Nyami Nyami, Yummy Yummy: A Trip to AKL (with pictures!)

[MushyMushy]

Well, I've waited plenty long enough to write my trip report. With the beginning of school just around the corner, I figured I'd better get to work and flesh it out.

Players:

Marcia: me, 39 years old and on my second trip to the world. I am a housewife/graduate student who has become Disney obsessed in the past two years.

Dennis: DH, 34 years old. Has been to WDW several times as a kid, but always stayed offsite. Now that he's making his own way in the world, he insists (THANKYOU, thank you thank you) that we stay on site. Dennis is a project manager for a utility company.

Rhiannon: DD, 10 years old and ecstatic that, in all of its infinite wisdom, Disney considers her an adult. She never fails to remind us of this.

Sunshine: DD's friend, 9 years old. Sunshine is not her real name. She has been DD's BFF (best friend forever) since kindergarten, and since DS didn't want to join us on this trip, Sunshine was more than happy to take his place. I am ever SO grateful that Sunshine didn't turn 10 until weeks after our trip!

Jonathon: DS, age 15. Went with us to WDW last year and hated it! He had absolutely no interest in going on this trip with us, so we made arrangements for him to stay with my parents. It may be controversial that we didn't force him to go, but if you've read any of my posts over the past year or so (under the username Marseeya), then you'll know that it was best for everyone involved that he stay home. I wish things were different with him, but they aren't. 'Nuff said.

Dates of trip: Saturday, June 3 to Monday, June 12

 

[MushyMushy]

Because last year I had caught chicken pox over a week before our trip (and thankfully recovered before we left!), I was a bit paranoid about getting sick again for this trip. For weeks I took extra vitamin C and multivitamins, avoiding crowded places, and washing my hands like crazy, determined not to get sick for this trip. All was going well with our plans – DD was bringing a friend, DS was set to stay with my parents and very happy to be staying behind, and the house was getting a good thorough cleaning before we left.

Just three days before we leave, I was washing my hands in the bathroom and, realizing there was no hand towel, shook them off. I stepped towards the door and BAM! I slid on a drop of water and went sprawling into the hallway! I heard my left ankle SNAP and as I was lying on the floor, I grabbed my ankle and held on to it for dear life, thinking if I could just hold it tight enough, it truly wouldn’t be hurt. Almost immediately, the swelling and throbbing started and I just laid on the floor moaning, “No, no no nononono!”

After about 15 minutes or so, I managed to get it together enough to slide down the stairs on my butt and hobble into the kitchen to make myself a bag of ice. Quick – what to do in case of a sprain? Anybody? RICE – rest, ice, compression, and elevation. That’s right. Just remember that one little world.

As soon as I got myself settled into the recliner for my rest, ice and elevation, DS decides it’s a perfect time to bring home the GF for me to meet. Lovely. I manage to grit my teeth and smile, trying very hard not to bite off their heads for snickering at my predicament. I called DH at work and begged him to come home early, which he wasn’t able to do, so I asked my father to run to the store to get me an Ace bandage.

At this point, sitting in my chair with my foot raised halfway to the ceiling perched on ice, all I could do was laugh while shedding a few tears. People on the DIS assured me that it would be perfectly easy to get a wheelchair or ECV for the parks, but I wasn’t to be consoled with this, as I do NOT want to be one of those “hidden disability” fat, lazy women riding around the parks that everyone so gleefully bashes. I suppose I could have made sure to wrap my ankle in a big bandage every day, but nonetheless, that’s just not my style.

DH kindly took off the Friday before our trip to help me out with the last minute shopping and packing. We went to Walmart, where I did cave in and use an ECV, and my suspicions were right on about people’s reactions. I had worn a pair of jeans, but after getting glares and dirty looks, I rolled up my pants leg so that people could see my wrapped ankle, and after that the looks magically disappeared. Aside from that, it was no fun riding around in the ECV, as I found that people simply have no patience for them, despite the fact that they take up less room than a person with a cart. If I’m standing with my cart in front of the canned vegetables, people typically wait their turn before grabbing their own can. However, when I was sitting in front of them, people have no qualms about practically climbing over top of me to get what they needed. Did I want to go through 10 days of that at Disney?

No thanks!

I don’t know if the ghost of Walt was smiling down upon me those three days, but whatever it is, my ankle got much, MUCH better, and by the Saturday we were to leave, I wasn’t even walking with a limp.

This is good, because I had enough to worry about with the flight to Florida. Somehow over the past 15 years since I last flew, I’ve developed a raging fear of flying. I wanted to drive to Florida like we did last year, but DH laid it on the line – if we drove down, we’d have to stay for only 7 days instead of 10, so if I wanted to have my 10 days at Disney, then flying it would be. On top of that, I made the huge mistake of researching flying issues too much.

Because we were flying SWA, I became aware of what they call their Customer of Size policy. They don’t have any clear standards, but basically, if you’re a fat person, you could be subjected to having to buy an extra seat for your wide load. On the other hand, if you wish to be proactive about it, you can go ahead and pay for that extra seat and get a refund from SW, as long as the flight hasn’t oversold, which they frequently do. I went round and round about this with my DH, but we finally decided that, for the peace of mind, I would go ahead and get the extra seat.

I’m the type of person who doesn’t want to draw any attention to myself, so I was extremely worried that this would be a huge embarrassment, and that I would end up having to sit by myself because of SW’s cattle call seating.

I’m happy to say that our flight down was a smooth as silk. Our flight home, however, couldn’t have been farther from that.

Read on.

 

[lauren_elizabeth]

Aw, I'm sorry you hurt your foot!
But, I love the report so far!

 

[fizz13]

A compelling start, my heart leapt in my throat with the piccie of your ankle, you poor thing well I'll definately be looking out for more, its gonna be a great read,

 

[pickles]

I am a confessed basher of the hidden disability folks with the wheel chairs and ecv and also of the people who seem to spread over seats on airplanes.I never climb over folks or anything like that..rude but not that rude) i must admit tho your writing gave me a chuckle and I think I will even be a little more compassionate next time around. I appreciate greatly your humor at a tough situation.

 

[MushyMushy]

1st Day, Saturday, June 3

The big day! Woohoo! We’d loaded up the car the night before and planned on waking up at 3:30 a.m. Rhiannon woke up like the ray of sunshine she’s always been. I haven’t been outside at that time of the night in forever, and I’d forgotten how peaceful and quiet it is with the world sleeping. We pretty much ran around the house doing last minute things, kissed the dog goodbye, kissed Jonathon goodbye, and went for Sunshine. I’m going to have to kiss Jonathon in the middle of the night more often. When he’s half asleep, he forgets to be angry at the world and he’s my sweet little boy again for the briefest moment in time.

We got to Sunshine’s house and her mom, grandmother and grandfather were all waiting up to say goodbye. Got Sunshine loaded up and off we went! You know, before I ever had a daughter, I always thought the sound of giggling girls was like nails on a chalkboard. After I had my own girl, that sound has been music to my ears. For most of the trip, they talked about what they were going to do at the World. A few months before our trip, I’d sent Sunshine a copy of Birnbaum’s WDW for Kids, so she had a list ready of what she was looking forward to in the parks. Rhiannon talked about Test Track for a good 15 minutes, and I had to break the bad news to Sunshine that PoTC would be closed for our trip. Bummer.

The drive to the airport uneventful. We stopped for a crappy McDonald’s breakfast halfway to the airport, then arrived at PIT around 6. I was fairly nervous about how this whole Customer of Size (CoS) thing was going to work, but it was pretty easy. I’d already printed our boarding passes online the night before, but had to go to the counter to get my second seat boarding pass. The agent didn’t even bat an eyelash. After that, we waited two hours for our flight.

The girls had a good time playing on the moving sidewalk. They would ride it all the way to the end, and then walk against the flow. I was just glad they had something to keep them occupied, and at that point that wing of the airport was pretty empty, so the girls weren’t bothering anyone.

The girl in the front is Rhiannon, and that's all the more I'll ever show of Sunshine in my pics, because she's not my child.

Contrary to what I’d read about on the transportation boards, everything was so relaxed at PIT. People just sat around near their boarding lines (Pre-board, A, B, and C), then about 10 minutes before the flight, the agents told us to line up, and there were no hassles – people just walked right to their lines. Nobody was worried about who would sit where, and nobody fussed or acted stressed. The gate agents told pre-boarders to line up and said something to the effect of “Immediate family only – no grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, third cousins, third cousins’ friends, etc.” and then they said that if one person in the party had an A or B boarding pass, but another person didn’t, the person who didn’t could get in line with the rest of their family. I didn’t want to drag my whole family through pre-boarding (even though we would have been allowed to), so one of the agents told all of us who were pre-boarding to go ahead and save seats. Wow, this is all so different from what I’d been reading online. I thought people in C were going to have FITS, but everyone was so cool.

Rhiannon and I pre-boarded. She and Sunshine wanted to sit together, but I was a bit nervous about that and told her it was a big maybe when we saw how things went with the plane loading. I sat in an aisle seat, put my “reserved seat” placard next to me, and had Rhiannon sit across the aisle in the middle seat, saving the window seat for Sunshine (or Dennis, however it ended up). People filed in and pretty much ignored Sunshine and Rhiannon, until a family came near. A middle-aged man sat on the aisle seat next to the girls, and I offered to let him switch with Dennis, but he said he was fine with them. He ended up being really nice – the flight attendant even asked if he was okay with them (maybe thinking they’d misbehave, LOL) and he said he was fine. He should have been fine! The girls were perfectly behaved while his kid kicked the back of Dennis’s seat the entire trip!

I did write about this on the transportation board, but I’ll add here because a lot of people have PM’d me about it. With the whole CoS thing, I really wasn’t sure if I’d need an extra seat or not. I’m a size 22, but I have no problems fitting in most amusement park seats, bus seats, theater seats, etc. The problem is, I’m right on the border of what would need an extra seat or not, so I went ahead and got one. I’m happy to say that, even though the seat was tight, I fit nice and cozily in the seat without an inch of blubber spilling onto the next seat. However, having that extra seat was a good move, as Dennis is no skinny Mickey himself. We would have been a couple of sardines if we’d had to sit next to each other.

Oh, and did I mention? I forgot to bring my Xanax! What a moron! I was extremely nervous throughout the flight, but Dennis pretty much held my hand and talked me through some of the scarier parts. It was an extremely smooth flight and the girls loved flying. They took turns sitting by the window seat, and Sunshine said hi to her uncle up in heaven. What a sweetie.

We arrived MCO at 10:15, met Bob from Sunray and went on our shopping trip at Publix.

Next I’ll tell you about how we met a man who “single handedly wiped out small pox.”

 

[Avivasmom]

Great report. I wonder if you are who we met at MGM on June 8th by Beauty and the Beast. We were from South Florida!!

Cannot wait to read more!

 

[MushyMushy]

Great report. I wonder if you are who we met at MGM on June 8th by Beauty and the Beast. We were from South Florida!!

Cannot wait to read more!

Were you the teacher? I was at MGM that day, and spoke to a couple of very nice ladies in front of Beauty & the Beast, so I bet it was you!

 

[Avivasmom]

YES that was us, my friend was the teacher and I was the one with the little girl. How funny!

She started kindergarten today, and had a great day!

Cannot wait to read the rest of your TR!

 

[PoohGal05]

Loving your trip report!

 

[DeterminedOne]

What a great report! Can't wait for the next installment.

 

[DisneyFan06]

This is one of the best reports I read in a long time!

 

[erinch]

Don't take this wrong! Our welsh terrier is named Rhiannon! I love that name! It's the Welsh goddess of birds and animals, maybe creation in some interpretations. We went with Meredith for our DD, but I've always had a soft spot for Rhiannon.

Meredith and I are going to Cedar Point next week for a girl trip and leaving our 18 yr old DS at home. sometimes leaving them is good!

 

[MushyMushy]

Rhiannon is a great name, isn't it? She's not too fond of it, and I sure won't tell her there's a dog with that name. Did you ever read the book "A Moment in Time" by Bertrice Small? That book tells the story of the goddess Rhiannon. It's a romance novel, but still very good.

 

[MushyMushy]

So we get to Publix to do our grocery shopping. We get a half hour with Sunray, which didn’t seem like a whole lot to us, so we wrote up our list and prepared ourselves to sprint through the store. “Dennis, you grab the doughnuts,” I shout! “Bottled water, aisle 6,” he yells back. Then we realized that Publix is just a little grocery store, not a megamart, so we slowed down a bit and walked together with the cart, tossing in goodies as we went along. At the end of the first aisle, this sweet-looking elderly gentleman stopped us. Time is tick-ticking away, but we stopped politely to see what he had to say. He looked at the girls and said that we owed him money because the kids didn’t need small pox vaccines. Alrighty then, Dennis gets out his checkbook, and…. No, no, no he didn’t.

So this guy goes on to tell us that he used to work with Jonas Salk and either WHO or the CDC in Africa and they discovered the vaccine and eradicated smallpox, so that now our children don’t need the vaccine anymore. What a character! He went on to tell us some details about his experience, but after about 10 minutes, we told him we had to run, and we shook his hand and thanked him for his contribution to society.

We easily finished up our shopping with a good 10 minutes to spare, and I also got to talk to a really nice elderly lady while Dennis was at the check out. For a minute there, I was thinking it must have been senior discount day at Publix and then it hit me, DUH, Florida is the biggest retirement community in the USA.

So we went back out to the SUV, just shaking our heads and chuckling, loaded up, and on the road again. It was kind of neat, driving by Discovery Cove and a few other places. The kids were awestruck at the palm trees and flat land (we live in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, so we’re surrounded by hills). This is something that only my fellow DISers will understand, but when we drove through the purple Walt Disney World sign, I felt this tremor of excitement and tears came to my eyes. The world looks so different once you pass that arch – roads are perfect, everything is clean and fresh. We’re home!

We arrived at AKL at 11:30 and were able to check right in. I was a bit bummed that we’d had to go with a pool view this year rather than savannah, but honestly, I’d rather be at AKL with a pool view than home without, so I definitely looked on that bright side. The bellhop grabbed our luggage and off we went! One thing I didn’t like from last year was that our room was at the very end of the very end of the resort, so we had to walk a mile to get to our room. Uphill both ways. But this year, our room was so much closer! We were on the 4th floor, and the first thing I did was check out the view. ACK, a bit tree was blocking the pool! Well, no matter, it also blocked other people’s view into our room.

Right away, I went to unpack and discovered the floor in front of the closet was soaked in what smelled like cat pee. It was still wet, and Dennis and I were so baffled as to why someone would try to sneak a cat into their room, and how housekeeping didn’t notice it. Unbelievable. We weren’t mad, but called the front desk at least 3 times to try to get them to take care of the mess. At first they sent an engineer, who sniffed the spot and agreed it smelled like pee and said we needed housekeeping. Dennis waited in the room for housekeeping while the girls and I went swimming for a while. He wasn’t really being noble or anything like that, but he had to check his e-mail and see if there were any huge crises at work. Housekeeping finally showed up and steam cleaned the mess and, surprisingly, the smell went away – it ended up not being cat pee after all, but a leak in the ceiling. They offered to move us to another room on the other side of the pool, but quite frankly I was just happy they took care of it and loved our room the way it was, big tree in the window and all.

Next up, a gathering of the gay red had society.

Here are the kids (even the big kid) who are very happy to have a bunkbed. Don't laugh at my botch job on Sunshine's face -- I've never done it before.

 

[BeautyNBeast]

Love your report. I am glad your ankle got better in the 3 days before you left. Cannot wait to read more!

 

[MushyMushy]

After spending most of the afternoon in the pool, which the girls absolutely loved, we all got ready to go to Ohana for a 5:30 ADR. Somehow I got it in my head that early ADRs were the way to go in order to avoid excessive crowds and waiting. For the most part, this turned out to be true, but on some occasions it turned out to be a big PITA. Before we took off for the Poly, we explored AKL for a while, talked with some great CM’s, and bought Sunshine some pins & an autograph book. For some reason, we thought the best way to get to the Poly would be to ride the bus to Epcot to catch the monorail to Poly. We just ended up doing a lot of walking.

Got to Epcot & Rhiannon begged to ride Spaceship Earth, so we did. With all the exciting and wonderful rides in the World, she just adores this ride for some reason. Sunshine was thrilled with it too. We still had time until our ADR so we went to Club Cool to try some drinks, then on our way back out of Epcot, rode Spaceship Earth one more time. Because it was Gay Days, we ran into a lot of “red shirts.” I hope nobody takes offense to this, but I was a bit concerned about Sunshine.

See, we’re a very liberal family, but Sunshine’s family is very conservative, and I know that Sunshine’s grandfather has complained about gay days in the past. I hate, HATE, when I hear people say, “How will I explain it to my children?” when it comes to what they might see at Gay Days, and for the first time ever, I had that same concern. What would I say to someone else’s child about what they might see at Gay Days? I eventually figured I’d go with the neutral, non-judgmental approach of, “Sometimes men love men, and women love women, and they’re very happy that way.” I also kind of wanted to do it in a positive light without offending her parents.

Oh, and did I mention that we were on the dining plan? Probably, but I’ll mention it again. We love it so much that I can’t imagine going to WDW without being on the plan. Also, I wrote some dining reviews on the Dining board, but I’ll go ahead and incorporate them into my whole trip report.

We finally got to Poly after a ton of walking & there were 100s of red shirts outside Ohana – it was pure chaos! I was so bummed, because all I’d wanted was a nice quiet (relatively quiet anyway) dinner. A big group of men were wearing flamboyant red hats & purple shirts, looking like a gay red hat society – I loved watching them; they were SO CUTE! I really wanted to take a picture, but I really didn’t want anyone to see me doing it and think that I was making fun of them.

Surprisingly, we were called into Ohana right away. We battled our way through the thick crowd, and were delighted to see that the restaurant was only about ¼ full.

Having already eaten at 'Ohana on our 2005 trip, we knew what to expect with the skewered meat. We weren't too sure, however, about Sunshine, as her mother had warned me that she was a bit of a picky eater. Well, my family of chubbies just isn't used to that, so I wasn't sure what to expect. We figured on eating at the TS restaurants, and if Sunshine wasn't satisfied with the dinners, we'd find other ways to fill her up..

We started getting served right away, and I ordered an 'Ohana Colada, which was delicious. Our server started us off with the mixed greens. The girls wouldn't touch them, but Dennis and I liked them just fine. I was a bit disappointed in the new starters and the lack of shrimp skewers. The girls attacked the fried wontons, but I wasn't blown away by them. Sunshine ate ALL of the honey-coriander chicken wings and thought they were great, while the rest of us picked at the sweet & sour shrimp. I wasn't too fond of having to peel and eat sticky gooey shrimp, so I only ate one.

On to the skewers. While both girls loved having the waiter come to the table and slide the meat off the skewers, neither one of them wanted any of the offerings. The steak was fairly tough, but the Asian BBQ pork loin was delicious, as was the turkey and Hawaiian pork sausages.

The skewers were served with Maui scalloped potatoes and stir fried veggies. Nobody really cared for the potatoes, and frankly, I didn't find them any different than the boxed, dehydrated Ore Ida potatoes you find in the grocery store. The stir fried veggies were good, but a little too soggy for my liking.

Then came the dessert -- bread pudding with bananas foster sauce. That itself was worth the entire meal. The bread pudding was soft on the inside and just a bit crisp on the outside, and the bananas foster was delicious. Everybody but Sunshine enjoyed that dessert, but even she picked at the ice cream.

Overall, we'll probably cross 'Ohana off our list for our next trip. None of us were blown away by this meal, and the girls are getting just a tiny bit too old for the coconut races and hula dancing. Sunshine wasn't interested, and Rhiannon was pushed to the side and ignored in favor of the younger, "cuter" kids.

Here she is:

After dinner, we rode the monorail back to MK, which just about killed us not to go in, and then hopped bus to AKL, then just loafed around in the room. We wanted to get to bed early since it was such a long day At this point, my ankle was holding up remarkably well, but it did start to hurt a little. I did, however, get a huge honkin’ blister on the bottom of my foot. Owie.

Next up, some kiss and make up and introducing Nyami Nyami.

 

[KathyRN137]

Mushy,

Your DS is plenty cute! (and so is your trippie). Looking forward to the next installment...

Kathy

 

[jackskellingtonsgirl]

Hey! Loving the report so far! Glad I didn't read about the could-have-been-cat-pee before our trip! We loved AKL but didn't make it to the pool a single time. In fact, in 3 trips we have never made it to ANY pool! Perhaps I need a pool ADR next time. I seem to do well making it to everything that has to actually be scheduled!

Next installment soon, please!

 

[pattiken]

you have my attention !!
Waiting for more