jenjenmouse
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2002
- Messages
- 258
We just returned June 16th from a lovely fourth trip to the world. By we I mean Myself , Jennifer 36 , my DD Taylor 8 and my ds Tanner 7 mos. The rest of our grand gathering left on the 14th of June as we were going to leave with them. I decided for reason's you will soon find out to stay an extra two days.
Let's back up.......
The Grand gathering cast
Me, DD, DS,
My sister and her husband and two kids, one ds13 and dd 17
My sister and her ds 7 years
My sister on her own
We arrived on the 7th of June at AKL. What a great place. It would be our first trip there. We've stayed at ASMu and POR in the past but had a great deal with an email pin code for AKL. My room was a savannah room and it was great. Smaller than I thought it would be but still great. I had a crib orderd and it was in the room upon arrival. It turned out to be a port a crib instead of the real crib I thought is was from reading reviews on this site. So I called the man to pick it up. Was still charged for two nights
. Anyway back to the real story....
We arrived at MCO at 6:30pm and we were advised to pick up our luggage ourselves because it would be 5 hours or more before it would arrive via the magical express. So we did and went to check in at the Magical Express counter. When I got up there the person brought up my reservation and it had three travelers names, Mine, my daughter's and my husband's, who was not with us and never was on any reservation. So I just said "well my husband is not here but my 7mos old son is. Well they had to change the names on the reservation and couldn't figure it out and it took at least 20 to 25 minutes just to fix it. Then they couldn't find my sisters ressie and it took another good amount of time to add them to the system.
Finally, we got in line for the bus to AKL and waited and waited and waited. Then we boared to find out that we had to go to Cornado Springs first. THe driver kept anouncing that she didn't work for Disney and her and her kids would accept tips. (She said it at least 5 times)
We arrived at AKL at nearly 9 pm. We had 8:20 ressies at Boma so we asked the bellman if we could just go straight to the resturaunt as we were all starving. Yes, he said our luggage would be waiting for us. So we went to Boma and then realized we were on the meal plan and had to check in first in order to use our table service meal. So, I went to try to check in and no one was in line so I thought this will be fast. But I got with a chatty CM who wanted to discuss everything. He even said "If you were looking for fast you are out of luck, I talk too much>" So several minutes later I returned to Boma and it is approaching 10 pm and we are straving and still haven't gotten into our rooms. But the meal was awesom, our waiter on the other hand didn't know how to use the meal plan and took eons to check us out. He was visably (sp?) upset that he shorted himself a tip by charging 15% instead of 18% for parties over 6. So it was off to our rooms and the luggage was still to be delivered. It went smoother than I thought. My other family members had pool view rooms so they all came over to ours to check out the animals. After signing my life away stating that we would use quiet voices and not do anything dangerous to the animals I told my nieces and nephews the rules. One of them just didn't care and talked very loud and jumped on the little table and said "you're not the boss of me" His mom didn't mind. Nothing I could do but wait until everyone left. Finally around midnight we went to bed to get ready for our first day at the parks. Animal Kingdom was planned with a breakfast at Donald's Breakfastsaurus at 8 am. I'll continue later with the not so grand gathering story.
Let's back up.......
The Grand gathering cast
Me, DD, DS,
My sister and her husband and two kids, one ds13 and dd 17
My sister and her ds 7 years
My sister on her own
We arrived on the 7th of June at AKL. What a great place. It would be our first trip there. We've stayed at ASMu and POR in the past but had a great deal with an email pin code for AKL. My room was a savannah room and it was great. Smaller than I thought it would be but still great. I had a crib orderd and it was in the room upon arrival. It turned out to be a port a crib instead of the real crib I thought is was from reading reviews on this site. So I called the man to pick it up. Was still charged for two nights
. Anyway back to the real story....We arrived at MCO at 6:30pm and we were advised to pick up our luggage ourselves because it would be 5 hours or more before it would arrive via the magical express. So we did and went to check in at the Magical Express counter. When I got up there the person brought up my reservation and it had three travelers names, Mine, my daughter's and my husband's, who was not with us and never was on any reservation. So I just said "well my husband is not here but my 7mos old son is. Well they had to change the names on the reservation and couldn't figure it out and it took at least 20 to 25 minutes just to fix it. Then they couldn't find my sisters ressie and it took another good amount of time to add them to the system.
Finally, we got in line for the bus to AKL and waited and waited and waited. Then we boared to find out that we had to go to Cornado Springs first. THe driver kept anouncing that she didn't work for Disney and her and her kids would accept tips. (She said it at least 5 times)
We arrived at AKL at nearly 9 pm. We had 8:20 ressies at Boma so we asked the bellman if we could just go straight to the resturaunt as we were all starving. Yes, he said our luggage would be waiting for us. So we went to Boma and then realized we were on the meal plan and had to check in first in order to use our table service meal. So, I went to try to check in and no one was in line so I thought this will be fast. But I got with a chatty CM who wanted to discuss everything. He even said "If you were looking for fast you are out of luck, I talk too much>" So several minutes later I returned to Boma and it is approaching 10 pm and we are straving and still haven't gotten into our rooms. But the meal was awesom, our waiter on the other hand didn't know how to use the meal plan and took eons to check us out. He was visably (sp?) upset that he shorted himself a tip by charging 15% instead of 18% for parties over 6. So it was off to our rooms and the luggage was still to be delivered. It went smoother than I thought. My other family members had pool view rooms so they all came over to ours to check out the animals. After signing my life away stating that we would use quiet voices and not do anything dangerous to the animals I told my nieces and nephews the rules. One of them just didn't care and talked very loud and jumped on the little table and said "you're not the boss of me" His mom didn't mind. Nothing I could do but wait until everyone left. Finally around midnight we went to bed to get ready for our first day at the parks. Animal Kingdom was planned with a breakfast at Donald's Breakfastsaurus at 8 am. I'll continue later with the not so grand gathering story.
! Did you keep up this pace the whole time? Sounds like the start of a very interesting trip......
