We're home!
We did manage to cram everything back into the luggage. We checked 4 bags going to MCO, 5 bags coming home. It was $15 for the first bag, $25 for the second, so they got us for $70 going in and $95 coming out.
I called BAGS on Friday and paid our luggage fees - very easy once I figured it out. DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT wait until you are in the resort airline check-in line to try to pay those fees!!!!!
There were 2 families in front of us that hadn't paid them. The people were getting mad at the BAGS agents, it was a huge mess. They had to step out of the line, call to pay the fees, give the confirmation to the BAGS agent, huge debacle. CALL TO PAY THE FEES BEFORE YOU GET IN THE LINE!!! I will say when I got the letter about paying the fees I was confused. When I asked at the concierge desk she told me to pay them when we checked the bags in. Um, NO. Wrong answer. Luckily I double checked with the BAGS guy Friday morning. Oh, and in case anyone was curious, you are DEFINITELY supposed to tip the BAGS agent when you do resort airline check-in. I was never really clear on that, but this year they made it QUITE clear.
In December we will just have carry-ons, so they won't get us for anything extra. Next summer we'll have to just see. If we can get decent airfare on SW we won't have to pay for bags, but we prefer to fly American. I think we will be in a villa with a washer next year so TECHNICALLY I won't need to pack so many clothes.
I was bummed that there was no WiFi on our flight coming home. Made for a boring 2.5 hours! Uneventful trip home.
I just added up the cost of ALL of our food. All of the food, drinks, snacks, etc. that we bought over the course of the entire trip came to $2131.86, tips included with the Tables in Wonderland card. That averages out to $142.13 per day. The basic
DDP would have run $120 per day without tips, and the DxDDP would have been $210 without tips. We came in under what I had budgeted for food, mostly because DS ate off the kid's menu the whole time (HIS choice, not ours).
We saved a ton of money on milk because they had it in the concierge lounge. DS drinks gallons of milk! Other than that, we mostly just had cookies, chips, and soda from the lounge. We did eat breakfast there several mornings, so that saved us some money, too. They used to have soup in the evenings, but they didn't have soup any evening during this trip. They typically only had one or two appetizers in the evenings, and if you didn't time it right they were gone. But really, they put those things out as we were leaving for dinner every night so it's not like we were horribly disappointed.
It was well under 50 pounds on this trip and it is much easier to pack. In December we'll need bring both warm weather & cold weather clothes. I've had temps ranging from 30's to 80's on the same trip more than once.
The weird thing was that the tip envelope for the housekeeper was gone. I put it next to the toaster. DH saw it, and he swears he didn't touch it. The only thing we can come up with is that they popped in to make sure we were gone and grabbed the tip. 
Nothing else in the room had been touched.
