My basketball season is (un)officially over. The chance of me somehow getting assigned anything at this point is almost 0 because I'm only a 3rd year and we are getting deep into the post-season tournament. DH and I worked a District Final last night for division 4 girls (which is the smallest school designation in Michigan) and it was.....something. The teams had a combined 8 wins and 25 losses before the tournament started and one of them somehow managed to beat the favorite in their district on Wednesday night. Anyhow, it's time to work on new goals for the year now.
Quick (haha!) Princess Weekend Recap:
Wednesday: I took the day off from school so I could completely focus on being packed and ready to go for my flight on Thursday. We had a boys 7pm playoff game to work that was a 2.5hr drive away, and my flight was at 6am, so I needed to basically be able to roll out of bed, put my bag in the car and leave. And then the school called. DD's teacher recommended she go home because her stomach was bothering her, but once she was home and had a pepto in she was completely fine. We got home from our basketball game at about 10:30, and I was in bed a little after 11pm.
Thursday: DH and I had decided to get up at 3:30 so I would have time to drink coffee and get to the airport in time to check my bag. My local airport is tiny, and the longest we've ever waited is about 15min to check a bag, and there's never more than a 2min wait at security. After a quick hop to Chicago (that I somehow managed to nap on), I had nearly a 3 hour wait for my next flight. Thanks American Airlines. I grabbed a breakfast sandwich and waited in an outrageously long line for Starbucks. My flight to MCO was also uneventful, just the way I like it. Once I was off the plane,
@The Expert sent me a text letting me know her sister's flight was landing about 25min early, so instead of taking an Uber to SSR and then a bus to the expo I sat and waited so we could all ride together.
Yall. I was not prepared for the expo to look busier than MW on a Wednesday. I didn't get a VQ spot because I was obviously out of range, and The Expert tried to grab one for me at 1pm but they showed as unavailable. She had grabbed pins and a shoe ornament for me, but I still like to look at stuff and had earlier waffled on getting a coffee mug. Unfortunately for me, it appears that the mugs all sold out on day 1.
When we were done at the expo and had picked up some groceries we headed to the resort (room was finally ready!) to unload all our luggage and figure out dinner. We got what was quite possibly the best location for a standard room at SSR (Grandstand by the pool) for a race weekend when you're planning to bus. It was less than a 5min walk to the lobby, and another minute or 2 for the race busses. We headed to DS for dinner and The Expert and I got food from Morimoto Street Food while her sister opted for a salad from Earl of Sandwich (Morimoto was lacking in vegetarian options.) We met back at EoS to eat and had several people stop to ask us where we had gotten our food.
After dinner we organized all of our costume parts, pinned our bibs, set our alarms and got into bed for the 5k.
Friday: We managed to be on the 2nd bus, but just missed out on getting the pre-race Merida pic by about 4 groups. We all dropped back to D to run with The Expert's aunt, and generally had a great time. ELENORE was the first character stop and you'd better believe that we waited for her! We had been discussing which characters were "must stop" and she was the only 1 I had come up with. I appreciated that there seemed to be more characters out than I'm used to seeing on MW, and while most of the lines WERE long, they weren't OMG-runDisney-do-better! long. I somehow grabbed the wrong CC out of my wallet (it was expired) and wasn't able to get my post-race cider, so I hopped back into the Merida line after the race. The rest of the group had headed back to the room to hit the parks, but I definitely needed some time to decompress with back-to-back early wake-ups. I just squeaked in to getting a Merida pic, and also managed to get a picture with Daisy before they shut everything down for the morning. I took a nap in the room, and then met the group at Cake Bake shop for lunch. I missed the bus I needed to be on for HS, and ended up needing to hustle more than I wanted, and still managed to be about 5min late.
We debated if the HH meetup was on FRIDAYS or if it was on 10k DAY, so The Expert and I walked over to BC to see if anyone we recognized was there at 2pm. It was pretty full at HH, but there were no familiar faces, so we picked up her mom's car from BW and headed back to the room. I am pretty sure I took another nap, possibly both of us since The Expert was fighting a migraine (I'm pretty sure this was on Friday? The days all run together.) I grabbed a tikka bowl from EET at DS with some butter naan for dinner and then dodged raindrops back to the room as the storm system moved in. Again we organized all of our costume parts and pieces, pinned our bibs, waited for runDisney to post a plan for the rain, and got to bed later than we wanted.
Saturday: 3am came sooner than both of us wanted, and we elected to drive to the start instead of bussing just in case the rain got worse, or there was a last-second delay. We met Naomeri at the table she commandeered near the lightpole and it was lovely to see familiar faces AND some new faces at the meetup.
The 10k course was great. I can see how it would really suck for wheels with multiple very tight turns, but runDisney did a great job getting us more in-park time, having great entertainment, and no horribly-placed water stops. The Polynesian drummers by Connections? SO GOOD. Manageable character lines? Also good. No hair-pin turns onto the highway? Delightful. Mr_Incr3dible ran with us for a bit, but I ended up walking a lot more than I wanted to because my achilles just were not having it. I don't know if it's the shoes, running on pavement, or just me having hit a certain point with strength-loss but I really do need to figure out something if I want to be able to continue to run. PT didn't do a whole lot for me, so I'm hoping that getting back on the strength training wagon will help address things.
I DID get my post-race Cider, and then apparently drank too much of it before we got back to the room, and THEN had a mimosa at Raglan Road where Naomeri, Nancipants, myself, and Mr Incr3dible met up for lunch. (Lunch was SUPER FUN!) I ended up with a wicked headache (hello, dehydration) that really put a damper on my afternoon plan to soak up some sunshine on my vitamin D deprived northern skin.
I had gotten my shopping in DS done for family members before lunch, so after lunch when my headache really hit, I.....drumroll....took a nap. Shocking. Did I just sleep this entire trip? Maybe? Did I also go to bed a 7pm when The Expert did since she was getting up early for the HM? Yes. Yes I did.
Sunday: I got 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep and it was AMAZING. I checked in with The Expert while she was running to gauge if I wanted to wait for her before hitting the parks, and decided to try to get in MK early and take advantage of lower wait times for things in general. And then my bus time got pushed back. And back. And back. So I decided to hit up Epcot and then hop to MK. And then the bus time for Epcot completely disappeared! Finally an MK bus showed up, so I stuck with my original plan. I got medal pics right away with no line, ate a cinnamon roll and rode a few rides. I was looking for the pink and blue ombre sparkly corkcicle tumbler and could not find it ANYWHERE. Once The Expert arrived, we got more medal pics, looked through the Emporium again for the cup, and then headed to Poly Tower for lunch. Then it was off to Epcot for Guardians and margaritas, which turned into Guardians and Brown Elephants (which is a frozen coke with amarula in Africa) when we both decided that tequila might not be the best choice if we wanted to last until HEA. Creations didn't have the cup, but a CM's tablet showed that they allegedly had a lot in-stock and that we should check in MK. We hopped to HS for TSMM, and checked the shops for the cup. And then I momentarily wondered about hitting AK for EE to complete the 4-park challenge. We decided that there wasn't time to do that AND get back to the room for warmer clothes and a quick dinner, so we grabbed a bus back to SSR.
Once we made it back to MK we had a little bit of time to kill, so we rode JC and our Skipper was fantastic. We also had several first-timers, which made things even funnier since they had no idea what was coming next.
HEA was great. I cried, as usual. And the settled for the black glitter version of the corkcicle, which is much less happy than the pink one I wanted. But using mobile checkout, what color do you think it rang up as? Yes. Pink. So maybe Disney IT is its usual self, and they don't actually have that cup in stock any longer. By the time we got back to the room I was genuinely wondering if I should even bother going to sleep as I was getting up a little before 2am to get my uber to MCO. I decided that I needed as much sleep as I could get since I had TWO connections to make.
My uber driver was as strange as I was expecting. He didn't take any toll roads (understandable) but I was a little concerned when we started back and I suddenly didn't recognize any of the stuff out the window. My flights home were uneventful, and DS1 picked me up with a slice of Costco pizza and a coke. But when we got home, I definitely went directly to bed to take yet another nap.
#TeamNap.
I cannot thank The Expert enough for a super fun weekend, for hosting me in her rooms, and for hanging out in the park with me on Sunday when she had been up since 2am.
