heycher
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2008
- Messages
- 379
Thought I would put together some thoughts on our trip that we recently returned from. We were at the world from July 29 August 5, did 7 park days and stayed at POFQ. It was my daughter and I (age 8) and we travelled along with another family of 3 people.
First Ill get some oppressive things out of the way!
HEAT. Heat was more intense than I expected. I *thought* I knew heat, it gets to high temps in Ohio sometimes and Ive done Vegas and Phoenix in the summer (temps over 115) but Florida in the summer is so different, and as much reading I did with people talking about the unbearable heat, you would think I would have been more prepared. But I was not, and it knocked my socks off! I took 2 types of misters with us. I had a couple of misty mates, and a couple of the Wal-mart misters with the fans on them. We MUCH preferred the walmart combo than the misty mate misters (that just mists, no fan). Having that fan, even though it only puts out a teensy bit of a breeze, was at times, sanity saving.
FEET. My personal conclusion is that summers because of this heat are much harder on the feet. I think you retain water in the heat for one thing, and that for me occurs in the hands and feet. I also think that when feet sweat, they rub shoes differently and for me, that resulted in blisters. I have done several recent trips (and equally long and intense) and have never had a problem with feet. But this time I did. So Im blaming the heat! I did what I read about, with rotating shoes (wore different shoes in day than night, and switched day shoes around) My #1 life saver on this trip was MOLE SKIN. Being able to apply that to blistered or almost-blistered areas of my feet literally saved my trip by keeping me walking.
CROWDS. I thought the crowds were about as I expected them to be, which were much higher than we had experienced in the past. But that is obvious because our last three trips were intentionally planned during slower times of the year (May 07, January 08, October 08). So it was busier than we prefer, however having done my Disney homework and knowing how to work the parks we did not wait for anything much at all. We did am emhs 5 out of 7 park days. We left those parks mid-day and usually returned to a different (non-emh) park at night. We did not spend much time at Animal Kingdom (1 day) this trip, mostly because it felt so hot it just didnt feel as pleasant as it normally does for us to be there. In almost all cases we waited for restrooms, never walked into restrooms in any park that didnt have a line. Maybe one time the entire trip, or early in an EMH.
Headliners in the parks were almost always 70+ minutes, with the big ones, being 120+ minutes in the afternoons. I really felt sorry for people who didnt know how to use things like fast pass and touring plans. I would have been miserable in those lines!!
Now onto more magical topics!
PARKS. I had been doing a lot of reading on the boards prior to our trip and was worried about some reports of park care having slipped due to cuts, cleanliness of restrooms, etc. I would say that the change, if any, seemed very moderate to me. I still felt like I saw the same amount of cast members around the parks. Maybe a few less attendants in the restrooms than I had seen in the past. But it wasnt like the restrooms were the filthy mess I anticipated. There were some counters by the sinks that had water on them, and occasionally some toilet paper on the ground, but nothing major at all.
We didnt wait in lines, because we knew what to go to first, worked the fast pass system absolutely consistently on our trip too. critical!
Tour groups were almost non existent, or at least they were not at the parks we were at. We saw maybe 3 tour groups the entire week, and they were not chanting, or any of that I had read about. From what I gathered by talking to some CMs most of the tour groups had literally just cleared out before our trip, with the prior week parks / resorts being heavily attended by groups.
HOTEL Absolutely positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt FELL IN LOVE WITH the Port Orleans French Quarter. Our prior hotel stays were: Pop Century, Caribbean Beach and Coronado Springs. Unless some miracle occurs and I could afford a deluxe on a future trip, I will never stray from POFQ. We loved it that much. We were in building 2 in a corner room (2133). It was right by the towel / housekeeping corner so it didnt have a good view at all, but the location was incredible, about 15 steps to the boat to Downtown Disney and about 30 steps to the pool. We did fax in building location preferences, no idea if that helped us or not, but we even got the connecting rooms we requested. Got very lucky. We were treated like GOLD by the cast members at this resort and have no complaints whatsoever. I do think the rooms are showing their age, and should be somewhre on the list for some updating, but all of the incredible goodness of this resort, to me, far far outweighed a little chipped paint and carpet wear!
TWITTERING This was really fun! I twittered our trip from start to finish. Weve got some family and friends who were interested in knowing what we were doing. Rather than sending emails, etc.. I learned how to do a twitter feed from my iphone. It was SO EASY to take a picture and throw it on twitter, like literally 5 seconds. So I think I twittered about 150 pictures during our week. (225+ actual tweets) Like of things we were about to ride, things we saw, things we ate. It was a lot of fun! And gave me something to do while waiting in line or rest breaks. People back home seemed to love going on vacation with us too!
**COOL NOTE!** Because I was twittering, I also saw via twitter that LEN TESTRA from touringplans.com was going to be doing a meet and greet at the Magic Kingdom to celebrate his birthday one day during our trip. The Disney geek in me, was ALL OVER THAT! And I hopped from AK over to MK to meet him and some other super super cool Disney folks! It was AWESOME!!! He gave me a cupcake and I sat around and chatted (ok, I worshipped these folks!!) for a while. It was a really neat experience to just sit and chat with them at the Tomorrowland Terrace Noodle Station!
IPHONE- Wow how invaluable I felt that my iphone was on this trip! Some apps that I thought might be really useful werent for me (maps and wait time apps), and other apps were highly useful. The one we used most was the dining app, where you can look at menus from every restaurant, etc.. Very cool! That was another thing that we did to kill time in our short lines, was look at the menus and figure out where to go or what we might order , etc. It came in particularly handy to make decisions regarding childrens menus. They are SO super limited especially with the counter service options, that we could look at a couple of restaurant options (IN ADVANCE) before getting to say, (Columbia harbour house) which didnt have a child dining option that would have worked for us. Saved us a lot of leg work and unhappy kids! Our dinners were all ADRd so no changing those though! (more on dining in a bit). I did populate some wait time apps wait times while we were there. I just didnt find the return times to be recent enough for things we were looking to ride to make it real valuable for me. Maybe I helped someone else out though by populating wait times I saw!
Photo Pass opportunities I had read on the board about there seeming to be a decrease in availability of photo pass photographers. I did not see this to be the case at all. We did not use photopass this trip, however, we did buy the disc last trip (October 2008) and so I was paying attention to see if photographers seemed to be scarce. They did not. I saw them at every single place we got photos taken in October, and then some.
DINING PLAN: This was our first time using the Disney Dining Plan. We definitely got our moneys worth! During our trip I saved all of our receipts and noted amounts spent on the receipts that didnt show the amount. The day after we got home, I added up the cost of our actual dining spending vs. the cost of the dining plan. The cost for my daughter and I for the dining plan for the 7 days was $356.86. Our actual food spending was $579.64. So we had a savings of about 38.5%! ($222.76 saved).
A lot of the reason for that was choosing restaurants, snacks, etc.. that were good value on the dining plan. We probably ended up choosing things on menus that tended to be pricier, but didnt choose those things just because they were the expensive items. We ate what we had a taste for.
Our Table service restaurants were:
Chef Mickeys (dinner)
Ohana (dinner)
Le Cellier (dinner)
Crystal Palace (breakfast)
Teppan Edo (dinner)
1900 Park Fare (dinner)
Mamma Melrose fantasmic package (dinner)
Sci-Fi (lunch, out of pocket)
Our counter service restaurants were:
Cosmic Rays (lunch)
POFQ (lunch)
Sunshine Seasons (lunch)
Cantina de San Angel (dinner)
Pizzafari (lunch)
Wolfgang Puck Express (breakfast)
Wolfgang Puck Express (lunch)
Overall, our dining experiences were really great. My favorite TS meals were Le Cellier, Chef Mickeys, Teppan Edo, and Crystal Palace. Ohana would have been great if we had a server who didnt try to push us out in 30 minutes (in my opinion he wrecked our experience because of how much he rushed us the food was YUM though). 1900 PF left a lot to be desired I thought. The only good part of that dinner was the characters (who were terrific!). We were stuck in a back corner in the extension room, and the food was really average. And Sci-Fi Im glad we did it, but likely wont return. Just didnt like having to look at the back of the heads of people in our party and thought my $13 turkey sandwich was over priced and very average.
Our counter services were *great* Wolfgang puck express is an amazing value and their food is just SO good! I could have eaten every CS meal there and been happy! The boat from POFQ to DTD made dining at WPE so easy, it was great! I think being on the dining plan allowed me to make better choices at the CS also. Our last few trips I remember eating a lot of burgers and fries at CS places, this time I didnt have that once! I ended up choosing more of the ribs / chicken options on the CS menus (which not on dining plan I would probably have been too cheap to choose those options!). It really felt like non-fast-food eating. That was a pleasant surprise, how much I really enjoyed our CS meals!
I started weight watchers about 6 weeks before this trip, but decided to just let it fly and eat kind of whatever I wanted and not worry about it, just for those 8 days. I thought I would have gained 5 lbs. at least, and much to my pleasant surprise, I LOST a half of a pound on this trip! Guess all of that walking and sweating truly did burn calories! Because I sure ate a lot of them!!
We used Garden Grocer and that was a great savings too, each day I would bring a few bottles of water with us, which saved us from spending the $2.50 per bottle rate in the parks. We went back for mid-day breaks each day so would take a couple more bottles with us to the parks in the afternoon. I also had cereal, milk, bananas, and diet pepsi delivered to the room, so we had our breakfast there mostly. That worked out great!
Overall, it was a great trip! Disney is never anything less than magical for me. If I ever do another summer trip (which I kind of doubt!), I will NOT forget the following: moleskin , misters with fans, ponchos and patience!
First Ill get some oppressive things out of the way!
HEAT. Heat was more intense than I expected. I *thought* I knew heat, it gets to high temps in Ohio sometimes and Ive done Vegas and Phoenix in the summer (temps over 115) but Florida in the summer is so different, and as much reading I did with people talking about the unbearable heat, you would think I would have been more prepared. But I was not, and it knocked my socks off! I took 2 types of misters with us. I had a couple of misty mates, and a couple of the Wal-mart misters with the fans on them. We MUCH preferred the walmart combo than the misty mate misters (that just mists, no fan). Having that fan, even though it only puts out a teensy bit of a breeze, was at times, sanity saving.
FEET. My personal conclusion is that summers because of this heat are much harder on the feet. I think you retain water in the heat for one thing, and that for me occurs in the hands and feet. I also think that when feet sweat, they rub shoes differently and for me, that resulted in blisters. I have done several recent trips (and equally long and intense) and have never had a problem with feet. But this time I did. So Im blaming the heat! I did what I read about, with rotating shoes (wore different shoes in day than night, and switched day shoes around) My #1 life saver on this trip was MOLE SKIN. Being able to apply that to blistered or almost-blistered areas of my feet literally saved my trip by keeping me walking.
CROWDS. I thought the crowds were about as I expected them to be, which were much higher than we had experienced in the past. But that is obvious because our last three trips were intentionally planned during slower times of the year (May 07, January 08, October 08). So it was busier than we prefer, however having done my Disney homework and knowing how to work the parks we did not wait for anything much at all. We did am emhs 5 out of 7 park days. We left those parks mid-day and usually returned to a different (non-emh) park at night. We did not spend much time at Animal Kingdom (1 day) this trip, mostly because it felt so hot it just didnt feel as pleasant as it normally does for us to be there. In almost all cases we waited for restrooms, never walked into restrooms in any park that didnt have a line. Maybe one time the entire trip, or early in an EMH.
Headliners in the parks were almost always 70+ minutes, with the big ones, being 120+ minutes in the afternoons. I really felt sorry for people who didnt know how to use things like fast pass and touring plans. I would have been miserable in those lines!!
Now onto more magical topics!
PARKS. I had been doing a lot of reading on the boards prior to our trip and was worried about some reports of park care having slipped due to cuts, cleanliness of restrooms, etc. I would say that the change, if any, seemed very moderate to me. I still felt like I saw the same amount of cast members around the parks. Maybe a few less attendants in the restrooms than I had seen in the past. But it wasnt like the restrooms were the filthy mess I anticipated. There were some counters by the sinks that had water on them, and occasionally some toilet paper on the ground, but nothing major at all.
We didnt wait in lines, because we knew what to go to first, worked the fast pass system absolutely consistently on our trip too. critical!
Tour groups were almost non existent, or at least they were not at the parks we were at. We saw maybe 3 tour groups the entire week, and they were not chanting, or any of that I had read about. From what I gathered by talking to some CMs most of the tour groups had literally just cleared out before our trip, with the prior week parks / resorts being heavily attended by groups.
HOTEL Absolutely positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt FELL IN LOVE WITH the Port Orleans French Quarter. Our prior hotel stays were: Pop Century, Caribbean Beach and Coronado Springs. Unless some miracle occurs and I could afford a deluxe on a future trip, I will never stray from POFQ. We loved it that much. We were in building 2 in a corner room (2133). It was right by the towel / housekeeping corner so it didnt have a good view at all, but the location was incredible, about 15 steps to the boat to Downtown Disney and about 30 steps to the pool. We did fax in building location preferences, no idea if that helped us or not, but we even got the connecting rooms we requested. Got very lucky. We were treated like GOLD by the cast members at this resort and have no complaints whatsoever. I do think the rooms are showing their age, and should be somewhre on the list for some updating, but all of the incredible goodness of this resort, to me, far far outweighed a little chipped paint and carpet wear!
TWITTERING This was really fun! I twittered our trip from start to finish. Weve got some family and friends who were interested in knowing what we were doing. Rather than sending emails, etc.. I learned how to do a twitter feed from my iphone. It was SO EASY to take a picture and throw it on twitter, like literally 5 seconds. So I think I twittered about 150 pictures during our week. (225+ actual tweets) Like of things we were about to ride, things we saw, things we ate. It was a lot of fun! And gave me something to do while waiting in line or rest breaks. People back home seemed to love going on vacation with us too!
**COOL NOTE!** Because I was twittering, I also saw via twitter that LEN TESTRA from touringplans.com was going to be doing a meet and greet at the Magic Kingdom to celebrate his birthday one day during our trip. The Disney geek in me, was ALL OVER THAT! And I hopped from AK over to MK to meet him and some other super super cool Disney folks! It was AWESOME!!! He gave me a cupcake and I sat around and chatted (ok, I worshipped these folks!!) for a while. It was a really neat experience to just sit and chat with them at the Tomorrowland Terrace Noodle Station!
IPHONE- Wow how invaluable I felt that my iphone was on this trip! Some apps that I thought might be really useful werent for me (maps and wait time apps), and other apps were highly useful. The one we used most was the dining app, where you can look at menus from every restaurant, etc.. Very cool! That was another thing that we did to kill time in our short lines, was look at the menus and figure out where to go or what we might order , etc. It came in particularly handy to make decisions regarding childrens menus. They are SO super limited especially with the counter service options, that we could look at a couple of restaurant options (IN ADVANCE) before getting to say, (Columbia harbour house) which didnt have a child dining option that would have worked for us. Saved us a lot of leg work and unhappy kids! Our dinners were all ADRd so no changing those though! (more on dining in a bit). I did populate some wait time apps wait times while we were there. I just didnt find the return times to be recent enough for things we were looking to ride to make it real valuable for me. Maybe I helped someone else out though by populating wait times I saw!
Photo Pass opportunities I had read on the board about there seeming to be a decrease in availability of photo pass photographers. I did not see this to be the case at all. We did not use photopass this trip, however, we did buy the disc last trip (October 2008) and so I was paying attention to see if photographers seemed to be scarce. They did not. I saw them at every single place we got photos taken in October, and then some.
DINING PLAN: This was our first time using the Disney Dining Plan. We definitely got our moneys worth! During our trip I saved all of our receipts and noted amounts spent on the receipts that didnt show the amount. The day after we got home, I added up the cost of our actual dining spending vs. the cost of the dining plan. The cost for my daughter and I for the dining plan for the 7 days was $356.86. Our actual food spending was $579.64. So we had a savings of about 38.5%! ($222.76 saved).
A lot of the reason for that was choosing restaurants, snacks, etc.. that were good value on the dining plan. We probably ended up choosing things on menus that tended to be pricier, but didnt choose those things just because they were the expensive items. We ate what we had a taste for.
Our Table service restaurants were:
Chef Mickeys (dinner)
Ohana (dinner)
Le Cellier (dinner)
Crystal Palace (breakfast)
Teppan Edo (dinner)
1900 Park Fare (dinner)
Mamma Melrose fantasmic package (dinner)
Sci-Fi (lunch, out of pocket)
Our counter service restaurants were:
Cosmic Rays (lunch)
POFQ (lunch)
Sunshine Seasons (lunch)
Cantina de San Angel (dinner)
Pizzafari (lunch)
Wolfgang Puck Express (breakfast)
Wolfgang Puck Express (lunch)
Overall, our dining experiences were really great. My favorite TS meals were Le Cellier, Chef Mickeys, Teppan Edo, and Crystal Palace. Ohana would have been great if we had a server who didnt try to push us out in 30 minutes (in my opinion he wrecked our experience because of how much he rushed us the food was YUM though). 1900 PF left a lot to be desired I thought. The only good part of that dinner was the characters (who were terrific!). We were stuck in a back corner in the extension room, and the food was really average. And Sci-Fi Im glad we did it, but likely wont return. Just didnt like having to look at the back of the heads of people in our party and thought my $13 turkey sandwich was over priced and very average.
Our counter services were *great* Wolfgang puck express is an amazing value and their food is just SO good! I could have eaten every CS meal there and been happy! The boat from POFQ to DTD made dining at WPE so easy, it was great! I think being on the dining plan allowed me to make better choices at the CS also. Our last few trips I remember eating a lot of burgers and fries at CS places, this time I didnt have that once! I ended up choosing more of the ribs / chicken options on the CS menus (which not on dining plan I would probably have been too cheap to choose those options!). It really felt like non-fast-food eating. That was a pleasant surprise, how much I really enjoyed our CS meals!
I started weight watchers about 6 weeks before this trip, but decided to just let it fly and eat kind of whatever I wanted and not worry about it, just for those 8 days. I thought I would have gained 5 lbs. at least, and much to my pleasant surprise, I LOST a half of a pound on this trip! Guess all of that walking and sweating truly did burn calories! Because I sure ate a lot of them!!
We used Garden Grocer and that was a great savings too, each day I would bring a few bottles of water with us, which saved us from spending the $2.50 per bottle rate in the parks. We went back for mid-day breaks each day so would take a couple more bottles with us to the parks in the afternoon. I also had cereal, milk, bananas, and diet pepsi delivered to the room, so we had our breakfast there mostly. That worked out great!
Overall, it was a great trip! Disney is never anything less than magical for me. If I ever do another summer trip (which I kind of doubt!), I will NOT forget the following: moleskin , misters with fans, ponchos and patience!
