First Ever Trip Report: New Owners & Lovers of AKL Jambo...Marathon Weekend

[mrsgoose8]

Still riding the Disney High!

I'll do a little intro to our family and then I'm gonna go to bed and write more tomorrow.

So back before MrIncredible and I had kids, we thought we'd wait till the youngest one was old enough to remember before we did a "once and a lifetime" trip to Disney.

Things haven't gone according to that plan, thank goodness!!

MrI and i had visited DL prekids and thoroughly enjoyed it. So naturally when we visited our friends in SoCal when our kiddos were 2.5 and 4 months old, we felt we HAD to take them. Who knew when we'd get to Cali again!

Well I saw my daughter light up with the Disney Magic. :ixieDust:: everywhere. I almost cried when she saw the castle, she was just bursting with delight. It was right then (feb 2012) That I began formulating plans for a trip to WDW for us, ASAP!

The "dream" became reality with a stay at Pop Century for marathon weekend 2013. Unfortunately due to circumstances I didn't run the marathon as planned, but we did enjoy an amazing time at WDW. However... We did NOT enjoy the value resort. We are unfortunately spoiled by hubby's cushy traveling job which has made us into Marriott addicts....so when I realized DVC would mean more affordable rooms/like what we are used to, we decided we'd go for it! We bought at AKL direct (oops...now we know better!) even though we had never even been to AK theme park or visited the resort. Happy to say I have no regrets (other than buying resale!).

That leads us up to January 2014, Marathon weekend. Our first ever stay at our home resort, our first ever Disney race, and Our first trip together, away from our kiddos that wasn't work related in 4 years. (If you're keeping track, basically since our oldest was born! )

So MrI and I ran the WDW half and have already planned on attempting to get our Coast to coast medal this year. Plus 2 other visits to AKL. Trying to make the most out of our annual passes, haha.

Okay, I must make myself go to bed! But I can't wait to write more tomorrow!

 

[twinsouvenirs]

Subscribing! We too joined early--our twins were only a year (now they are a ripe old 16 mo) but we are thrilled to have so many years of fun together ahead of us! Can't wait to hear about your trip--next Jan we are planning to do the 5k (I want to try the 10k but I'll wait for '16 on that, I'm having another baby in July) and doing some of the kids runs too!

 

[mrsgoose8]

Subscribing! We too joined early--our twins were only a year (now they are a ripe old 16 mo) but we are thrilled to have so many years of fun together ahead of us! Can't wait to hear about your trip--next Jan we are planning to do the 5k (I want to try the 10k but I'll wait for '16 on that, I'm having another baby in July) and doing some of the kids runs too!

awww my first ever follower! welcome!

God bless you ! i can't imagine 3 under two!! :shudder:

The kids races are soooo fun. My daughter did them last year when she was three and I'm afraid when we go this summer she will be disappointed when we go to WDW and there is no race! haha!

 

[mrsgoose8]

Boy, is flying without kids so different! It had been so long since I had flown anywhere without my kiddos! We packed so much lighter and the plane ride was actually fun and relaxing. No problems whatsoever. We made our way to ME (again, so much easier to do the long walk to ME with OUT kiddos!)

We got to the ME check in and I had our vouchers ready, but the MagicBand worked for us perfectly and we only waited a short while to get on our bus to the AKL Jambo House! LOVED that the ME could be checked in on the MB. Next trip, the less papers to worry about the better!!

We arrived after the stops at POP and AoA. We had some nostalgia on this bus tour because last year we stayed at POP with our kiddos.

While I was worried I wouldn't like the dark decor of Jambo, I was totally pleased to find I was wrong! I loved it! I felt it was very welcoming and I really liked the lobby with all the couches and kids doing rubbings etc right when you walk in. I immediately felt like our kids would love it.

I had checked in online and requested a savannah view. I did not think this would be honored with being a value studio! But we lucked out and we were on the ostrich trail, Room 5112. Not TOO far from an elevator (again, probably seemed shorter because no kids!) and we had a view! Not a great one, but I will take it since we got it for free! We mostly saw birds/the ostrich. Occasionally there was an Elk type thing out there. I can't remember its real name. More visits will fix that! Forgot to add, our MB worked here fine. Though I agree with another DISer that I often found myself awkwardly contorting to make the mickey's match. LOL. My hubby had trouble figuring it out at first too, but eventually we got the hang of it and had no real problems on the trip.

We weren't sure if we were going to make the race expo that evening (our flight had gotten in about 430, the expo ended at 7pm), so we had no dinner reservations. After arriving we decided to do the expo the following morning so we headed down to Boma and were able to be seated with no waiting. (The dining theme we experienced on this trip was that if we were willing to eat early, there was no waiting...but almost always when we left a restaurant it looked like the wait would be long!!!)

We LOVED Boma. I usually find buffets to be a waste- not a big eater- but I enjoyed this thoroughly! My favorite was the sweet potato mash and the sweet potato bread pudding. (I'm a bit of a carbaholic!). My hubby loved the quiche.. I forget the name... Bombati maybe? Anyway we both also had the steak- delicious. everything was pretty delicious. Hubby then decided he wanted to change some of our ressies around so that we could eat there again for breakfast the day we departed! That's how much he loved it! I figured we may not go there in the next trip with the kiddos (probably will do more character dining), so I acquiesced to his request.

We poked around the resort a bit before hitting the hay early. I should tell you now we are not late night DTDers. We are parents of young children, AKA people who go to bed at 8pm. LOL!

The next day we went to the race expo, then had our longest wait time of the trip.. In my next post! I'm going to try to add a few pictures here.. let me know if they work!
Jambo Lobby:

Bed in the Studio...One thing I will miss while at DVC is the fun towels. But I'll deal.

 

[KBrown88]

Joining it too! AKV is my family's home resort too. We love it! Boma is my favorite restaurant! Looking forward to reading more of your report.

 

[mrsgoose8]

Joining it too! AKV is my family's home resort too. We love it! Boma is my favorite restaurant! Looking forward to reading more of your report.

Yipee!! Welcome!! We are very happy so far!

 

[mrsgoose8]

Did the pictures work for you all??

Anyway, where Was i... ahh Friday!

So, my friend got to the Expo before me the day before and had let me know that the shoe sales line was already done for the day. We decided to meet at the Expo when it opened the next morning to get in the line. I should explain more:

New Balance and Run Disney worked together to offer a new shoe line just for Run Disney. The shoes feature Goofy, Mickey, Cinderella and Minnie. Well my friend and I were NOT going to leave the expo without these shoes.

Us and every other person coming to this event! LOL

They set it up so FIRST you waited in a line to sign up to actually get the shoes. At the front of that line, you then were able to sign up and get a text alert for when your turn at the shoe tent was up. Then you had to sign in and wait again (within 20 minutes, so you couldnt leave te expo the entire time while you waited for your text) for someone to be available to help you. Then you got to get your shoes, IF they still had them. So by thursday afternoon when my friend got there, they were already SO busy that there was no more sign ups for the entire evening.

So MrI was not interested in getting up early on our first day of kid free vacation. I personally can't sleep in past 7 anyway usually! So I got on the first bus I could to get to the expo, (located at ESPN for those who might not know ) and got in the first, "sign up to text me" line. This line was already decently long considering that the expo was not even technically open yet! Definitely glad we had headed there early! My friend got there after me BUT i was able to get her signed up also, Yay Me!

We weren't sure how long the wait would be after we signed up. I was hopeful that since we were early it wouldn't be too bad. But I was also not going to spend the entire day at ESPN ! There is shopping and photo ops at the expo, along with picking up your packet and tech tee, so I did those things. Hubby got there and did the same. I enjoyed walking around and I was surprised that before I was "done" I got the text to go get the shoes!! So my friend and I both got to go in to the tent a few minutes apart.

We weren't sure they were going to have our sizes available either- people were buying them and putting them on Ebay immediately They did limit the purchases but it was soemthing like 6 pairs per person or something.

MrI had said he didn't want a pair (MrI can SOMETIMES be a little cheap...) but i decided to ask and see if they had some anyway. I got the LAST pair they had in his size... it was fate!! I tried to call him but he didn't pick up. I knew he REALLY needed new shoes and they were not more than regular running shoes so I went for it! Turned out he was happy I did ! Go me again!

Since I got the shoes I couldn't justify any other souvenirs, so away we went! Went back to AK to drop off our new shoes, and then on to MK!

More later!

 

[mrsgoose8]

So we dropped off our shoes back at the hotel (forgot to post a pic, here they are!) https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-lmC9R2FWJJA/UtiRjqh8pDI/AAAAAAAATvE/D51uyyYtzp0/s544-no/IMG_3959.JPG

We had decent luck with the buses our entire stay at AKL, both the special Expo/Race buses and to the parks. We took our nice little ride down to MK andthere were no big lines. I'm thinking this was about 11am. Put our MB on and no green mickey. Uhoh. No Bueno. Now I know we had already paid for our APs and seen it come out of my visa so I was a little worried.... Then they directed us to Guest Services.

I was sooooo thankful we didn't have our kids with us at this point. This was the LOOOOOOONGEST line we waited in during our visit, and the only one that had NO shade. We waited over an hour at guest services. I was really surprised that not every window was open. We stayed in decently good spirits during this time, again, not having our kids with us kept our mood up while waiting... I felt reeeeeeaaaalllly bad for the people who had kids with them !!

By the end of this hour of waiting I was getting mildly annoyed, but it was all erased when some computer issues erred in our favor. We ended up getting our APs at an extra discount because of the issues (yay!) and were totally shocked that that happened. So happy dance for us. Well worth the hour wait, since we all know Disney is not in the business of saving us money, LOL!!

After about 20 minutes of the computer issues, we were all straightened out and headed into the park. Worked perfectly this time and we were finally in the parks!

We had gotten the fast pass for Beast's castle lunch. Soooo glad we did that because the line was HUGE. We zipped right in. We had preordered our lunch but they couldn't find it (that comes with being a Beta tester, so we weren't surprised). We had to wait in the shorter line inside the castle to order our food. Of course when we got to the ordering screens, we WERE able to pull up our pre ordered food. Just scanned our MBs and we were on our way! I loved eating in there and definitely plan on bringing our kids. Of course they won't actually eat anything there... so MH and I will get QS there and share our fries with them, haha. The Turkey sandwich was amaaaazing. Yum.

Love how the chocolate says "Be Our Guest"...

Room I want to eat in with my kids!!!

A funny castmember photobombed us :

The real shot:

Okay more to post, but my 2 year old almost deleted this entire post so I am posting before he does it again and I lose it all!

 

[WAHkoMom]

I was enjoying your TR - - are you still making updates?