Our next adventure
If you’ve read this far, you must be at least slightly curious about our next adventure. Our last trip to the “World” was a great big 3-part production called “City, Sand, and Savanna” and was covered in great minutiae
here. This trip will be nearly as big, also have 3 parts, and who knows, may even have a 3-word titled trip report using alliteration but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Like last time, we have a high school graduate to celebrate (Marlene, this time) and will again be doing a New York City 3-night visit. I was able to trade-out some DVC points through RCI and got the exact dates I wanted on the first try. Easy peasy. We’ll be seeing “Phantom of the Opera”, touring Rockefeller Center, and visiting some museums, and that’s about all we have planned really. She wasn’t interested in seeing the Statue of Liberty or taking a boat tour like Lauren enjoyed, but hey, every kid’s different. Judy and I both will be accompanying her this time around. (Just Judy went with Lauren, if you recall.) I was going to be the only parent going this time originally, but I’ll need to do a full-day of work on one of the days, so I’ll do that from the hotel room while the girls hit the town. And our kids back home are big enough now to take care of themselves, so both parents are going this time around.
We’ll get back from that, have a day or two to unpack and repack, and start driving to Walt Disney World. Also happening during the turnaround days is I’ll work a full-day on a Saturday -- I can’t believe a guy can’t take nearly 3 weeks off without all of this work interruption! But even more fun, the kids and I will catch Paul McCartney in concert in Philly the night before we start driving. Maybe he’ll do “Drive My Car” so that we can have that echoing in our heads as we go. I told Judy that she can take the first shift of driving and I’ll relieve her later in the day...somewhere around South Carolina. I have a hotel reservation in Georgia and then we’ll roll into the Disney bubble on the second day of the drive.
We’ll be staying at the Boardwalk Villas for 6 nights. When we toured the Boardwalk model suite last time (I think?) Marlene said that that’s where she’d like to stay for her graduation trip, and that was fine with the rest of us also. We love our home resort of Animal Kingdom Villas, but we’d also like to see what some of the other resorts have to offer. I was able to switch from our home resort to Boardwalk Villas at the 7-month mark with no issues. We are sooo looking forward to being able to walk to both Hollywood Studios and Epcot from the resort, especially that “back entrance” into Epcot!
Oh yeah, I should mention that all 3 kids are going on the trip to Disney World. For the last trip, I wasn’t sure if that might be our last trip as just our nuclear family (yes, we glow), with college and summer jobs and everything that encroaches on kids’ time as they get older. Lauren and Marlene both have summer jobs, but were able to get their work schedules cleared for the trip.
I have ADRs at a lot of new-to-us restaurants this time around, namely:
Be Our Guest (lunch)
Sanaa Judy’s still holding a grudge from the long time it took us to get seated last time, but the kids convinced her to give it another try.
Sci-Fi Dine-In
Spice Road Table
Beaches & Cream
California Grill
Chefs de France
Via Napoli
Which means that
@Captain_Oblivious is a full-fledged Glennbo-stalker, since he got them all right in my Guess My ADRs challenge! Good work Mark!
@Steppesister just missed one (which naturally, is 88% -- you can just write it down before she even takes the test), and
@afwdwfan and
@KatMark each had a good showing with 4 right.
The kids had a good amount of input into the restaurant selections. We decided on them when we were driving across Pennsylvania over Thanksgiving. Judy drove while I read menus out loud to everyone. They wanted some more exotic/spicy options, which is how Sanaa and Spice Road Table made the cut. I know it’s kind of funny that we don’t have any Boardwalk restaurants on the list. The kids weren’t wow’d by the menu of the new place, Trattoria al Forno, and it sounded like it had a lot of pasta options, which means heavy on the gluten, so Judy wasn’t pulling for it either. Beaches & Cream was a late entry -- I was watching one of those Behind-the-Magic Disney subliminal infomercials a few weeks ago and a shot of a Kitchen Sink flashed on the screen for a second or two. Judy exclaimed, “what was that?!!” When I told her she said, “why aren’t we eating there?”, so I added it for lunchtime on our non-park day.
And lastly, the third part of our trip is none other than the lovely Disney’s Hilton Head Island Resort. To break up our drive home, and so that we’re not so sad when we leave Orlando, we’re going to stay there for 3 nights at the end of the trip. I finally got smart and put the relaxing beach portion of the trip at the end, rather than at the beginning like I did with Vero Beach a couple of years ago. I know that my kids decided that maybe they’re not “beach people” when we visited Vero, but I’m excited for them to experience Hilton Head. I think they’ll love it. I was originally only able to book two nights, but our third came through on a waitlist. I was so happy about that, since it will give us a couple of full days to unwind and ease back into the real world.
I think it’s amazing that over the next few weeks we’ll be spending 13 nights in hotels, and 12 of them are “paid for” through DVC. The only one I’ll have to lay out a credit card for is the one in Georgia as we’re driving down. Of course, I had to do a little banking and borrowing from last year and next year’s points, but still, this would have been a mighty expensive vacation otherwise. Undoable really. Gotta love my DVC.
In other news, my good camera, the Canon EOS Rebel XSi, went kaput the other day. Believe it or not, it occurred while Marlene was walking across the stage to receive her diploma. I put it on “burst” mode so that it would take a bunch of shots while she walked, and “burst” is exactly what it did. It’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s a mechanical issue -- a part is stuck behind the mirror, blocking the sensor, so every picture has a big blotch in front of it. I took it to a camera shop and as I suspected, considering its age, and the better features/performance of today’s cameras, it’s not worth it to get it fixed. So, in light of this big vacation coming up, I bought a new camera body -- a Canon EOS Rebel SL1. It has more features, more resolution, and is actually more compact and lighter than the old one. The old lenses work with it, so I could get away with only having to buy the camera body.
Well, that’s the extent of the pre-trip report. Phase 1 starts...let’s see, I had my itinerary around here somewhere...oh yeah..............tomorrow!
Follow our progress on Instagram -- glennbo123
Anyway, here are some clues:
