Bengalfreak and his Bengal-ettes trip to WDW

[bengalfreak]

For anyone that doesn’t wanna read the driving stuff and introductions, Day one starts in message 3. This first page is going to be very boring.

Hello, I’m finally in WDW again. As I’m writing this, it is Tuesday, at 5:27 am. I’ve been up since 3:30am (more on that later). For those of you not familiar with our situation, we are here for the first time since June 2004. We were supposed to be back in early December 2006. My DD is 17 and has always been an honor student (sometimes with straight A’s) and in a tough Catholic school where 99% of the students go on to college. That’s saying something. So we thought that it would be no big deal to take her out of school for a week and go to WDW when the crowds were exceptionally light and holiday festivities abound. So imagine our surprise when we sent out the email to all her teachers that she would be gone for a week, and her math instructor replied that we might want to rethink our plans since she was currently failing Algebra II. Not a B- or C+, a stone cold F. DD is gifted but not always motivated. At this point we were three weeks from our getaway day. Well, needless to say, we cancelled that trip at great expense and re-planned it for the day after school was out.

I’ll start out with a listing of all the guilty parties.

DW – Over the years she has been almost as big, although not as obsessive, of a Disney aficionado as me. However, she’s not anywhere near as keen about this trip as she has been the others. This is our 7th trip since our first in 1985 (honeymoon) and I think she would like to do something else for a change. She’s 49 for a few more months. Her name is Rae

DD – Previously mentioned. She loves WDW and she is the main reason for this trip. I think this will be our last big vacation as a family. She’s just finished her junior year of high school and I don’t see her going on a vacation with us next summer. There’ll be too many things she’ll want to do as a full fledged adult. My wife believes she’ll go on vacation with us forever but I just don’t think so. It makes my heart sad, but I think this is the end of bringing up baby. Oh yeah, here name is Rose. And, thru tremendous hard work and a father that cracks the whip extremely hard when necessary, she finished the year on the honor roll.

Me – I’m Lee. I’ll turn 43 in 8 days. The only thing I like better than WDW, aside from my wonderful family of course, are the Cincinnati Bengals (everyone go ahead and get your laughs out now). I’ve been a season ticket holder for most of the last 10 years. Anyway, I can’t get enough of WDW. If it weren’t for limited finances, I’d be here at least every other year. Although, I must admit, this trip is turning out to be much more tiring than in the past. I guess I can live with it if we don’t come back for ten years (Rae’s idea). I’ll probably start planning that trip about six weeks after we get home. Everyone needs an off-season to rest and recuperate.

Travel Day – Friday 6/8 (The day after school let out). I’m up at 3:00am (an hour earlier than our past trips) and wanted to be on the road by 4. It’s a 16 hour drive for us and we like to get it done in one day. We could make it in 13 hours, but Rae has nightmares of hellish vacations in the car as a child when her father wouldn’t stop for hours on end. I make sure there are restroom/stretch-the-legs-breaks at least every two hours and we stop for an hour for lunch and dinner.
I should have packed the car the night before. I thought I could get up and shower, load the Chevy. Trailblazer, and be on the road in an hour. Turns out it was 4:55am when we pulled out of the driveway. I’m glad I got up an extra hour early. We get going at exactly the same time as we did when I got up an hour later.

The trip is fairly uneventful. We live in Dayton, OH, so about 900 of the 950 mile trip is straight down I-75. It couldn’t be an easier drive as long as you leave early enough that you are nowhere near Atlanta at rush hour. Kentucky and Tennessee are very mountainous (hills?) states and the roads wind thru the mountains constantly so you really can’t make very good time. After that the terrain becomes very flat. I always hate the drive thru Georgia. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful state. But it is very long North to South which means half our trip runs thru GA and it seems like it takes forever. And their transportation dept. has a nasty habit of reducing the speed limit in construction areas for 20 miles at a time with absolutely no lane restrictions in place. In Ohio, if you don’t have some kind of lane closure going on, they have to restore the permanent speed limit immediately. Evidently that’s not so in the Peach State. I drove thru construction zone after zone with reduced speed limits and all the barrels pushed off the side of the road. Sigh, oh well.

No big problems until we get to Florida. I start hearing on the radio that there is a major accident at mile marker 407? North of Ocala, A semi-tractor trailer is jack knifed and the report says that it has been a major delay for hours and hours but two lanes are open to traffic. Anyway, we hit the backup and it is enormous. We never did see any accident or traffic reduced to two lanes. They must have gotten it all cleaned up by the time we came thru, but since it was 6:00pm rush hour traffic just never got caught up. The accident cost us an hour, but the most important thing is that hopefully no one was hurt.

We arrived on International drive at about 10PM. I never reserve a hotel for the first night of our trips. I know its risky, but I can’t be sure if we are ever going to make it all in one day, its just too many miles. Luckily, the first hotel I try has availability although for a bit more than I budgeted ($109 versus 79). It doesn’t sound that bad but $109 turns into $125 with FL hotel taxes and before we stay the first night, we are already 50 bucks in the holes. I could have always searched for a cheaper hotel, but we were tired and the Courtyard by Marriott was very nice. We got to sleep by 11:30pm which is later than I planned. I was hoping we wouldn’t suffer for it in the morning because out first day is at the MK and we needed to be up by 7.

 

[Avivasmom]

Great start....we drive too but only have a 3 hour and 15 minute drive North to the Big Mouse.

 

[bengalfreak]

Day 1 – Magic Kingdom

Up at the butt crack of dawn, (that’s 5am for all of you non-Ohians) I start preparing for the day. I’d like to say for all of you early morning groaners out there, that I haven’t used an alarm clock for 15 years. Unless I get to bed way past midnight, I’m up between 4:30 and 5:30am every morning. Anyway, I put the coffee on and I get the clan up at 7am. We get the suitcases loaded up and head to the MK. The first thing I notice is that they’ve raised the price of parking from $8 to $10 per day. I must have missed that little update.

We park at the TTC and take the monorail to the entrance gates. We are at the turnstiles at 8:30am. I had thought that they used to let you onto Main St. at 8:30 but not any longer. They stop you just below the Main St. train station for the opening skit with Mickey Mouse and friends. I got some good pictures of some characters that I don’t see very often. Geppetto and other characters from Pinocchio can be found below. Once we're let in, we high tailed it to Big Thunder Mountain.

At this point, I’d like to say I subscribed both to the Ridemax software and TourGuideMike’s web site. I bought Ridemax back in December when we were originally supposed to go and TGM much closer to this trip’s beginning. And up to now, I think Ridemax wins hands down. With TGM, you get tons of information. And while a lot of it is good stuff for first timers, there’s just not that much that I didn’t know. Don’t go to the parks that have EMH. Its too crowded. Vets know that. Ridemax allows you to enter all of the attractions that you want to see, how long you want to stay in the park, and when you want to eat. Press the button and bam, a few minutes pass and you have a personally tailored touring plan that has worked perfectly up to now (Tues morning Day 4).

Anyway, Rose’s favorite attraction in MK is BTMRR. So I told ridemax we wanted to ride it twice. I should also say we broke the MK up into two days. Left side of the park on day one and right side later in the week. We went to BTMRR and rode with no wait at all. After disembarking, there’s a cast member with a mechanical counter in his hand that is clicking as we walk by and he says something I couldn’t understand. Being somewhat hearing deprived (I work around heavy equipment) I asked Rose what he said. “Congratulations” she replies. Wondering what he meant, we leave the ride. Outside there is another group of cast members just congratulating the he$$ out of us. They start ranting about the Year of a Million Dreams and fastening blue bracelets on our wrists. It seems we have won the right to stay in the park for an hour after everyone else leaves. They tell us to be in Tommorrow Land at 11:00pm to begin our magic hour. We were so unbelievably happy to have won something, that we didn’t think to ask where in Tommorrow Land to be. I mean, its a pretty big land (more on this later).

According to our Ridemax schedule we were to ride BTMRR again which we did. All except for Rae, she really doesn’t like roller coasters because of the big drops. And although she liked BTMRR last trip, she didn’t today despite the fact that there are no drops. Again we rode with no wait whatsoever. Our itinerary then said to proceed to Splash Mountain. Once there, Rose said it was just too early for that big drop. I told her we’d just get a fastpass for it and do it at the end of the day and it shouldn’t affect our schedule too much. The best laid plans of mice and men. It seems that the Disney folks are currently upgrading the FP systems at MK. And because of this, there would be no FP’s available for SplM at all today. Ouch. At this point we had a couple of choices. Ride now with a very short wait, come back and wait a long time, or don’t ride at all. Since this trip is about having fun and not just to say we did everything, we skipped it. Next on the list: PoC. Rose is a huge Johnny Depp and thus PoC fan. So she was enormously enthused when she heard that they were adding Capt. Jack Sparrow to the ride. We get there and both cues are open. Both DW and DD are complaining loudly when I pick the right side. Everyone else is using the left side they say. “Exactly says I.” This side doesn’t even look like a line they say. We can’t even see the other people. “Trust me” I say beginning to wonder if I’ve err’d myself. About that time we arrive at the embarkation point and I am a hero. I decide not to point out that there is no wait for either line so it didn’t really matter that I was right. I’ll take any bit of praise I can get being the only man in a five girl (both dogs are female too) household. PoC is nice, but Rose is hugely disappointed. They’ve only added a couple of audio animatronic Capt. Jacks. It seems she thought they were redoing the whole attraction around the movies. Although there is a nice Davey Jones effect at the beginning of the ride. I didn’t even ask Rose if she wanted to ride again. Her face let me know that she didn’t.

At this point, I take my leave of the ladies and walk briskly to Peter Pan’s Flight (what no official acronym? I'll call it PPF from now on). While getting FP, I notice the standby line is already at 30 min. I meet up with the girls at Mickey’s Philharmagic and we experience our first wait whatsoever of the morning. Its about ten minutes until we are ushered into the theater. This is the first time any of us experience MP. I’m not sure why we didn’t do it last time, but we were astounded. Its definitely the best of the 3D movie attractions in all of WDW. And it features my favorite character Donald Duck. The duck should be the face on everything at WDW not that silly old mouse. Anyhow, it’s a great attraction. Womenfolk were in total agreement.

The list then says to proceed to IASW. This attraction was closed in ’04 when we visited so we were anxious to see the refurbishment. I have a couple of questions to ask you veterans here. One – haven’t a lot of the original dolls from the World’s Fair attraction been replaced? If so, I think this is a huge bummer. It was one of the few things leftover from the original Walt designed attractions. Two – didn’t the song used to play largely in English throughout the ride? Now it plays in the language of the land you are passing thru. If this has been changed, I definitely like the new version. The song doesn’t seem to get stuck in your brain anywhere near as much. Of course, maybe its just been too long since I’ve been on the ride and nothing has changed but a new paint job.

As the designated FP runner, (something that is much more exhausting than I thought, but hey this trip is all about the girls right?) I head to the jungle Cruise to get the paper tickets. DW/DD enjoy ice cream from a kiosk near Piniocchio’s Village Haus. When I return, we experience PPF, the Country Bears, and the JC with little to no wait. CBJ needs some updating, the jokes are tired and the bears need some physical work. PPF and JC were great as always. My daughter was definitely not enjoying the extremely corny jokes of the JC boat captain. Kids just grow up too fast. It seems like a few months ago that things like that sent her into a giggling fit.

Well, that’s the end of the morning. It’s a little before 1:00pm and we did everything we wanted except for SplM. I’ll redo the day 2 MK tour schedule to see if we can fit it in. We are off to check in at the Cypress Pointe Grand Villas and then to Walmart to stock the fridge. I’ll check back in later with the rest of day one.

 

[ebowen]

Wow! Could we be separated at birth? The two things I obsess about most in life ... WDW and The Bengals (happen to be a Buckeye fan too). Grew up in Miamisburg and just move to Louisville 3 years ago. I can't wait to read more. Have fun getting up at "the butt crack of dawn" for the rest of your trip.

 

[OhMari]

Hey, you have to come back and finish your report.
Would you believe there was no opening when I went over Easter. It was 8:00 a.m. and a family got to throw pixie dust. That was it.
Hope to hear from you again.

 

[Lil' Grumpy]

, oh~mari..is right...this is a very good trip report,
even though , ..you are one of those dreaded bengal fans....
[to the point of corrupting the kids]....i like your take on the
ways do a wdw vacation....so come'on back!

are you stil listening to the old soap opera..my bunglin bengals?

[ i didn't make that up ].

how's bot those bucky-eyes? did you "see" the florida game?..sumpthin
didn't look right.. , eps. the calls....* sometimes..it pays
not to know the rules...

actually..i started college @ gainsville...i can remember when all 3
fla. schools..didn't win 3 games..the whole year..but, they
were fun to watch.

hope you finish up..sorta brings back the old days...

,cool pics. too!

 

[OhioTony]

DANG! ...Start off hot with a "Butt-crack of dawn" blast Keep momentum going with cool PIX & snappy banter ...Then DISAPEARS at the end??? Dude MUST be a Bengals fan!


Unfortunatly..I'm a fan too! Who-Dey..SHHHHH

Now FINISH YOUR REPORT!

 

[tinawv]

Hey, we have the "butt crack of dawn" here in West Virginia too. Mabye it's because we border the state of Ohio. Look forward to more.