Mother/Daughter trip reviews Aug13-22 updated 9/26 complete with final analysis

thanks for your reviews...taking my DD in April!

we are also doing Les Chefs, CRT and Ohanas.....I spend lots of $$ on those frozen lemonaides too, DD LOVES them.

DS found them our first trip, and now it has become the beverage of choice when they are thirsty. I think she out did herself this trip with them. I had to force her to drink water or I would have spent my whole budget on frozen lemonades!!!!!:laughing:
 
I am enjoying your mother daughter trip, I am taking one with my daughter in January for her 10th Birthday, It is a surprize, she will find out Christmas morning, If I make it that long with out blowing it.

I hope you have a magical trip. We really had the best time. I am looking forward to planning more trips for just the two of us.
 
This is so great! Thank you so much for your review...We're travelling with a mother-daughter combo in our group in December. I'll have to pass this on to them.

Taking time for just the two of us was the best thing for my DD. One on one time is so hard to find in the chaos of life and it was just what she needed before starting middle school.

Great reviews! Any chance to get a picture of the tiara I love tiaras lol!
Glad you got a girls trip!

I will try to dig through my mountain of pics. Unfortunately, it will take me a few days as I am going on a college visit with DS this weekend and prior commitments have me hopping till we leave tomorrow afternoon. I know I have some with the princesses, just not sure I have even uploaded them to the computer yet. Between my work schedule and school starting, it's busy time for us.
 
So today is the day we planned no parks, I let DD sleep in till she woke up on her own. We then headed to Captain Cooks in the Polynesian. The original plan was to just split an order of Tonga Toast, but DD didn’t think this was going to be enough food for both of us. So we ended up with Tonga toast and sausage, a fruit cup, an apple Danish and an orange juice. We both really enjoyed the Tonga toast, how can you not like a thick piece of bread stuffed with banana and covered in cinnamon sugar. DD insisted on syrup which made it even sweeter. I opted to eat some of the fruit which had cantaloupe, honeydew and grapes, very good to offset the sweetness of the toast. The sausage was the typical Disney sausage, I love it, DD won’t touch it. DD did not touch any of the fruit or the Danish. It was packed up and taken back to the resort with us for breakfast tomorrow.

Tonga toast and sausage $6.19
Apple Danish $2.39
Fruit cup $3.39
Orange Juice $1.89
Tax $ .91
Total $14.77

Total OOP $544.92
 

DD and I both decided on the Buckingham Palace for our tea. It came with our choice of tea, teas sandwiches, a scone and a jam tart and choice of tow pastries, strawberries and cream or trifle for desert.

DD chose the Gardenview Blend for her tea, our waiter said it had hints of chocolate and berries, DD said it tasted like water, so I tried it after having a cup of mine, I agreed with her, tasted like sugar water. I’m not sure if it did not steep long enough but she ended up ordering a sprite. I chose the Princess Blend, hints of vanilla bean and strawberries:love:, this was very good. I wanted to purchase some to bring home, but forgot to stop and buy some.:headache:

The tea sandwiches came with an onion tart usually, but the waiter said they were trying out some different sandwiches for an upcoming menu change and offered us one of them as a replacement for the onion tart. I stayed with the onion tart, but DD opted to try one of the new sandwiches. Her choices were, roast beef with a horseradish cream, wine poached salmon, or roasted vegetable. DD chose the roasted vegetable. The tea sandwiches we received were pear and gorgonzola, DD and I both loved this one and are trying to recreate it at home, it was the perfect sweet, salty, savory sandwich. There was shrimp salad, I ate both as DD wouldn’t touch hers, it was tasty but not incredible. There was chicken salad that was a little salty but okay. One was cucumber and watercress, this one was better than the chicken but still not wow. The last one was egg salad, DD doesn’t care for egg salad so she didn’t eat hers. It was egg salad, nothing special. The onion tart was really good, I could have quite happily eaten quite a few more those. The roasted vegetable sandwich was served open faced and had thin slices of summer squash and zucchini with an herb spread on a baguette. She let me have a bite and ate the rest herself. It was no bigger than the rest of the sandwiches so maybe 3 bites total. DD said it was good, I thought it was rather bland, but so were some of the other sandwiches.

The scone with the Devonshire cream was very good the scone was light with just a hint of sweetness. DD wouldn’t try the cream and put jam on her scone, not one crumb remained on her plate from that scone. The jam tarts are very sweet in contrast to the scone. In hindsight I should have eaten some of the jam tart between bites of the scone, it would have balanced the sweetness of the tart a little.

DD chose two pastries for her dessert, an éclair which said very good and a chocolate covered strawberry which she said was fantastic and asked if she could have more. I told her no as I knew what was coming next. I had the biggest bowl of fresh strawberries and whipped cream. Those berries were sweet and juicy and the whipped cream was to die for. It was the perfect dessert.

DD's Dessets

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Strawberries and cream
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Continued next post.
 
So as I was planning, I knew I wanted to order a slipper dessert for DD. She was very worried about starting middle school this year as we have three towns that combine for the seventh grade. Lots of new faces and a whole new set of rules equals lots of stress for a twelve year old girl. About two weeks before we left I called the reservations line and they transferred me to the Grand Floridian and I was able to place an order for a white chocolate slipper with Good Luck Next Year as the message. Here is a pic of DD with her dessert. She was very surprised.

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The slipper is filled with whipped cream; the little boat is filled with a sinfully rich chocolate mouse. It was way too much after the meal we had just eaten so we packed it up and brought it back to the room. It was eaten a few days later as an afternoon snack. It was very rich and filling but soooooo good.

Cindy Slipper $15.00
2 Buckingham Palace $39.00
TIW Discount $10.80-
Tip $9.72
Tax $2.81

Total $55.73

Total OOP $600.67

I was very surprised that they took the TIW discount off the slipper.

So I will be away for a few days, but will try to post more on Monday. Have a great weekend.:goodvibes
 
I had booked a 7:30pm reservation for Narcoossee’s knowing that we would be eating light. We arrived at 7:10 and were seated within minutes. Neither of us was starving but we decided on appetizers and dessert. DD ordered lemonade and I ordered a glass of chardonnay which tasted like dishwater. I stuck with water after that.

DD and I both ordered the Green Goddess Salad, romaine, avocado, tomato, cucumber, hearts of palm and tarragon, with an avocado dressing. The greens were fresh, the other vegetables were good, but there was too much tarragon. Every bite was overpowered by the flavor of tarragon. I could only eat a few bites. DD ate a little more of hers, she said it wasn’t so bad if you ate around the dressing.

I also ordered the crab cakes, and they were very good. The Cajun sauce that is served with these has just the right amount of kick to it. I ate every bite!!!

DD and I agreed to share the almond cheesecake. I had it once in 2008 and I could not wait to have some more. It didn’t taste the same this year. It was very good, but not as flavorful as I remember. It was creamy but not as much almond flavor. It was still good, but not great as I thought it would be. We had dined at Narcoossee’s before and loved everything about it, next trip I think I’ll try Citrico’s instead.


Lemonade $2.69
Chardonnay $12.00
2 Green Goddess Salad $22.00
Crab Cakes $13.00
Cheesecake $9.00
TIW discount $11.74-
Tax $3.06
Tip $10.56
Total $60.57

Total OOP $661.24
 
DD once again wanted someplace with AC, so we headed for Backlot Express for lunch. It was about noon so it was pretty busy. DD ordered chicken nuggets and fries, and I ordered a Southwest Salad. We both ordered ice water to drink. This is the only place that gave us small cups for ice water. I usually insisted that DD drink water with lunch as it was so hot, I had to refill our little cups at least 4 times during lunch.

DD has proclaimed these to be the best nuggets ever. She said they did not even need sauce, they are that good. She let me have a small piece to try and ate the rest herself, every single bite. My salad was very fresh and hit the spot on such a hot day. It was light and refreshing, there was a good mix of chicken, black beans, avocado and crispy pieces of tortilla. The dressing was perfect. We both really liked our lunch and have found a new CS place in Hollywood Studios.

8 piece chicken and fries $7.69
Southwest salad $8.29
Tax $1.04
Total $17.02

Total OOP $678.26
 
Loving your reviews. DD and I love the Grand Floridian Tea. I am not a tea drinker but have fallen in love with the Mad Hatter Tea. We usually leave DH to his own devices and she and I have a great mother daughter moment. She's bummed we're not doing it on our next trip.

My daughter just started junior high also where 3 towns combine. I'm thinking its the same school!!

Suzabelle
 
Loving your reviews. DD and I love the Grand Floridian Tea. I am not a tea drinker but have fallen in love with the Mad Hatter Tea. We usually leave DH to his own devices and she and I have a great mother daughter moment. She's bummed we're not doing it on our next trip.

My daughter just started junior high also where 3 towns combine. I'm thinking its the same school!!

Suzabelle

I think we will plan to do this every trip and let the boys go off on their own. DD's school had it's back to school night last night. I enjoyed meeting her new teachers.
 
So after a couple hours DD is once again dying of thirst, can anyone guess what she wanted? Yep another frozen lemonade please!:laughing: We headed over to Min and Bill’s for another of these tasty frozen drinks. We grabbed a table and enjoyed our lemonade as the parade went by. DD is not into parades so she stayed at the table while I snapped some pictures of the parade. I even took one of DD with her lemonade.

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2 frozen lemonades $7.38
Tax $0.48
Total $7.86

Total OOP $686.12
 
Dinner tonight was at Mama Melrose’s, I booked the Fantasmic Package as this is DD’s favorite night show and I do not like standing in line for hours to get a seat. We had an ADR for 4:45 and we showed up at 4:30. We waited about 15 minutes to be seated. The waiting area here is very small and there were children sitting all over the floor. It was very cramped and very hard to move anywhere here; the hostess did nothing about moving people out of the way who were blocking the restrooms. Oh well, our waitress came over and took our drink orders, DD had sprite and I had pomegranate lemonade.

On to our appetizers, DD loves bruschetta, marinated tomatoes served with crostini, and this is what she ordered for her appetizer. I ordered the antipasto for 2, selection of meats, cheeses and marinated vegetables. DD tasted her bruschetta and said it was too spicy. I also tasted it and I would swear they used red pepper flakes in the tomatoes, the waitress said it was just black pepper, but if that was all it was waaaaaaaaay to peppery!!!! She brought DD an order of Mozzarella and Tomatoes, with marinated onions, sweet balsamic drizzle, basil and extra virgin olive oil, more on this coming up. The antipasto came with salami, prosciutto, roasted peppers, olives, asparagus, and pistachios. I have had this before and really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed most of it this time also, except the salami. I am very fussy about salami and it needs to be freshly sliced or it tastes old. This tasted beyond old to me; even DD who loves salami spit it out. Everything else was very tasty and I ate everything but the salami and the pistachios, I can never understand the nuts.

DD had barely taken a bite of her Tomato and Mozzarella appetizer and then the entrees were being delivered. She was so frustrated that she told the waitress to take the appetizer away and she would have her entrée. She had ordered the Spicy Italian sausage with rigatoni minus the peppers. It was a huge portion and even though DD ate quite a bit, it did not even look like she touched it. I ordered the Pipette pasta with shrimp, peas, artichokes and roasted red peppers in a four cheese cream sauce. This was light a very good but again way too much for one person to eat. I think even if we split one entrée between the two of us we could not have finishes those portions.

For dessert DD had vanilla gelato, and I had the Chocolate Cannoli Cake. DD ate her ice cream and said it was good. The cake was okay. It had the smallest blob of cannoli filling in the center, and the cake itself was a little dry. I ate some of the cake with the filling and left the rest.

We left here very disappointed, we have eaten here twice before and loved it, this year it was just not as good as it has been.

2 Fantasmic Dining Package $65.98
Tax $ 4.29
Tip $12.00
Total $82.27

You cannot use TIW for the Fantasmic Dining Package.

Total OOP $768.39
 
We stopped at Beverly Sunset before heading into Fantasmic to grab some snacks for the show. We ordered a chocolate chip cookie shaped like a Mickey head, carrot cake cookie, a piece of fudge (not sure what kind), a sprite and a Nestea iced tea.

The carrot cake cookie was every bit as good as my first one:worship:, the chocolate chip cookies ears were dipped in chocolate and DD scoffed those up before I knew it, she did give me a bite of cookie and it was soft and chocolaty just like I like them:love:. The fudge was gross:sick:, neither of us liked it and we threw it out. I wish I could remember what flavor it was; receipt says Van/plain Fudge mix. We enjoyed our snacks as we waited for the show to start.

Chocolate chip cookie $3.95
Carrot Cake cookie $3.95
Fudge $3.95
Iced tea $2.39
Sprite $2.39
Tax $1.02
Total $16.65


Total OOP $785.04
 
We had an 8:05 ADR for breakfast at Crystal Palace, we checked in no problem and watched as Pooh and friends opened the restaurant. We were seated within a few minutes after opening. This is a buffet and after our server had come over and taken our drink order we headed up for some food. I always encourage my children to have some fruit with breakfast so I was pleased to see DD had lots of strawberries, pineapple, and grapes on her plate. She had waffles, regular and chocolate, eggs, cinnamon roll, raspberry crumb cake, a muffin to start with. She went up later for Pooh’s French toast as they had not put any on the buffet yet. She said everything was good except the eggs were salty and the chocolate waffle tasted like bitter chocolate. As you can see, she ate a very big breakfast. I sampled a little of everything. The eggs were salty, the vegetable frittata was excellent and I had seconds of that. The cheese potato dish was also salty, but the red skinned potato and onion dish was very good. Pooh’s French toast is very sweet, but yummy. The characters here are great and we saw Piglet, Pooh and Tigger in quick succession. We waited and waited and waited for Eeyore, to the point that our server came over and apologized for him being so tardy this morning. We ended up with a fast pass for any ride in the park. It took an hour and a half for breakfast, we finally saw Eeyore at 9:25. We had planned on just seeing characters in Fantasy Land this morning so it was not a huge issue, but I have never had to wait so long for one character before. This will not prevent me from going back as we love the food and the characters.


2 Adult breakfast $41.98
TIW discount $ 8.40-
Tax $ 2.19
Tip $7.56
Total $43.33

Total OOP $828.37
 
After meeting up with Alice and the White Rabbit, Peter Pan and Wendy, The Fairy Godmother, Cinderella’s Stepmother, and riding a few rides, we headed over to Frontier Land to meet Woody and Jesse. DD decided she was thirsty will waiting in line so I headed over to Golden Oak Outpost and grabbed to bottles of water.

2 Dasani 20 0z $5.00
Tax $ .00
Total $5.00

Total OOP $833.37


We were walking through Adventure Land and DD decided she wanted a snack, so we shared a citrus swirl from Aloha Isle. This tastes just like a creamsicle and was soooooo good. We both enjoyed it.:thumbsup2:thumbsup2

Citrus Swirl $2.89
Tax $0.19
Total $3.08


Total OOP $836.45
 
We had an ADR at 2:05 at Tony’s Town Square for lunch. We checked in about 1:45 and waited and waited. The waiting are was packed and I was very nervous about the wait. I asked how long it would be and was told not long. We only waited about 5 minutes past our ADR time. We were seated and our waiter took our drink order, we both ordered lemonade. We decided to each get an appetizer and split an entrée. DD ordered the cheese bread, toasted garlic and cheese bread topped with tomato and basil. She loved this and I tried a small (think about the size of 2 bites) piece and it was good. I ordered the lunch house salad. It was a typical house salad, some of the lettuce was brown and mushy, so I just pushed that off to the side. For the entrée DD wanted the Spaghetti but she wanted sausage instead of meatball and that is the way I ordered it. It came out with meatball. I asked the server if he could bring DD a piece of sausage and he did without any issue. We split the meal between the two plates and it was plenty of food for lunch. The pasta was cooked a perfect al dente, the meatball was okay, a little too much filler for my taste, the sausage was a sweet Italian sausage. The only complaint we had was we would have liked a little more sauce on the pasta to give it a little more flavor. I could have asked for it, but our server had disappeared at this point. This was the only server that made me feel uncomfortable about sharing a meal with DD. Our waiter finally came over to ask if we wanted dessert and DD ordered the Ice cream bomb, chocolate and vanilla ice cream covered in a rich chocolate sauce. I didn’t feel like anything so I told him to bring 2 spoons. The dessert was okay; it had a thin layer of chocolate cake under the ice cream that neither of us cared for. I am undecided about this restaurant if I would return or not. The food was not bad, not outstanding either. The waiter made me uncomfortable.

2 lemonade $5.38
Cheese Bread $6.99
Lunch Salad $5.49
Spaghetti and Meatball $16.99
Ice cream bomb $5.99
TIW discount $8.17-
Tax $2.13
Tip $7.35
Total $42.15

Total OOP $878.60
 














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