When we left off, DSis and I were heading to pick up our rental car at the Dolphin. This was our first time renting a car in the World and looking back, I think that showed.
We hopped on a bus to DHS and then snagged a boat to the Dolphin. Following with the general transportation theme of the trip, we lucked out and this whole trip (from hotel to hotel) only took about 25 minutes. So far so good, right?
We head into the Dolphin (which is absolutely breath taking, by the way) with the rental email and driver's licenses in hand only to realize that DSis has forgotten her credit card. Seeing as we're already here we decided to try and use mine even though the rental was in Cait's name, and I was too young to switch it to mine. Unfortunately, this was a no go. The woman at the National desk transferred our rental to the Car Care Center, but said we'd still need to get the credit card before we could go there and pick the car up.
Briefly interjecting, I'd like to point out newbie mistake number one. I'm pretty sure we needed to pick the car up at the CCC no matter what. The National woman mentioned something about needing to take a bus to the car lot anyways, so in the future I would definitely do the booking through the CCC desk, not the desk at the Dolphin. It seems like that would have cut out part of the trip in the first place!
Back to the story! Luckily, the National woman set us up on a shuttle bus that could bring us back to our hotel to grab the card. Even better, the bus driver was AWESOME and said he'd wait us for while we ran (which we practically did) to our room to grab the card and then bring us to the CCC. Once we got there it took about ten minutes to process the rental before we got to see our ride for the next two days, Jessie!
Red? Jessie has red pig tails? We needed a Disney name- get it?
Overall, this whole ordeal probably took an extra hour, maybe hour and a half. Looking back it really wasn't horrible and certainly didn't put a damper on our vacation. However, I feel like I've learned some valuable rental tips for the World.
One. Always bring the credit card you need to pay with!
Two. Book your rental through the desk at the CCC
Three. Take advantage of the rental shuttle to come pick you up at your resort, rather than tranpo-hop.
Four. Be thankful everyone is so fantastic and nice to WDW. Seriously- these people took our mistake and went above and beyond for us!
With all that sorted out, we drove ourselves over to Epcot for our first visit to the park during the trip! As usual, I made Caitlin stop for some pictures on the way in!
We were ready to jump on Spaceship: Earth when we saw two friends so we figured we had to stop for pictures there too.
We both agreed that posing with Daisy was sort of awkward. She was doing her own thing and we just kind of stood there, lol
Next update: Dining under the sea
Looks like you guys got alot done!
