It's about time! A Spring Break TR (March 09)

[michellem1118]

I'm going to try really hard to finish this trip report - it'll be the first one I complete if I'm successful. Last fall, we booked 3 2009 trips to WDW, and I was utilizing the boards a lot leading up to trip #1 in March... then when we got home, life got in the way of DIS'ing, and I took an unintentional break for a few months. Now, with less than 2 weeks til trip#2, I'm determined to get this TR done before we leave.

First up, some background/introductions:
The cast for this trip is very small - just me & DH. We're both teachers, so unfortunately we're relegated to traveling during busy weeks or the heat of summer. Someday we'll retire and be able to use our DVC points to travel in the off-season... we hope!

Here's a picture of us from our wedding last summer:

Our original dates were Monday, March 15-Friday, March 20, booked at SSR on our developer bonus points. We added on Sunday, March 14 at All-Star Movies when we realized the drive was a bit shorter than we first thought.

This was also the first trip with my new dSLR camera, so hopefully I'll end up with some good photos to post... I need to move them to my new laptop and get them edited... good thing I'm off work right now! More coming soon!

 

[michellem1118]

Departure: Saturday, March 14

Because this trip took place over Spring Break, airfare was ridiculously high (like, nearly $500 per ticket), so we decided to drive. We knew the drive would take the better part of two days, so our reservation at SSR (booked on developer points that we got when we added on to our DVC contract) started on Monday, March 15. The plan was to stop about halfway to Disney on Saturday night, and then get a hotel an hour or so out of Orlando for Sunday night.

Well, when we started pricing hotels outside of Orlando, I got to thinking… and decided to see if there was an AP rate at a value resort for that Sunday night. Of course, there wasn’t. But, then I started thinking some more… (you’ll soon see that thinking is dangerous for me!)… and checked the cash rates at the values for that night… with the help of some fuzzy Disney math, which DH never understands even though he teaches math, it was decided that it made more sense to book at All-Star Movies for Sunday night. Reservations in hand (or, well, in my pretty purple trip binder), we headed out around 7:30AM on Saturday morning to begin the drive from Dallas to Orlando.

We were pretty excited at this point… we’d gotten out of the house more than an hour ahead of schedule, and were hopeful that we’d be able to cancel our reservation in Daphne, AL, and push on into the FL panhandle before stopping for the night. We made great time all through Texas, even though it started raining right as we got on the highway and rained on us the ENTIRE day. We entered Louisiana, and continued making great time… until we got to Baton Rouge.

It took us over 2 hours to get through Baton Rouge early on a Saturday afternoon, which took us completely by surprise, even in the rain. The drive got worse after we passed through Baton Rouge, and we encountered quite a bit of traffic as we passed through Mississippi and Alabama. Due to the traffic set-backs, we kept our reservation in Daphne, and arrived at our overnight home around 9:00pm – about 4 hours behind schedule. When we checked in, it was still raining, but we were starving, so we headed up the road for a quick dinner. I can’t remember the name of the place, but we both ended up with a mild case of food poisoning, so our night was not as restful as we would have liked.

Day two, Disney arrival day, up next!

 

[michellem1118]

Arrival Day, Sunday March 15:

We woke up pretty early after a restless night. John seemed to be recovered from his brief illness, but I had one more round of sickness before we could head out. I was really worried about the rest of the driving, since we still had about 8 hours ahead of us. We quickly repacked our small suitcase and headed downstairs for the complementary breakfast. John really enjoyed it… I had some hot tea and, I think some oatmeal. We were on the road around 8:30 I think.

The day’s drive was uneventful, and thankfully, the weather had cleared up quite a bit. We had a bit of rain while we finished the drive through Alabama, but as soon as we hit the Florida border, the skies cleared up and we had sunshine the rest of the way. Traffic was light, and thankfully, we didn’t have any reappearance of illness for either of us.

The directions I had printed took us the back way in to WDW property, so I was a bit surprised to see a Welcome sign… and didn’t have the camera ready as a result. We made our way through Disney property, and arrived at All-Star Movies just before 5:00pm. We checked in, and since this was a one-night stay, opted not to add charging privileges to our KTTW cards. We had a preferred room, first floor in Toy Story building 9. This was nice, since Toy Story is one of DH’s favorite movies.
DH with Buzz:

DH with Woody:

After dropping our stuff off in the room, we decided to head over to MK.

In our three previous trips together, we’d only made it to MK once (!!!), so one of our goals on this trip was to spend more time in that park. We didn’t wait long on the bus, and were at MK pretty quickly. Our first stop was guest services to get our annual passes, then we headed in to the park.

Our first view of the castle:

A little closer:

We fast-passed Buzz Lightyear because I’d read good things about it. On the way, we found a PhotoPass photographer - this might be the only one we saw the whole trip - and she took our picture with my good camera:

, then headed over to Columbia Harbour House for dinner. I believe we both ordered a fish & chicken combo, and we agreed that next time, we’d just get the fish – we weren’t impressed at all with the chicken. This meal was OOP, since we only had the dining plan added to our DVC stay.

After dinner, we had some time to spare before our Buzz FPs, so we got in line for HM. The line was pretty short – less than 15 minutes – and while we were in line we were able to watch the space shuttle launch!

Neither of us had ridden HM in 9+ years, and we really enjoyed it, but without a good low-light lens, we didn’t get any pictures.

After HM, we headed over to use our Buzz FPs. We enjoyed it, but it probably won’t make our must-do list for the July trip. We didn’t feel like it lived up to its hype.

After Buzz, we went to the Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor, where DH was disappointed to not be “that guy.” We always enjoy that show, even if it doesn’t change much each time. Then we decided to take a leisurely ride on the PeopleMover (TTA), where we saw part of Wishes. We went on the Carousel of Progress next, but still think it needs some serious updating. It’ll probably make the list for July just because of the air-conditioning.

We obviously didn’t really have a touring plan for this evening, so when we left CoP, we decided to check the wait times at the mountains. On the way, we stopped at PhilharMagic, which had no wait. When we got to the mountains, the wait times were both more than 80 minutes, so we (obviously) passed.

We decided to head out, but on the way back to the front of the park, noticed that Pirates only had a 5 minute wait time, so we hopped on. We thought about Jungle Cruise as we passed by, but the wait time was 30 minutes, and even though we thought it would be fun in the dark, decided to pass.

The Castle at night, on our way out of the park:

We didn’t have a long wait for the bus, and we were back in our room around 11:45pm. We set the alarm for 7:30am, since Monday was resort-switching day, and we were hoping to make DHS rope drop!

 

[michellem1118]

Monday, March 16, 2009

The alarm woke us bright and early, and we were still pretty tired from two days of driving and a long night at MK. We got dressed, loaded up the car, and headed out to DHS. Our plan was to FP TSM, then leave to go check in at SSR, and then return to DHS for the afternoon.

We arrived at DHS right at 9:00, and got up to the gates just after rope drop. We missed the stampede to TSM, and the stand-by line was still fairly short when we got there. DH jumped in the standby line (posted at 20 minutes) and I got in the FP line to get FPs for later. The standby line was moving much faster than the FP line, and I just barely got over there before DH entered the building.

We actually waited about 30 minutes, but we were glad we got to enjoy the queue, and the ride was a lot of fun. After TSM, we had breakfast at Starring Roles (still OOP since we hadn’t checked in at SSR yet), then went on GMR with a very short wait – maybe 15 minutes or so – where we had the mobster scene, but no pictures of this. After GMR, we still had a bit of time before our FPs for TSM were good, so we decided to go to the American Idol show. It was OK, probably not something we’d do again unless desperate for the air conditioning! We still had a few minutes to kill, so we decided to go FP RnRC, which is one of our favorite all-time rides, before heading back to TSM.

We got back to TSM at 11:35am, and all the FPs were gone for the day already! We took our 2nd ride, and then, since we were starting to get hungry, decided to go check in at SSR and get our new KTTW cards with QSDP credits on them.

By the time we got out of DHS, found the car, got out of the lot, and found our way to SSR, it was about 12:45. Our room was ready when we checked in (yay!). We had a handicapped-accessible 1-bedroom villa on the 4th floor in the Paddock area, next to a quiet pool and a bus stop. We were glad to be so close to the quiet pool, since the main pool was closed for refurbishment during our visit. It doesn't appear that I managed to take any pictures of the room, not entirely sure why, or of the next part of the day.

We moved all of our belongings from the car to the room, and unpacked a bit, then decided we’d head over to DTD for lunch and some shopping. We decided to do lunch at Wolfgang Puck Express, where I had a pepperoni pizza and DH had some sort of BBQ chicken wrap thing. We both thought that the food was amazing, and WPE may very well be the best QS value in WDW – OOP this meal would have run more than $30!

We did a bit of shopping after lunch. In less than 24 hours, I’d already decided that hauling the dSLR camera wasn’t going to happen every day, at least not in the case I had for it. So, at WoD, I bought a really cute purse that was big enough to hold the camera if I really wanted to take it along, but small enough to be light and manageable throughout the day (as a sidenote, I now understand why people are constantly on a search for the perfect touring bag!), and we bought a St. Patrick’s Day pin for our pin collection.

We decided to walk back to SSR rather than take the bus. On the way, a female Florida softshell turtle was crossing the sidewalk (we know what kind of turtle because we looked it up online when we got back to SSR), and tried to go down into the sewer, but got stuck in the grate. DH decided he couldn’t just leave her there, so he somehow lifted the heavy, iron grate so she could continue on her journey. His back bothered him for the rest of the day as a result! LOL

We got back to the room around 4:30, showered because we felt gross from all the humidity that day, and then headed back to DHS. We waited 20 minutes for the bus, but were at the park by 6:00. We headed straight to RnRC to use our FPs from the morning.

When we were nearly loading, the ride broke down and they had to empty the building. Everyone already inside was given a re-entry pass that didn’t expire til the end of the month, so we set them aside to use later. We checked ToT, but the wait time was 60 minutes, so we skipped it for now too. We walked around the park taking pictures:

We then decided to go see the Indiana Jones stunt show since we’d never seen it before. Then we took some more pictures of the park as the sun started to set, and decided that we’d use our first snack credits on frozen lemonades – yummy! We checked RnRC, but it was still down, and the wait was even longer for ToT, so we decided to head back to the resort.

We got to the bus stop just as an SSR bus pulled up, and were back in our room around 8:30, where we watched some TV and I talked to my mom. We were missing her birthday while in WDW, and she asked for a Mickey t-shirt as her present. So, when we got off the phone, I convinced DH to walk over to Artists Palette with me to get our refillable mugs and see if there was a cute t-shirt in the shop. We got back to the room fairly quickly, and headed to sleep since we wanted to be up early the next day.

 

[heaven2dc]

Definitely signing up for this one! Glad to hear you got over your food poisoning episodes You really were able to see alot of attractions in the short amount of time you've been there so far - great pics! You really have a keen eye for getting something out of the ordinary (and kudos to your husband for saving the little turtle )

 

[michellem1118]

Definitely signing up for this one! Glad to hear you got over your food poisoning episodes You really were able to see alot of attractions in the short amount of time you've been there so far - great pics! You really have a keen eye for getting something out of the ordinary (and kudos to your husband for saving the little turtle )

Glad to have you along for the ride! I'm editing photos of the next day now, so another update will be up tonight or early tomorrow. Thanks for the compliments about the pics, too.

 

[michellem1118]

Tuesday, March 17, 2009: St. Patrick’s Day!

When the alarm went off, we got up and I made some instant oatmeal for breakfast, and then we got dressed. We had originally planned to “drink around the world” today for St. Patrick’s Day, but decided over breakfast that we’d like to head back to MK instead. We headed out around 10:00, and were at the gates by 10:30. It should be noted that we are not “get up early and make rope drop everyday” people – we like to sleep in on vacation (or at least not set the alarm!) and go with the flow. We even did the QSDDP because we don’t like being tied to ADRs for a whole week at a time! So anyway, we got in to MK and decided to take the train around to Frontierland, but first I had to get a picture:

We got FPs for Splash Mountain, and decided to hop in the standby line for BTMRR. The wait time was posted as 50 minutes, but we couldn’t even see the line, so we were sure it was shorter than that… and it was! We waited about 30 minutes total. Here's a picture I took while we were in line...

When we were done, it was time for Splash! We didn’t get too wet, but the FP line was fairly long, and I think we waited nearly 15 minutes even with the FP.

After conquering two of the mountains, we hopped back on the train and headed to ToonTown – but not to visit. We wanted to be sure we got on Space Mountain, since it would be down for refurbishment on our July trip, so we headed that way to get FPs for later, and then decided it was time for lunch. I really wanted to try Cosmic Ray’s, but the line was ridiculous, so we kept looking. We headed towards Adventureland, grabbed FPs for Jungle Cruise, and decided to try El Pirata y El Perico for lunch since it had a short line. I must say, we were pleasantly surprised. We both ordered taco salads, and the fixin’s bar had a great selection of toppings.

Following lunch, we spent a few minutes exploring the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse… it was cute, but it seems like there’s so much more that they could do with it to make it better. I took several pictures, but the only one I feel like sharing today is this one: the view of the Castle from the treehouse:

Then, since it was getting warm, we decided to go take in Monsters Inc again. Sadly, again, DH didn’t get picked to be “that guy.” He really wanted to be “that guy” for some reason! After Monsters Inc, we headed back to ToonTown to take a look around - our first visit ever! We went in to Mickey’s house, and explored the water play area (Donald’s boat, the Miss Daisy), but were soon overwhelmed by the number of people, so we escaped. Here are a couple of the pictures I took as we walked through:

It was nearly time for our Jungle Cruise FP, so we headed back over there and took our tour. I think we’ll try this in the evening on the next visit, seems like it would be more fun. Our skipper wasn’t great, but also wasn’t terrible. Maybe we’ll be luckier next time around.

As we exited Jungle Cruise, we noticed Aloha Isle, and I had to try a Dole Whip! We used a snack credit on one and shared it – it was tasty! By this point, we’d done everything we wanted to do at MK except Space Mountain, but we had over an hour to kill before our FP was good… so we decided to take the monorail around and visit the monorail resorts. We explored the Poly for a bit, longer than we intended, and soon it was time for our Space Mountain FPs, so we monorailed it back to MK to conquer the final mountain. After returning to Earth, we decided it was time to go drink around the world, so we headed to EPCOT.


Before leaving MK, we apparently saw the Sword in the Stone, and DH had to see if he was the true King...

When we got to EPCOT, John’s AP was no longer working, so he couldn’t get in to the park. Of course, I had gone through the turnstile first, so we were trapped on different sides of the gate. Luckily, there was a really great CM at that turnstile who was able to get his AP reprinted quickly, but he felt really bad about holding up the line. I should point out that throughout the day on this day, John's AP wouldn't work in FP machines, and by the end of this evening, my AP wasn't working in FP machines either (which works out really well for us on the next day, stay tuned!)

When we finally got the AP issue taken care of, we decided to hop on to Spaceship Earth since it had no wait, and then we headed over to the World Showcase. On the way, we took a few pictures of topiaries - we have one of us that a nice guy offered to take with my camera, but it's blurry, so I'm not posting it.

We explored the Mexico pavilion for a while – we had never actually gone inside the pyramid before – and decided to ride the Gran Fiesta Tour – it was cute, but we probably won’t ride it again until we have kids. We continued walking around the World Showcase, checking out the QS options in each country as we went since we were getting hungry. We ended up eating at Tangierine Café, which we really enjoyed. We both got the lamb & chicken combo, but again were a bit disappointed in the chicken. The lamb was really good though! After dinner, we finished our way around the World Showcase. In France, I tried a Grand Marnier Slushie (it wasn’t as good as I had hoped), and in the UK, DH got a green beer. We enjoyed our drinks while walking through EPCOT, and debated watching Illuminations. In the end, we decided that since we’ve seen it so many times, we’d beat the crowds and head back to SSR. Of course, I had to take a picture on the way out:

Again, we got right on a bus, and we were back in our room a little after 9:30. We probably went to refill our mugs, although I didn’t write it in my notes, so I’m not entirely sure. We were in bed by 10:30 or so.

 

[TinkLovinMomma]

Great pictures so far!!! Is SSR your home resort? I own at AKL and am taking my first trip there in January!

 

[Northern Disney Girl]

Count me in for the ride! Great report so far! Waiting patiently for more!

 

[michellem1118]

Great pictures so far!!! Is SSR your home resort? I own at AKL and am taking my first trip there in January!

Thanks, and welcome! SSR is our first home resort, we have 200 points there... but on our honeymoon last summer, while on a Disney Cruise, we added on another 100 points at AKV-Kidani. Our trip next week will be our first Kidani stay, and we're really excited about it!

Count me in for the ride! Great report so far! Waiting patiently for more!

Welcome! I'll have another update up tomorrow... all the installments are written, I just need to finish editing photos and get them uploaded to photobucket, which has been taking forever lately.

 

[michellem1118]

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

We woke up somewhere around 8:30, and decided that we’d brave AK today. AK is probably our favorite park, and when we were here on our honeymoon, it was HOT and humid... we were hoping for better weather this time around. I believe AK had evening EMH, and I was really determined to be in the park after dark to get some of those awesome night-time pictures of EE that I often see on the boards. We headed out of the room around 10:00, and were at AK by 10:30. I was worried my AP wouldn’t work when we got to the park this morning, since John’s had stopped working the night before, but it worked fine, and we were through the turnstiles in no time.

We headed first to Kilimanjaro Safari for a FP. I used my AP first, and it still wasn’t reading in the FP machine, so I had to wave down the CM. He asked how many were in my party, and just printed me two FPs – didn’t even ask me to try DH’s AP first. The return time was 1:15pm, which didn’t seem too bad. Since neither of our APs had been officially scanned, we ran over to EE to grab FPs for that too – here, the CM made DH scan his AP before he’d print me a FP, but that’s ok… our return time here was 4:30pm already!

Armed with our FPs, we headed over to check out the wait at Kali River Rapids. We’ve never actually waited in this line, ever, so when we saw the standby time was only 30 minutes, figured it would be worth it. We got several good pictures in the queue and on the ride itself (we have a waterproof Olympus digital camera that we kept out for the ride – my dSLR was safely stowed for this one!).

After Kali, it was a bit after 11:30, and we were hungry. We had eaten at the Yak & Yeti table service restaurant on our honeymoon and really enjoyed it, so we decided to try their QS location this time. It was OK; we weren’t thrilled with the food, and will probably stick to Flame Tree as our QS of choice in AK from now on. I took some pictures of the architecture while waiting on DH to return to the table with food.

After lunch, we walked the Maharajah Jungle Trek, and the Pangani Forest Trail. The following pictures are from the two walking paths, forgive me for not remembering which animals are where, LOL. I know we were looking for the meerkats, but the CM told us they were all down in the burrow because of a hawk that had been in the area lately. He advised that we should come back later to see them, but we never made it back over that direction.

When we finished the trails, it was time for our KS FP, so we headed over there. I managed to get a handful of good shots as we bounced around in the back row of our safari vehicle:

At this point, we were kind of at a loss over what to do – we still had several hours until our EE FP would be good, but we’d done a lot. We decided to take the train over to Rafiki’s Planet Watch – we’d tried to look around in this area on our honeymoon, but we got over there after most of the area had closed for the evening. We petted some animals in the affection section, and DH spent a good amount of time talking about spiders with a CM inside the building.

We spent maybe half an hour in this area, where I think we stopped for Mickey bars, before heading back to the main part of the park. We got back right before the parade started, so around 3:30, and we darted into Dinoland to avoid the parade. Neither of us had ever ridden Dinosaur!, so we decided to give it a try. The standby line was posted at 50 minutes, but we had time to kill, so we waited. The actual wait time was about 40 minutes, so that was a pleasant surprise. We really enjoyed our trip back in time.

Oh wait, I believe we checked the times for Flights of Wonder before we headed to Dinosaur. The show was about to start, and we opted not to watch it again (we've seen it at least once on every trip), but I did get a good picture of one of the owls that was outside the theatre area with a handler "recruiting" audience members:

Finally, after Dinosaur!, it was time to use our EE FPs. We trekked up to see the yeti, and when we returned to base camp, decided we’d had enough of AK for the day… so I missed EMH again! Oh well, maybe we’ll make it next week! We returned to SSR, where we refilled our mugs and relaxed in the room until we started to get hungry, around 8:00.

We decided to ride the boat to DTD and try Earl of Sandwich for dinner. Boy, were we impressed with the quality of the sandwiches. We’ll definitely have at least one meal here on our next trip since we’re not on a dining plan. Tummies full, we decided to walk around DTD for a bit. I wanted to check out the Build-a-Dino at TREX, and we ended up with a stegosaurus named Donald… I’ll have to take a picture of him. We were getting tired, and on the West Side, so we decided to take the Water Taxi back to the Marketplace so we could catch the boat home to SSR. We were the only people on the boat, and DH joked to the captain that he should just take us back to SSR. As we pulled out of the dock, I noticed the captain was on his radio, and then out of nowhere, he turned towards SSR. He called and got permission to run us back to the resort since we were the only ones on the boat! It was an awesome little bit of Disney Magic to end the evening. We got back to the room around 11, exhausted from our long day.

 

[Leleluvsdis]

I am loving your TR!!! I'm glad you had such a great time!!! Can't wait for more

 

[Northern Disney Girl]

Pardon me while I live vicariously through you! I dream of the day when I can stay up late in the parks and see the night life! As it is our kids are still too little to keep up too late! Some day I will do ALL the Evening EMH's and close the parks at 2am! I will stroll through DTD at a leisurely pace and window shop the stores I like! I will enjoy an Evening at EPCOT and watch Illuminations and enjoy the World Showcase in all its glory! someday...someday...

 

[michellem1118]

Welcome new readers!

Sorry for the lack of an update today - our internet was down for several hours, so I haven't been able to upload the next set of pictures to photobucket. Hopefully the internet will work all day tomorrow and I'll be able to get the next installment up!

 

[michellem1118]

Thursday, March 19, 2009

On our last full day of Disney, the alarm went off at 7:30. I believe we were trying to make rope drop at EPCOT to make sure we got Soarin’ FPs. We made it on an EPCOT bus by 8:30am, and were through the gates at 9:05am. For some reason, DH & I split up right at the start of the day – he headed to Soarin’ for FPs and I… did something else? I have no idea, it’s not in my notes. Then I met him in the FP line. Our return time was 10:45am.

It was early, and we were hungry, so we had breakfast at Sunshine Seasons. As an interesting aside here, the energy drinks counted as one of our breakfast beverages, which surprised us since they’re pricey. After breakfast, we were on our way over to ride Living with the Land, and noticed the sign for the Behind the Seeds tour. We went to check on availability – they had room on the 10:30 tour – and the price – about $15 each with the AP discount (or DVC discount, or AAA discount) – and decided to sign up. We had some time before the tour started, so we spent some time in Innoventions, where we found out what time the Segway demos started, and browsing through MouseGear, before heading back to the Land Pavilion. I believe this was when we found Club Cool for the first time, and decided to go in and have some samples. At some point, I decided it was too mean to "surprise" DH with the Beverly, but he's a good sport, and tried it anyway... here's his first taste:

The Behind the Seeds tour was very good, and lasted a bit over an hour. It was really interesting to hear the backstory of the Land Pavilion, and see the different hydroponic and aquaponic techniques in use. Take a look at some of the pictures:

It let us out right at the end of our FP window for Soarin’, so we hopped right in the line. We always enjoy this, although I would NEVER wait in the standby line for it.

We headed out of the Land Pavilion, and went over to FP TT (return time: 6:30). My AP still wasn’t working in the FP machines this morning, and I was worried that, at some point, it was going to stop working completely like DH's had done previously. We then spent some time exploring the Flower & Garden Festival, starting in Minnie’s Butterfly Garden...

... and then heading in to the World Showcase to see the topiaries around. I must say, compared to 2007, this F&G Festival was not that impressive. They seem to be reusing topiaries from year to year, and they didn’t add as much new stuff this year when the festival opened. We did enjoy the tea leaf topiaries in the UK Pavilion, and I believed I photographed all of the tea varietals.

We were a bit hungry, so we snacked around the World Showcase as we went. We had a pretzel in Germany (ok, but dry), and a sweet pretzel in Norway (also ok). I also several photos of the architecture, but I'm only going to share these photos, of the UK and Morocco, which is the best one IMO:

I also got this photo of Morocco from the other side of the World Showcase Lagoon... if you look carefully, you'll notice the Tower of Terror in the background!

After making our way through the WS, we decided to try some things we’d never done before, and that had virtually no waits: Journey into Imagination with Figment, and Honey I Shrunk the Audience. Both were cute, but I would definitely never wait in line for either.

Because this was the first day of the Flower and Garden Festival, and the DisneyEarth movie was about to open, there were some sand sculptors working on something in honor of the movie:

DH really wanted to do the Segway demo, so we headed back over to Innoventions. After a short wait, we watched the safety video, signed the release forms, and got to spend roughly 30 seconds on a Segway. I think on a future trip we’re going to have to do either the WS Segway tour, or the one at Fort Wilderness. It was a lot of fun to ride on it once we figured it out.

We did a bit more (window) shopping at this point, spending some time in Art of Disney talking about how to spend the money we don’t have, and then finally it was time to ride TT. We love this ride, but again, wouldn’t wait in long lines for it. After our brief stint as crash test dummies, we headed back to WS to get some dinner. We ended up at Cantina de San Angel, which isn’t bad, but we have much better Mexican food at home! We headed out after dinner, taking one last ride on Spaceship Earth on the way out, and I stopped at Guest Services to get my AP reprinted to make sure it would work the next day. We were back at SSR by 9:00. I threw the laundry in the washer, and then we headed over to the hot tub to sit and relax (with wine in our refillable mugs, shhh don’t tell!). I’m not sure how long we stayed outside, but when we got back in, we finished up the laundry and I started repacking the stuff that was easy to pack before we headed off to dreamland.

 

[dd50]

Sounds like you both are having a good time.

 

[michellem1118]

Yep, we both had a great time... and only 4 more wake-ups til our next trip!

Tomorrow, I'll be accompanying my mom to a doctor's appointment, so the next update will probably not come until Thursday... and that will be the end of the trip report...

And then on Friday, I'll be starting a thread for our anniversary TR, which I plan to do LIVE! from WDW. Maybe then I'll get more readers... LOL

 

[eandesmom]

I'm in! I'll need to get caught up but can I just say...

I your wedding dress

 

[michellem1118]

I'm in! I'll need to get caught up but can I just say...

I your wedding dress

and thanks! I may actually get the last update on this report up today, but we'll see... I need to see if I have any pictures for the last update, and if so, get them up on PhotoBucket.

 

[eandesmom]

I'm all caught up!

So sorry about the food poisoning, ick! Glad it didn't last too long.

You got some great animal pics! I love the tiger, gorilla, giraffe and elephant and especially, the owl!

Looking forward to the picture of your build-a-dino, I haven't seen one yet!!!!

It's amazing how much you packed in, sounds like a really good trip! 4 days, how cool. I am very jealous.