taythecray
TinkerTaylor
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2014
- Messages
- 360
one and all to my first official trip report! I'm excited to actually be able to write one now, since we just returned from our first big family Disney trip! I have written a previous pre-trip and trip report for my last visit, but those don't count because we were only there for one day so the reports were very short. THIS time, I get to share my stories from our 6-day vacation with my family! 
It's also a good way to keep me busy while we pass the time until our May trip to Disneyland. 
For those interested in following along, I will post the index and shortcuts in my next post and then quickly get into introductions since there are a lot to go through (we were a party of nine). If you are interested in reading about all the crazy planning that went into this trip ahead of time, you can find the link to this pre-trip report in my signature. Stay tuned for further updates!
Let's see the easiest way to do this. From left to right:
He's also my husband <3
Honestly I think we left at 6am, dropped off our luggage, got in line about 6:30am and didn't make it through until almost 8am. The only good thing about it was that we didn't have a long wait at our gate before they started boarding.
I don't blame you for the early flight, though. I took one but I couldn't be tired, it's Disney for goodness sake!!
Anyway, we were on Disney property by about 12:40pm, made stops at Art of Animation, Pop Century, and Jambo House, and then finally arrived at Kidani at 1pm!! 
We went to check in (we opted to skip online check-in) and were told a room wasn’t quite ready yet, so we left our bags and then took a nice walk over to Jambo House to eat at the Mara. Funny thing is about 10 minutes after we left we got the text that the room was ready, but we needed food first 
When we got to Jambo we actually got lost for a little bit and finally had to be directed by two different CMs to finally find the Mara 
We requested something like a high-floor, partial savannah room on the Pembe side near the Rafiki elevator and ended up on the fifth floor right next to the Timon elevator close to transportation and a parking lot view. However! We did not go into this vacation expecting a savannah room, and honestly we were high enough up to have a pretty view of the grassy landscape which we all loved waking up to 
I politely reminded them that they didn't book enough day tickets, but if they wanted to skip a different day or add a day they could.
These had been on my bucket list to see since last year, and when I thought we were going to miss them by a day I was devastated. At first I didn't believe it (all those darn Facebook rumors) but when it was confirmed, I pretty much jumped up and screamed to everybody "WE ALL NEED TO GO TO HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS AND SEE THE LIGHTS!" (not even exaggerating) 
Once everyone was convinced, I hoped on and changed mine and Austin's fastpasses from Epcot to the Studios and we were set! I was a little bummed about missing date night, but there was no way I was missing the lights!
I want to say we waited between 5-10 minutes for a bus and had no other stops, so that was really nice. The ride didn't take long either, and we were through the gates fast enough! Surprisingly you'll find that I didn't take a whole lot of pictures of the actual parks....guess I was too busy taking in the sights. 
Once we were off, we wandered back to the Streets of America to look around.
The standby wait was at 160 minutes, and the fastpass line was down and around way past where the "toy story" area ends. Once we realized that, we opted to skip it and save it for our second day. We met up with the group again over by the Mike and Sulley meet and greet (which Macy had just missed 
) and wandered around the shop for a few minutes before heading back and around to the Muppet area. It was there out of the corner of my eye that I saw Phineus and Ferb. Second magical moment for the studios! 
We were going to try and get seats for Fantasmic as well but on our way over we heard them announce it was standing room only, so we decided to skip it that night. Basically once our ride was over that concluded our first night! By that point we were all exhausted, and I was making everyone get up early the next morning so we decided to call it an early night and left about 7:30pm. On the way out we stopped at Guest Services to add on an extra day to everyone's ticket, and then headed for our room. The boys ordered pizza for dinner and I think we were all asleep by 10pm. 
But it's okay! Because a full day at Magic Kingdom was waiting for us tomorrow.
I guess all the important people went through with it. Austin and I had already planned on doing all the parks open to close every day, and I was really just hoping to get Macy and Devin up early to get the most out of the parks, so at least that happened. 
Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures because I was busy trying to fix Macy’s magic band issue. Either she forgot which finger she used the day before or the system was glitching because it kept turning blue for her. Thankfully the CMs got it fixed pretty quickly so we were able to enjoy the show! It was my first time seeing it as well and I thought it was a cute way to kick off the day. After that they dropped the rope and people mobbed the park. I’ll start getting into the “madness” section of this day in my next post since this ended up being a lot longer than I intended 
Then we tried to take some pictures in front of the castle, but man the sun was bright! I also think Devin was still half asleep, so I only really got a nice one of Macy and I. 
She had nightmares after watching Once Upon A Time with me a year or so ago, so I made sure to talk to her and try to make it a little more light-hearted. She was fine though, and actually ended up pointing out some of the creepy things on the ride to me. Devin thought it was pretty cool too, they had survived their first ride!
while Macy was in awe recording the entire thing. After that we wandered around Fantasyland waiting for the group. I had told us to meet them at 7DMT, and when we rounded the corner I was SO grateful for our fastpasses. If I remember right, the posted time was around 90 minutes, the line wrapped alllll the way down the outside gate and wrapped around almost to the entrance of the circus area. This was at 9:30am mind you 
When we finally met up with the rest of the family I made sure to point out the line and say "see, this is why we needed to reserve rides in advance." (They had made fun of my obsessive planning skills and didn't understand the need for fastpasses) 
We hopped in line around 9:45 with our passes and only had to wait about 5min for our car. This seemed like a pretty big hit with the family, Macy even asked to go again (thank god I had grabbed another pass for our second day).
