Scooterbritches
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2010
Warning! This is long so if you don’t like long, you can just skip. I don’t need comments telling me this is long when I already know it is long. Hopefully, it will have some helpful information, especially for newly disabled people navigating the parks in this way for the first time.
Hello everyone! We returned yesterday from our really quick trip to WDW and WWoHP/Universal. I thought I’d write a trip report on our adventures. The characters along on our trip were me (52 yo wife and mother of 6 who LOVES adventures and roller coasters and adrenaline rushes in general….I have been skydiving), my 16 yo DD (she is my youngest and has an equal adoration of adventures as me), and my 27 yo DD (who used to share my love of adventures, but showed on this trip that she’s becoming an old lady….I say with much love and facetiousness).
Actually, it is I that is becoming an old lady because as you can see from my title we had along with us a very special friend named Walter. I’ll explain who Walter is in a moment. In the last couple of years I’ve developed arthritis and bone spurs in my back which limits my ability to stand or sit for long periods of time. I looked into getting a DAS pass but because my issues are “mobility” related and most of the lines are ADA accessible, I would not qualify. This brought me a dilemma because a ECV would not work very well for me because I need to get up and keep moving periodically in order to avoid stiffness and pain and a manual wheelchair would require my DD’s to push me in the lines, plus it is not very lightweight and easy to maneuver around corners in those queue bullpens. My 16 yo DD got a sprained MCL shortly before our trip so I didn’t want her to aggravate that. Someone suggested a rollator/walker. Disney does not offer those for rent and I was looking to outside sources to rent when I happened to mention to my 89 yo dad what I was trying to do. He walked in the other room and came out with this rollator. He uses a cane around the house but on the rare occasions when he goes out, he sometimes uses this rollator. I didn’t even know he had it. He told me it would be fine for me to borrow it. So I decided it might be a good option for me. It would allow me to sit in it during long waits in line, but also be light weight and easier to navigate for those times when I needed to be standing or moving in a line.
This is new territory for us and not easy for a young 52 yo who has always been active to be able to adjust to. My 27 yo told me that it was breaking her heart to see her mom have to use devices like this. We decided to make the best of it though. We decided to treat the walker as our friend so we named him Walter. Walter has been pretty sheltered having his only owner be an 89 year old. We were certainly providing him with once in a lifetime adventures which started out with his plane trip from SLC to Orlando.
My 16 yo DD and I live in SLC and my 27 yo DD lives in Austin, TX. We were meeting up in Orlando. Our flight was scheduled for 9:40 am so we left our home at 7:30 and were in our seats waiting to board by 8:20 and the drive to the airport from our house was 25 minutes. Gotta love SLC international! There was a lot of time to kill so we became acquainted with some folks who had experienced a prior plane scare when hail damaged and broke the windshield of the plane they were on and they had to make an emergency landing. They had a little girl with them who was having anxiety over this. They wanted to show me pictures of the plane, but by this time it was time to board so I declined. I’m not bothered by stuff like this. I really have an attitude that if something’s going to happen it will happen and I will either live through it or I won’t. No sense stressing about what could happen every time you get in a transportation device.
We boarded and sat there and sat there. They came on the speaker and said they were waiting for the required paperwork that needed to be completed before every flight before we could take off. Someone dropped the ball on this one because if this said paperwork is required for every flight then obviously this is all part of the procedure, but for some reason, ours wasn’t getting done and we didn’t take off until ½ hour after our scheduled departure time.
The flight was uneventful until we neared Orlando. I’ve been on plenty of planes in my life and experienced turbulence but this was quite the ride. My DD and I turned to each other and said we felt like we were already on Space Mountain! There was a severe thunderstorm in the Orlando area. When we landed, I texted my 27 yo DD and she said she had just witnessed the worst thunderstorm ever (and she lives in Texas where they can get pretty dicey). At one point, she thought a bomb had gone off the thunder was so loud and shook the airport.
They couldn’t let us off the plane until they hadn’t seen lightening in the area for 5 minutes so we had to wait on the tarmac for about 10 minutes. As I said, I have trouble sitting for long periods. While the plane was in the air, I tried to get up periodically to stretch, but with this being a 4 hour flight and them not letting us take our seatbelts off on the tarmac, I was starting to feel the pain.
We finally deplaned and met up with my DD in the main terminal. We went to find Walter because I had checked him at the counter instead of the plane. We waited and waited at bag claim and there was no sign of Walter. We found the Delta Customer Service Area and there he was! They said they had been paging us, but none of us had heard anything. I have a different first name that is hard for people to pronounce correctly so maybe they weren’t saying it right and therefore, we didn’t recognize the page as being for us.
So now it was off to the car rental. I had recently joined the loyalty club for Hertz but they said on my first rental after joining I still needed to go to the counter. So we went to the counter and got our car which was a Nissan Versa. There was no pressure at all to buy a Sun Pass or insurance. Those things were already determined when I registered for the loyalty card.
It was still raining pretty hard and it was during rush hour so traffic was bad anyway. It took forever to get to our hotel! We were staying at the Galleria Palms which was just off SR 192 on the southern boundary of Disney. The hotel had just finished renovations so it was nice. The rooms had refrigerators, microwaves, and blow dryers. The pool area had a pool, but no hot tub, which I was disappointed with. The area it was in was strange. Not dangerous by any means, but just surrounded by these touristy shops where they sold souvenirs for cheap. The building right by our hotel was in the shape of a huge mermaid.
We went in and got acquainted with our room and unpacked. We were hungry by this time and the plan was to go to Disney Springs and eat at Earl of Sandwich and see some of the shops. Because of our delayed flight and the rain and traffic, we were much later arriving than I had planned (one reason why you shouldn’t make ADRs on arrival day) so I asked the girls if they wanted to go to Disney Springs or just find somewhere close. We decided we wanted to get the Disney spirit and we weren’t far from Disney Springs so we decided to stick with the plan. It was about a 15 minute drive to Disney Springs and we parked and made our way out. I had studied the maps a lot before we came so I’d know where to go, but in SLC we have the mountains to help us know which direction is what. It was disorienting and I thought we were headed toward the Marketplace but we weren’t so we had to back track.
I had left Walter in the car because I don’t need help walking, just standing/sitting. We finally found our way in the right direction and got to the Earl of Sandwich. I ordered the club and chicken tortilla soup, DD ordered the chicken quinoa salad, and dd ordered the Italian. (From here on out I’ll refer to my older daughter as DD and my younger as dd. Make sense?) The line was about 20 minutes long. Obviously, I wasn’t counting on that or I would have brought Walter. I was feeling it with all the sitting on the plane and now all this standing. When we finished we visited Once Upon a Toy, Ghiradelli, World of Disney and the Lego Store. We took pictures with a giant hulk and Woody and Buzz made out of Legos and sent the pics to my 9 yo grandson who is way into legos.
The trip felt more rushed than I would have liked because of our late arrival. We still had grocery shopping to do and we wanted to get to bed at a decent hour because of the two hour time difference between Utah and Florida. We knew the early morning was going to kill us. All in all, I liked Disney Springs and wished I had more time to browse through it. Earl of Sandwich was great and I thought they did a great job of getting a lot of people served and through the queue.
I asked my DD to google map a Publix grocery store near our hotel, but she said the closest one was 8 miles away so she kept finding these little convenience store like places that charged an arm and a leg for individual sized items. We finally found a little grocery store that was really close to our hotel that didn’t have a great selection but was at least bigger than a convenience store.
We bought bagels and cream cheese, string cheese, individual sized goldfish crackers, beef jerky, pop tarts and their last box of Krispy Kremes (I love donuts)! These items were great for breakfast or to carry into the parks to eat between meals. I didn’t say healthy, I said great!
Finally, back to the hotel. We set our alarm for 5:15 (uggh, 3:15 Utah time) and went to bed by 11:00 ready for our adventures in MK the next day.
Hello everyone! We returned yesterday from our really quick trip to WDW and WWoHP/Universal. I thought I’d write a trip report on our adventures. The characters along on our trip were me (52 yo wife and mother of 6 who LOVES adventures and roller coasters and adrenaline rushes in general….I have been skydiving), my 16 yo DD (she is my youngest and has an equal adoration of adventures as me), and my 27 yo DD (who used to share my love of adventures, but showed on this trip that she’s becoming an old lady….I say with much love and facetiousness).
Actually, it is I that is becoming an old lady because as you can see from my title we had along with us a very special friend named Walter. I’ll explain who Walter is in a moment. In the last couple of years I’ve developed arthritis and bone spurs in my back which limits my ability to stand or sit for long periods of time. I looked into getting a DAS pass but because my issues are “mobility” related and most of the lines are ADA accessible, I would not qualify. This brought me a dilemma because a ECV would not work very well for me because I need to get up and keep moving periodically in order to avoid stiffness and pain and a manual wheelchair would require my DD’s to push me in the lines, plus it is not very lightweight and easy to maneuver around corners in those queue bullpens. My 16 yo DD got a sprained MCL shortly before our trip so I didn’t want her to aggravate that. Someone suggested a rollator/walker. Disney does not offer those for rent and I was looking to outside sources to rent when I happened to mention to my 89 yo dad what I was trying to do. He walked in the other room and came out with this rollator. He uses a cane around the house but on the rare occasions when he goes out, he sometimes uses this rollator. I didn’t even know he had it. He told me it would be fine for me to borrow it. So I decided it might be a good option for me. It would allow me to sit in it during long waits in line, but also be light weight and easier to navigate for those times when I needed to be standing or moving in a line.
This is new territory for us and not easy for a young 52 yo who has always been active to be able to adjust to. My 27 yo told me that it was breaking her heart to see her mom have to use devices like this. We decided to make the best of it though. We decided to treat the walker as our friend so we named him Walter. Walter has been pretty sheltered having his only owner be an 89 year old. We were certainly providing him with once in a lifetime adventures which started out with his plane trip from SLC to Orlando.
My 16 yo DD and I live in SLC and my 27 yo DD lives in Austin, TX. We were meeting up in Orlando. Our flight was scheduled for 9:40 am so we left our home at 7:30 and were in our seats waiting to board by 8:20 and the drive to the airport from our house was 25 minutes. Gotta love SLC international! There was a lot of time to kill so we became acquainted with some folks who had experienced a prior plane scare when hail damaged and broke the windshield of the plane they were on and they had to make an emergency landing. They had a little girl with them who was having anxiety over this. They wanted to show me pictures of the plane, but by this time it was time to board so I declined. I’m not bothered by stuff like this. I really have an attitude that if something’s going to happen it will happen and I will either live through it or I won’t. No sense stressing about what could happen every time you get in a transportation device.
We boarded and sat there and sat there. They came on the speaker and said they were waiting for the required paperwork that needed to be completed before every flight before we could take off. Someone dropped the ball on this one because if this said paperwork is required for every flight then obviously this is all part of the procedure, but for some reason, ours wasn’t getting done and we didn’t take off until ½ hour after our scheduled departure time.
The flight was uneventful until we neared Orlando. I’ve been on plenty of planes in my life and experienced turbulence but this was quite the ride. My DD and I turned to each other and said we felt like we were already on Space Mountain! There was a severe thunderstorm in the Orlando area. When we landed, I texted my 27 yo DD and she said she had just witnessed the worst thunderstorm ever (and she lives in Texas where they can get pretty dicey). At one point, she thought a bomb had gone off the thunder was so loud and shook the airport.
They couldn’t let us off the plane until they hadn’t seen lightening in the area for 5 minutes so we had to wait on the tarmac for about 10 minutes. As I said, I have trouble sitting for long periods. While the plane was in the air, I tried to get up periodically to stretch, but with this being a 4 hour flight and them not letting us take our seatbelts off on the tarmac, I was starting to feel the pain.
We finally deplaned and met up with my DD in the main terminal. We went to find Walter because I had checked him at the counter instead of the plane. We waited and waited at bag claim and there was no sign of Walter. We found the Delta Customer Service Area and there he was! They said they had been paging us, but none of us had heard anything. I have a different first name that is hard for people to pronounce correctly so maybe they weren’t saying it right and therefore, we didn’t recognize the page as being for us.
So now it was off to the car rental. I had recently joined the loyalty club for Hertz but they said on my first rental after joining I still needed to go to the counter. So we went to the counter and got our car which was a Nissan Versa. There was no pressure at all to buy a Sun Pass or insurance. Those things were already determined when I registered for the loyalty card.
It was still raining pretty hard and it was during rush hour so traffic was bad anyway. It took forever to get to our hotel! We were staying at the Galleria Palms which was just off SR 192 on the southern boundary of Disney. The hotel had just finished renovations so it was nice. The rooms had refrigerators, microwaves, and blow dryers. The pool area had a pool, but no hot tub, which I was disappointed with. The area it was in was strange. Not dangerous by any means, but just surrounded by these touristy shops where they sold souvenirs for cheap. The building right by our hotel was in the shape of a huge mermaid.
We went in and got acquainted with our room and unpacked. We were hungry by this time and the plan was to go to Disney Springs and eat at Earl of Sandwich and see some of the shops. Because of our delayed flight and the rain and traffic, we were much later arriving than I had planned (one reason why you shouldn’t make ADRs on arrival day) so I asked the girls if they wanted to go to Disney Springs or just find somewhere close. We decided we wanted to get the Disney spirit and we weren’t far from Disney Springs so we decided to stick with the plan. It was about a 15 minute drive to Disney Springs and we parked and made our way out. I had studied the maps a lot before we came so I’d know where to go, but in SLC we have the mountains to help us know which direction is what. It was disorienting and I thought we were headed toward the Marketplace but we weren’t so we had to back track.
I had left Walter in the car because I don’t need help walking, just standing/sitting. We finally found our way in the right direction and got to the Earl of Sandwich. I ordered the club and chicken tortilla soup, DD ordered the chicken quinoa salad, and dd ordered the Italian. (From here on out I’ll refer to my older daughter as DD and my younger as dd. Make sense?) The line was about 20 minutes long. Obviously, I wasn’t counting on that or I would have brought Walter. I was feeling it with all the sitting on the plane and now all this standing. When we finished we visited Once Upon a Toy, Ghiradelli, World of Disney and the Lego Store. We took pictures with a giant hulk and Woody and Buzz made out of Legos and sent the pics to my 9 yo grandson who is way into legos.
The trip felt more rushed than I would have liked because of our late arrival. We still had grocery shopping to do and we wanted to get to bed at a decent hour because of the two hour time difference between Utah and Florida. We knew the early morning was going to kill us. All in all, I liked Disney Springs and wished I had more time to browse through it. Earl of Sandwich was great and I thought they did a great job of getting a lot of people served and through the queue.
I asked my DD to google map a Publix grocery store near our hotel, but she said the closest one was 8 miles away so she kept finding these little convenience store like places that charged an arm and a leg for individual sized items. We finally found a little grocery store that was really close to our hotel that didn’t have a great selection but was at least bigger than a convenience store.
We bought bagels and cream cheese, string cheese, individual sized goldfish crackers, beef jerky, pop tarts and their last box of Krispy Kremes (I love donuts)! These items were great for breakfast or to carry into the parks to eat between meals. I didn’t say healthy, I said great!
Finally, back to the hotel. We set our alarm for 5:15 (uggh, 3:15 Utah time) and went to bed by 11:00 ready for our adventures in MK the next day.