Happy Birthday and Graduation with Oddly Surprising Mickey Cake(s)

[mgarbowski]

This will be a scattered and limited report of assorted things during our recent trip from June 28 to July 5, 2022, in a 1 BR at Bay Lake Tower. This first entry is an extremely spare accounting of what we did. Some of these will get fleshed out later on. The trip involved my wife, our younger daughter (just graduated high school), and me.

Tuesday June 28
Uneventful flight (hooray!)
We had a rental car and all local transport is by car except where noted.
Dinner at Raglan Road. Good food, slow service. I will probably add more detailed restaurant descriptions later.
Shopping at Disney Springs.

Wednesday 6/29
TOT LL
Star tours LL
RNRC single rider 33 minutes
Shop
Lunch Brown derby
ROTR ILL
Mickey and Minnie LL
Room, Nap
Hop to MK
Dinner at Pecos bill
Fireworks
BTMRR LL
Pirates LL
After Hours for Deluxe Hotel Guests
Haunted Mansion
Space Mountain
Pooh

Thursday 6/30
Sleep in.
Lunch Cinderella's Royal Table -
Pool at Bay Lake. Almost unpleasantly warm water.
Disney Springs - shopping.
Dinner from food trucks.
I take bus back to room while DW and DD continue shopping.

Friday 7/1

Very rainy day, especially after noon.
Slinky dog LL
Star Tours LL
Lunch pizza Rizzo
Single rider Rnrc - broken - get anytime LL (x-slinky, rotr or tot)
Room relax
Millennium Falcon LL
Decide we don't have time to use LL before ADR
Boat to Boardwalk
Fly Fish - better than previous experience but I still don't love it
Boat back to HS to get car and drive back to Bay Lake

Saturday 7/2
Caring for Giants 9am - not a must do but a good do.
Everest LL ride down
Snack Starbucks
Kilimanjaro Safari LL
Avatar ILL
Everest with anytime LL in light rain
Late lunch Tiffins - awesome
Room relax
Mass (vigil for Sunday) at Basilica
Easy dinner at Contempo Cafe

Sunday 7/3
Splash LL
Pecos bill lunch during downpour
Haunted mansion LL
Tiki room
Carousel of progress
People mover
Ice cream at Plaza
Room relax
Topolino
Back to MK for 4th of July FIreworks on 7/3!
7DMT ILL, pushed back from late morning when down for 3-4 hours, then open for 20 minutes, then closed for lightning strikes
BTMRR LL

Monday 7/4
Gg Boarding Group 14
GG ILL
Best ride ever - details to follow. We managed 2 rides in a row and found the BG process pretty easy to manage.
Spaceship Earth LL
Test Track LL
Space 220 - Glad we did it and worth it, but one and done.
Walk around the World
Figment LL
Soarin LL
Room, relax
Take monorail back to Epcot
Dinner at Tangierine Cafe (a sad, pale shadow of what it was).
Harmonious! and 4th of July fireworks on actual July 4!

Tuesday 7/5
Sleep in
Pack leisurely
Lunch at City Works (Disney Springs)
Drive to MCO.
2 hour delay at airport, honestly not bad as things have been going with air travel.

I'll supplement limited aspects occasionally over the next week or two. Let me know if there's anything you particularly want expanded.

 

[mgarbowski]

This was my experience arranging to ride Guardians of the Galaxy on the 4th of July.
I got Boarding Group 14 at 7am without going through any extreme measures to refresh at exactly 7am. I did have a separate clock app open, but did worry about refreshing exacting some number of nanoseconds in advance.
I was initially told to expect to be called in 140 minutes or 9:20am.
By 7:30am the My Day tab was saying I should expect to be called at 9:48.
The park opened at 8am for onsite guests and 8:30am for everyone else.
At exactly 8:10 am, my group was called with a deadline of 9:10am. This was, of course, absurd. They could not have possibly gotten through 13 BGs in 10 minutes, and before offsite guests were even allowed to be in the park. But I read in various sources that they are very forgiving on the back end of boarding groups. We showed up at roughly 9:50am, the tap point turned green, and we had no issues boarding. I think they must call several groups at the start of the day because they have figured out that it is more efficient to do that, and be forgiving on the back end, than it is to enforce all BG times as they come. It seems counterintuitive, but I expect they have data to support that method.
I also bought a paid LL and my daughter and I rode back to back.

 

[cccory]

You did lots! Good to know that you can get that many rides in.

 

[mgarbowski]

Our graduate loves Figment and I saw a similar arrangement a few months before our trip from a local baker you can find at (https://www.facebook.com/watersidebakes).
We ordered these and had them delivered to the room early in our stay. The baker has a wide variety of themes and designs, and I think is open to special requests. She does need lead time and books in advance.

 

[SonnyEclipsesSpaceAngel]

Our graduate loves Figment and I saw a similar arrangement a few months before our trip from a local baker you can find at (https://www.facebook.com/watersidebakes).
We ordered these and had them delivered to the room early in our stay. The baker has a wide variety of themes and designs, and I think is open to special requests. She does need lead time and books in advance.

View attachment 685517

This is so cute I absolutely love Figment

 

[mgarbowski]

We had 2 reasons to celebrate this trip. In addition to our graduation I turn 60 in late July. Now we mostly focused on the graduation, but back when I made ADRs in advance of the trip, I decided spur of the moment to order 2 Mickey Mouse Celebration Cakes, a birthday one for me at Flying Fish, and graduation one at Tolopino's. I did so, told my wife, and then promptly forgot about it. As did she.
So when we got to Flying Fish and the hostess mentioned a birthday we were confused. I knew I had not otherwise put any notes on the ADR or trip reservation about my birthday. Then we finished the main course, and when the waiter showed up with my cake, which I ordered for myself, nobody was more surprised than I was. In fact my reaction so concerned our server that he offered to take it back, but as I struggled to reconstruct my memory I said "No, bring it. If I ordered it I ordered it." So he did and we enjoyed, but I guess he still was concerned and completely on his own, he removed the cake from the bill. None of which was my intent, and wholly unnecessary, but I accept free birthday cake!

When we got back to our room later that night, I looked at my email history, confirmed the order, realized we had another one coming a couple of days later at Topolino's and eventually the memory of what I did 60+ days earlier was unlocked.

Here is the Topolino's cake. I never regained my senses enough to remember to take of photo of the first one.


Each is enough for 6-8 servings. With 3 of us, we took about half of each one back to the hotel from the restaurant. Two cakes was absolutely overkill for us, regardless of how many we paid for.
Finally, the last quirk is that two of our servers at Topolino's then forgot we had a cake ordered there, and asked us about our interest in dessert, so I had to remind them about the Mickey cake.

 

[mgarbowski]

Odds'n'Ends

• Because online Magic band inventory was so limited, we arrived with old ones.
• We found that in-store Magic Band inventory was extremely limited. I think the big store in Disney Springs had none. Our resort store had none. In parks there was availability here and there.
• Because of that unavailability, and also probably because they are no longer free to resort guests, I saw many more people using cards than I have in several years.
• This tends to slow things down, especially at Lightning Lane entrances. Whereas many families would let even young kids wear their own MBs, with cards either Mom or Dad usually holds the collection, understandably. And then they tap everyone in 1 at a time. It's much slower than everyone doing it for themselves. Plus the family usually blocks both tap in points. As a result experienced the longest LL/FP+ tap in waits ever.
• We ended up buying 1 new MB for my daughter.
  I had bluetooth enabled on a fairly recent iPhone (2020 model/purchase) with location enabled and all the right settings, but it did not work for ride videos but my daughters account picked them up presumably via her new MB.
• Felt like more than usual ride closures.
• Everything was noticeably more crowded starting Saturday 7/2
• It unreasonably annoys me that QS at monorail resorts are still limited to guests at that resort. I really wish all monorail resort guests were considered part of a unified resort for certain purposes like that.
• We tried to go to the DVC lounge at Epcot but it was full and we did not use the waiting list.
• On my two most recent trips, every time I bought Genie+ or ILL it asks for a phone number, just in case, and pre-filled my work number. My work telephone number has not been part of my WDW profile info for years. I double checked. I have the same mobile number listed for both Cell and Home, and it's the same on both Web and the App. When I got home, I checked my DVC profile and found that my work and home landline numbers were still listed in my DVC account profile. I removed them. But I'll have to wait almost a year to test if that fixes the issue or if the number is being pulled from some old database I can't even change.
• Every time I used the app to check in to a table service reservation it took me to a screen to perhaps add extra people to the check-in. In every single instance it said I was allowed to add zero (0) people to the reservation, except on the last day when we checked in to Space 220. This seemed very odd because (1) repeatedly having the app say "hey! maybe we can let you, PSYCHE! no we won't haha loser," over and over again got kind of annoying even though I never actually wanted to add someone, (2) we were a party of 3 and always sat at a 4 top so it should have been no problem if we did want to add someone, and meanwhile (3) the most crowded sought after restaurant said, "sure no problem." I presume every restaurant gets to pick and most managers just set it to "No" on anything but low crowd days but they should have some way to account for the party of 3 issue.

That's the report.