BEST 20th Anniversary trip ever!! Updated 6/14/14!

[Skjhjb]

Hi! Welcome to my first ever trip report! It will be quite some time before we travel to Disney again, so I wanted to do a trip report to keep the memories fresh!

We travelled from May 10th to May 21st, which included driving to Disney from Ontario and back home again. We booked this trip for our 20th anniversary, and had family photos taken while we were there.

Here is the cast of characters, from left to right:

Julia, 18 - off to University in the fall and eclectic nerd fantastic
Me - cake decorator, Disney freak in the family
Stewart - DH, quality control manager
Jonathan, 13 - Mr. Sports dude - plays basketball & soccer
Hannah, 16 - the princess of the party

The plan so far is to do this day by day, so here's the list of days!

Day 1 - Travel!!
Day 2 - More Travel!!
Day 3 - Check-in & Magic Kindom - Part One!
Day 3 - Magic Kingdom - Part Two!

Day 4 - Epcot day
Day 5 - Hollywood Studios day
Day 6 - Magic Kingdom morning (turned Epcot morning) & photo day
Day 7 - Split day - ladies at Magic Kingdom & tea, gentlemen did quick Epcot and Disney Quest
Day 8 - Animal Kingdom day
Day 9 - Magic Kingdom & Hollywood Studios
Day 10 & 11 - more travel!

I hope you find it interesting!

 

[Skjhjb]

Here we go!

The Princess was in her school production of Seussical the Musical, which ran Wednesday to Saturday. Hubby stayed home Saturday night while I went to the play, and he spent the evening sleeping. We were home from the play by 9:30, so DD had a quick shower, changed and we loaded up the van.

We hit the road by:

USA here we come!

We hit this lovely site around 1am:

Shortly after that, a small bit of panic ensued! We went to program our Georgia stop into the GPS, but it wouldn't recognize any southern states!! I had updated it the week before, and it said "not enough memory for all the updates, so choose" So I chose Canada & the border states, not realizing that the stupid thing would DELETE the rest of the stuff on the GPS! After 30 minutes of some very bad language on my part and practically throwing the thing out the window, I had my second wind and was no longer sleepy.

We decided to rely on this:

The handy dandy, ever so informative, Along I-75 book! We decided to find a Best Buy or WalMart later in the day, and buy a cord for the GPS so we could update it with wifi at our hotel later on. AND as luck would have it, the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives location we wanted to stop at in Georgia was IN the book!

We made really good time - managed to get to Marietta, Georgia around 2:00 in the afternoon. We stopped at the Marietta Diner (SO fantastic) and had a great lunch. Found a WalMart, got our cord, and then drove until 5:00. Found a hotel, hooked up the GPS and Hubby hit the bed and didn't wake until morning!

 

[Skjhjb]

Welcome to Day 2!

We got up at about 7:00, as we wanted to hit the road by 8:00/8:30ish - and with 5 people and one bathroom? We needed some time!

Our oldest actually had to sign on to her University website this morning, and register for all her fall classes. Registration opened today, and if she'd waited until we got home, none of her choices would have been available.

We hit the road, and within an hour and half, we saw this lovely sign:

Woot woot!

And a few hours later? We were in Orlando! We checked in to our off-site hotel - Buena Vista Suites. We weren't due to check in to Disney until tomorrow morning, so this allowed us to chill out, have a great dinner and have an early evening so we could check-in and be at rope drop the next morning.

Last trip down (August 2012) we had happened upon Senor Frogs, and SO enjoyed our meal (and the 2 for 1 happy hour drinks!) so the kids really wanted to eat there again. It was just as great as we remembered!

We found an outlet mall that had a Forever 21, so the girls wanted to shop, and Hubby & The Dude wanted to check out the sports store. So we separated for a wee bit.

Being the clumsy clod I am, I managed to stub my toe on a rack in Forever 21 (in my defence, it was a VERY crowded store). It wasn't too bad, but I managed to cut my toe, right under my sandal strap. Oh joy! It made walking a tad painful - just what I needed! Thank goodness for band-aids!

A fairly uneventful day, nice and quiet, and we hit the beds early so we could be up and on the way to DISNEY by 7:30!!

 

[Skjhjb]

Woo hoo!! It is check-in day!

We hit the road after a nice breakfast at our hotel, and within 5 minutes, there it was, the best sign of the whole drive:

And then this one:

Our home for the next 7 days!!

Hubby and the kids waited in the van while I went in to see if our room was actually ready (it was only 8am!). Sadly, their entire computer system was down! They were able to give me our magic bands (Canadian, had to pick up at the resort) and that was it. They did tell me that because I'd done online check-in, that our room charging & pin was already set up, so we were good to go. And that by the afternoon we would be able to get our room.

SO, instead of parking and taking the bus, we opted to drive over to Magic Kingdom. We made it in plenty of time for rope drop, and then within minutes we saw this awesome sight:

We were in no rush, we had FP+ for 9:45, so we went straight for The Chapeau to get everybody new ears. The girls and I got ears, the boys opted for ballcaps.

We had some time, so we wandered over to Fantasyland to check out all the new things that were behind green walls in 2012! We were excited to see they were allowing you to check out the ballroom in Beast's castle, so we got a few photos there, and then the kids saw this:

Goofballs!

We then parted ways - the girls and I were off to see Anna & Elsa, and the boys were off to BTMRR.

We managed to sneak in a teacup ride before our date with A&E:

And then the moment our oldest had been waiting for since we told her about the trip! She was fully prepared to wait in line for SIX HOURS were they still in Epcot!! But we managed a cool 30 minute wait with our FP+:

Sleeping Beauty was lovely as well:

We hooked up with the boys again, and found they had also managed to ride Splash Mountain while we were meeting with A&E.

We managed to ride Pirates, and then we had FP for Splash again. I wasn't in a Splash mood, so I hit the Christmas store while they got wet. We had a FP for Be Our Guest, so we met back there. Lunch was AMAZING. Everybody was thrilled with their choices.

After lunch we did the Jungle Cruise, and then we decided to go see if our room was ready. It was, and while we got the building we wanted, and the first floor, we didn't get the corner room we had requested. We had a nice view of the parking lot, but it was fine, as we could park the van right by our room for unloading. SO handy!

Our oldest had her iPod along, so she was able to change our last FP+ to a later time, so we hung out for a bit, and DS had a bit of a swim. I think he cared more about swimming than hitting the parks!

Stay tuned for Magic Kingdom day, Part Two!

 

[khertz]

Joining in from the FB group! You have such a lovely family. I was so bummed about having to drive for our May trip, and we were only coming from Louisiana. Driving from Canada must have been quite the adventure!!

Looking forward to more.

 

[Skjhjb]

Waiting for the bus back to Magic Kingdom! All in all, we found the buses to be fantastic - or we just had really great timing! There were a couple times we said "screw it, let's just drive over" but for the most part, we managed quite well with the bus.

Everybody rode Space Mountain, while I looped around on the People Mover. I love that thing! I managed to convert the entire family to People Mover love this trip!

We did some wandering around (my girls are shoppers!) and then it was time to head to Grand Floridian for dinner.

We opted to take the boat - it was beautiful out, and the breeze on the boat was fantastic. We were so excited for our first ever character dinner! We had heard such great things about character interaction at Park Fare, so we were looking forward to dinner.

We had SO much fun at dinner! Dinner was good, nothing really stood out food wise, but it was tasty and filled the belly. The characters were awesome. Our favourites were the Step-Mother & Step-Sisters - they were all very interested in DS, what he did for a living, did he have any money. Both sisters mentioned (individually) he could marry the other sister, as "she has lower standards than I do"

We ended up heading back to our room after dinner. The princess was working on a headache and didn't feel well. We were all pretty tired anyway, so it was an early night for us.

Tomorrow - Epcot!!