait time doesn't normally exceed 20 minutes. YaaaaaY, FP!! We ended up waiting about 10 minutes to do this
Then we did this
Is it me, or is something weird around Goofy's middle stomach, upper crotch.....idk "blue" area???? Anyway-
Of course we met the head Mouse himself, but I'm in those pictures and they are FAR from internet acceptable.
Since we'd done Epcot yesterday and planned on coming back, our plans for the rest of the day were MK. However being the never-do-it-the-easy-way family, rather than take the bus Steve wanted to go back to our resort and check on the wet floor situation first. Our first FP wasn't until 1:30 and it was all of 12:30, so......sure!
Back to WS we went and quick walked over to the BW. We spoke to laid-back Neil at the front desk, the same CM Steve had spoken to that morning. Neil had no knowledge of maintenance going to plumbing about our room. We asked if we could switch rooms if the problem wasn't able to be fixed, and Neil said we could but all that was available at that point were non-refurbed, non-BW view rooms. I was ok with no view, Steve wasn't. But neither of us wanted a non-refurbished room because Chris was sleeping on the pull-down bed and if the boys had to start sleeping together now even after just 2 nights separately, there'd be a pre-Thanksgiving riot. Steve asked him if the problem was being looked in to and Neil assured us it "probably" was, and that by the next morning there should be a refurbed room available with a BW view if we could hold out. Well, it
was just shower water we were stepping in, so we could hang. Off to the bus stop we went for our first Nov. view of the castle!
UP NEXT: MORE WATER? OOH! THE RAINY DAY PARADE!
I'm so glad you're here! I just started this not long before Steve and I left for our quick January getaway, so I haven't gotten far and you haven't missed much! Now keep in mind this is my first time 
so I'm kinda getting the hang of it-
Well ok, we weren't FORCED to move. Nobody held a light saber to our heads and marched us out 
but as you can see the water situation was getting wetter, and stickier, and we just assumed it was from the shower and we were really hoping for an answer as to what the problem was, which unfortunately never came.
No Bueno.
or maybe you can make a request when you make your ADR? Like, "please equip our table with a nutella pump" lol!
I get all giddy and smiley and the rest of my family laughs at me. Another reason I was giddy today is that we were going to see the MK Christmas tree for the first time! We'd actually seen the other parks' trees on our previous Nov. trips, but due to the parade taping had never seen the MK one. Since this years' taping was moved up, the tree was up earlier than usual! We quickly got through bag check, tapped our Mickey's and soon beheld this 
A nice thing about the rainy day parade is that since many people aren't aware of it, they aren't lined up waiting so it's easy to get a front row spot 
And it wasn't just water, the glue or whatever was TOTALLY coming loose with the water and making it milky in places PLUS I had on warm fuzzy white socks with purple dots and......the bottoms weren't white anymore 
I was fairly disgusted at this point and so was Steve. As much as I was loving our view we needed to move. I was also a little perturbed that we'd reported this leakage and nothing had been done; Steve was more than perturbed. It was obvious the leak was not just being caused by the shower, if at all by the shower. More likely it was being caused by a combo of toilet/sink/maybe shower. So at 9 he headed down to tell them we wanted to switch rooms while I woke the other son and jumped in the shower myself so I could start packing up.
Now ladies and gentlemen, husbands and wives, girls and boys, significant others: you know how sometimes you disagree with your partner on how you should handle something? Well, one of us thought we should be nice; along the lines of you get more bees with honey. The other one thought we should show our anger and make demands. So Steve approached the desk trying it my way and drooled some honey over carefree Neil, the CM with whom we'd had a room-switching convo the day before. Neil informed him that yes we could indeed switch, to a non lake view room that was at least refurbed with the Murphy bed. *our room was technically lake view but had that cool view of the water AND the BW). He also told Steve we needed to be out of our current room no later than 11:00 as that was check-out time. 
I laugh now....he timed the walk so from the elevator to the new room was 2 minutes, 21 seconds lol. By the time he moved all our luggage the man was dripping sweat! I wasn't thrilled since we had it so good with room location but to me, and really to him, a dry floor (without the possibility of the wetness being toilet water) was more important than distance from elevator. And it was 3 days before Thanksgiving and I have no doubt they were very close to capacity.........so, we all went to check it out on our way to the park. Since we were the last room at the end of the hallway there was a window there and we did have this nice view
I know things don't always go right on vacation no matter where you are. We've had little blips on other Disney vacations - boys caught a 24 hour bug once, had major MB issues the first trip we used them - so I wasn't 
about a room having plumbing issues. But things were racking up between the nonchalant attitude from BW staff so far to the be out by 11 to the now blecchy shower. I wasn't happy that this was taking up precious time. Even though it was still only 10:30 we weren't able to have a relaxing morning with a walk to the BW bakery for breakfast, and now it still wasn't over because I had to go tell Neil to PLEASE have housekeeping clean our bathroom again.
