Monday was a lazy one. After our (for us anyway) late night out we decided to sleep in and have a pool day. The weather was coolish but still gorgeous. Our friends have been here for two weeks and were full of stories of the horrible rain that just went on and on. I feel just a tiny bit guilty that we're getting such nice weather. There was a tent across the way from us when we first arrived. That must have been fun.
Sometime around 4:00 we packed up and biked back to Miss Beth. We gave Molly a little love and walked her before getting showered and ready for dinner at House of Blues. The original plan was to eat early and see a movie. In the end we were enjoying the pool so much that we decided to rebook dinner for later and skip the movie. There really wasn't anything that both of us wanted to see.
We took the Disney bus to Downtown Disney. I'm not generally a huge fan of the buses but what with the construction at DTD and the fact that cocktails were on the itinerary we decided a bus would be best.
I had to stop by Guest Relations to straighten out our tickets. We have approximately 27 Magic Bands and almost that many different sets of park tickets. I was afraid this would be a lengthy procedure, full of confusion and supervisors but everything went very smoothly and was done in about five minutes.
Thanks to the efficiency of Danielle at Guest Services (She's great-ask for her if you're ever in the neighborhood with a crazy ticket problem) we were early for our ADR. First we thought we'd hit Happy Hour at the Hole in the Wall near Ragland Road but they've recently cut back their HH from a 7:00 to a 6:00 close, poop. If we're paying full price we figured we'd like some music with our drinks and walked on to the bar outside House of Blues. We ordered a couple of drinks, grabbed a menu and listened to a two piece band while watching the DTD evening unfold.
I was really glad we'd taken the time to change our reservation. There was a 40-50 minute wait for walk-ups. There's a huge convention at WDW this week and they had reserved most of the restaurant. We were seated in about ten minutes. (I never make House of Blues reservations with Disney. They're available on opentable.com and there's none of that 24 hour penalty business.)
View from our table
We had an old restaurant.com coupon for $50 off of $100 so were planning on eating and drinking BIG. We both had pre-dinner cocktails, an appetizer, entrees and then a dessert to share. Our waiter was great with helping us to reach our $100 without going over which was wonderful. It's touch and go with me and math when I'm stone cold sober-forget about it after cocktails&
We shared an order of Voodoo Shrimp for an appetizer-this was VERY good!
Scott had the New York Strip. He subbed out the veggies for BBQ beans
I ordered the House of Blues Salad and Street Tacos with grilled fish. I thought I was ordering light but this was a ton of food. The salad had almost too much cheese and pecans and with me that's a lot of cheese and nuts!
For dessert we split the Banana Bread Pudding. This was okay, it's hard to judge. By this time we had food coming out of our ears and the bread pudding at Raglan Road will always my true love
After dinner we moseyed back through DTD toward the Marketplace. Scott bought a cigar, we watched the kids dance party (very cute) for a while and I spent far too much money in Basin. I spent so much in Basin that my bag was too heavy for much more than lugging over to the bus stop and heading home. It was really a nice, relaxing evening.