Our Magical Pre Christmas Trip 12-13 to 12-20-2009 - Updated 04-15-2010

[nantrev]

We headed over to the reserve section for IllumiNations, which was behind the EPCOT Christmas tree at the World Showcase Plaza. Since it was very windy they had the very front area rope off, but we got a great spot right at the rope in front of the Earth Globe it was a awesome show, which a special holiday ending. It hosted by Walter Cronkite: Peace on Earth, was a very speical way to end our night. We felt sorry for anyone that was watching from the Mexico area as all the smoke was flowing that way and it was very thick.

Our DS had other plans, he wanted to ride Test Track and he did 3 times in a row. Then we rode Space Ship Earth before we left EPCOT around 11:30 pm and headed back to our resort.

Up next Photopass Pictures.

 

[nantrev]

Here are some of our favorite photopass pictures from EPCOT

and of course my princess picture

Up next our last full day at Disney World

 

[jenseib]

Love the updates. You guys look like a fun group and wonderful parents!

 

[reyasmommy]

Hello!

Just got caught up on your TR...... I'm loving it thus far, and your pictures are fantastic.

We might do the photopass this time, it looks like you took full advantage of it and that's awesome.

So when you were having fun playing at Blizzard Beach on the 15th, I was in the worst pain of my life in Labor with my DS. ((with a non-working epidural)) Anyway.... his middle name is Trevor. ((Thought that was cool, since that's your sons name)) Jayden Trevor to be exact.

Anyway, I know that's off topic. So your TR is great! We're leaving for our trip tomorrow, so I'm reading as many TR's as I can right now to tie me over until then.

So thanks for sharing.

 

[nantrev]

Love the updates. You guys look like a fun group and wonderful parents!

Thanks, we love to travel with our son.

 

[nantrev]

Hello!

Just got caught up on your TR...... I'm loving it thus far, and your pictures are fantastic.

We might do the photopass this time, it looks like you took full advantage of it and that's awesome.

So when you were having fun playing at Blizzard Beach on the 15th, I was in the worst pain of my life in Labor with my DS. ((with a non-working epidural)) Anyway.... his middle name is Trevor. ((Thought that was cool, since that's your sons name)) Jayden Trevor to be exact.

Anyway, I know that's off topic. So your TR is great! We're leaving for our trip tomorrow, so I'm reading as many TR's as I can right now to tie me over until then.

So thanks for sharing.

I love the photopass, it so easy to get great family pictures. We came home with over 200 pictures on 3 cards and I ended up with over a 1,000 finish pictures. It was very hard to pick which ones to order to go into our scrapbook.

Love your son's name

Hope you had a great trip.

 

[nantrev]

The Parks haven't been crowded so far , but we knew today would be different.
Since this was our last full day at Disney we started it early.
It was cold & windy with a high of only 63 degrees, but truthfully we think it was a lot colder, (maybe it was the cold wind), I wonder if Florida does their weather with a wind chill, like up north in New England.
We caught the 6:55 am bus to Magic Kingdom, there were just five of us on the bus, and it was still a little bit dark outside. But, we were excitied to be headed to Magic Kingdom.

We were going to have breakfast at Crystal Palace.

Up next a warm breakfast at Crystal Palace.

 

[nantrev]

On our last trip to Disney World we had breakfast at Crystal Palace before the park open, it was a very magical experience. (Even if when I made the reservation, I was like that is so early) Our reservations were for 8:15 am, we got to the park about 7:30 am and they let us into the holding area about 7:45 am.

They let us onto Main Street at 8 am. We were the first family through the gates and onto Main Street. They were still washing down Main Street. I know that Disney World is a magical place, but walking down Main Street when its mostly emtpy is a MAGICAL EXPERIENCE!

My boys walking down Main Street

After taking some great pictures and getting some great pictures taken at the Castle and Christmas Tree.

We headed over to Crystal Palace

We got in right at 8:15 am, which was our reservation time, that was nice as it was very cold & windy.
We had a wonderful breakfast and Pooh, Eeyore & Piglet stop by for a visit.

DS left a little bit after 9 am to go and ride Space Mountain, but it already had a long line, so he got three fastpasses for it and then he rode Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin and came back to meet us at Crystal Palace. Our waitress was so nice that she gave two hot teas to go, to keep us warm.

Up next a very crowded Magic Kingdom and off to the Gingerbread House

 

[nantrev]

We left Crystal Palace and headed towards Splash Mountain on the way we saw Princess Tiana and her Prince Naveen from the movie The Princess and the Frog, since there was no line, I had my picture taken with them.

DH & DS rode Splash Mountain with no wait, then my DS rode it again with no wait. It still wasn't crowded over in the Fronierland area. As the boys were riding Splash Mountain I took a picture with Woody & Jessie, the wait was under 10 minutes. This was due to they had to leave and go feed Bullseye.

Then we headed over to the Haunted Mansion, we rode it twice with no wait.

We headed over to Space Mountain for DS to use his fastpasses and we found the crowds It was getting very crowed over in Tomorrowland.
DS got in the fastpass line and sadly Space Mountain broke down and he was able to ride it only once in a 40 minute time frame. When we decide to leave, Space Mountain stand by line was almost 2 hours.
Main St was packed! We left around 1:30 pm.
We took the monorail to the Grand Floridian, our monorail car was empty when we left Magic Kingdom, but, the getting off to Magic Kingdom was PACKED!

After the first two stops our monorail car was PACKED!
We got off at the Grand Floridian for three reasons:
Christmas Tree
Gingerbread House
and my boys wanted to use their coupon (90 minutes for the price of 60 minutes) on the Sea Raycer on the Seven Seas Lagoon.
First you enter the lobby and see this wonderful huge tree, it was so different from the Animal Kingdom Lodge tree, both were so beautiful.

The Gingerbread House was so cute . The shingles on the roof even had chocolate on the back of them, but I will say the first thing I thought was what a waste of chocolate . They even had a store in the Gingerbread House, we purchased two roof shingles, our course they had chocolate on them.

DS got a chocooate Mickey Head.

Up next Seven Seas Lagoon

 

[nantrev]

Then we headed over to Captain's Shipyard Marina at the Grand Floridian and the boys took their Sea Racyer out onto the Seven Seas Lagoon and headed towards Bay Lake, they saw the: abandoned water park River County and the bird island Discovery Island, which had a lot birds on it, they also saw a Osprey flying in the sky.
DS had a blast doing 360's and trying to get dad wet in the wake of the other boats. Oh I'm almost forgot DS drove.

While the boys went boating I went to the Food Court, which I was very surprised to see how small it was. The food court is where their arcade is and there is not a lot of inside talbes, so I sat outside in the cold and caught up our family journal.
As we were leaving the grand Floridian, they were giving out Hot Apple Cider that was very warm and good.

Next up Downtown Disney

 

[nantrev]

Then we took a bus to Downtown disney, it seem to take forever. It was a much longer drive then from Animal Kingdom Lodge. the only problem on the bus was the back half was full of cheerleaders and they were very loud
I was very happy to get off at the fist Downtown Disney Disney stop to do some shopping. The boys went to the Disney Quest stop.

So our plan was, I make my way through Downtown Disney, shopping and then meet the boys at Disney Quest. I found the shopping to be slim pickings. I love to scrapbook and found the scrapbooking area to be full of albums and punches but nothing else The Christmas Store had no hotel ornaments, so I had to have a plain one customize and mail home to us. Even at the World of Disney, I could not find a sweatshirt for me and still no scrapbooking supplies
I finally made it Disney Quest to meet my boys, it took me about two to two half hours to get to them.
We ate dinner at the House of Blues, very good ribs.
Then all of us headed back to Disney Quest for another hour of game playing.
We took the bus back our resort to start packing. DS headed to the pool and DH took the 30 minute free arcade coupon and use it at the resort arcade.
As I was packing I turned on the Weather Channel and saw that we might have a problem flying home tomorrow as Washington DC to Maine was having a blizzard. I wasn't worry about Manchester, NH airport, but we had a lay over in Baltimore, Maryland (we didn't have to get off the plane, but we did have a hour layover). The more I watch the worst the storm was getting, now they were callig it "THE BLIZZARD OF 2009" and Baltimore might get over 15" of snow. Our flight was suppose to leave at 4:50 pm, so we will have to to wait to see what will happens .

Thoughts of the day:
It's well worth it get up and go to Magic Kingdom for breakfast, before the park opens. It's so peaceful and magical

Up next photopass pictures of our last full day

 

[nantrev]

Some of our favorite Photopass Pictures from our last day

Up next our last morning and will we get home

 

[jenseib]

seeing your pictures makes me want to go with your family! You do so much stuff and have so much fun.

 

[nantrev]

seeing your pictures makes me want to go with your family! You do so much stuff and have so much fun.

Thank you, we love to travel to different places, with our son and if possible our puppy dog.

 

[nantrev]

Our first thoughts, when we woke up today was: Where will we be spending the night at: Hotel, Airport or Home
We called to get our luggage pickup, and they were at our room in least then 10 minutes. We decided to have breakfast at Mara's and decide where to go for the morning. During breakfast at 9:00 am we called and found out that our flight was still on time. Then we called some friends and found out that we had 5 to 7" of the pretty white stuff on the ground and more was coming down.
We decided to head over to Animal Kingdom. It was then that we found our that our DS had pack his park ticket in his luggage. We went out to the bell hop and they went and got his suitcase very quickly for us.
We headed over to the bus stop and saw a bus that was leaving and it was FULL! Oh no We made it on the second bus and it was full also.
We arrived at Animal Kingdom with the crowds, the lines to enter the park were all the way back to the ticket booth, at least a 20 minute or longer wait.
Then I remember a tip from the Disboards, go through Rain Forest Cafe to enter the park. So we decided to try that entrance and guess what, no wait at all. THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH DISBOARDS FOR THE TIP!
Since we only had a couple of hours we decided to look at the animals and skip the rides.
I mention to my boys that there were trails that go right under the Tree of Life (Discovery Island Trails)

We decided to look for them and we found them We only saw a couple of other people on them. On the trails you go right up to the tree of life and you get to see the animal carvings up close. We found animals that we didn't know that were on the tree. Here is some that we found:
sea horse, knagaroo, eagle, camel, dragon fly, buffalo, shark, rhio, tortoise, horse, pterodateyl, chimpmunk, road runner, snake, flying sqirrel, ant, porcupine, lizards, koala, dolphin.

We saw a Paroon Shark-Catfish, but it was to cold for the Galapagos tortoise.

We came out of the trials by the entrance to It's A Bug Life.

 

[nantrev]

We did the Maharajah Jungle Trek trail (tiger trial) and the Panagani Forest Exploration Trial (gorilla trail).

The gorillas were so funny today , two of the Silverbacks were carrying around their pink blankets. It was so cute , to see these big boys carrying their blankies. Every once in a while they would give us a look, like don't even think about laughing at me! It made our day!

Animal Kingdom was getting very crowded and it was time to head back to Animal Kingdom Lodge to see if we get to go home today or not!

Oh I almost forgot I finally found a sweatshirt for me

 

[nantrev]

We got back to our hotel, we found out that our flight was delay to 6:55 pm, but we still had to go to the airport.
DH & I sat in the very comfortable rocking charis and look out onto the Savanna

Our DS walked over to Arusha Rock to get a closer look at the animals, it was very peaceful after the crowds at Animal Kingdom.

Then we were on the way to the airport in a very full bus.

We stop at POP Century and saw the abandoned hotel, DS thought it was cool that I knew about it (Thank you again Disboards). Then we got to the
airport.

Our flight was still at 6:55 pm. But we were very concerned about our lay-over in Baltimore. DH went up to the gate check-in and found out that there was a direct flight to Manchester, NH that was leaving at 7:30 pm. So my DH went over to that gate, to see if there were any open seats and if the flight was going to be leaving at 7:30pm. So long story short, we changed planes (at no cost, thanks Southwest). DH & DS were able to sit together, I was a couple of rows from them. We made it home by 10:30 pm, but our luggae was not going to to arrive until 1 am (our orginal flight), so we decided that it could spend the night at the airport, and we would pick it up the next day.

So our Christmas Disney World was over , but we would have a white Christmas

up next: last day photopass pictures

 

[nantrev]

Some of our last day photopass pictures:

Up next final thoughts

 

[jenseib]

I am so dad it's over. You had an amazing trip.

 

[nantrev]

We are sad it over also, now it's time for me to start the scrapbook.

I am so dad it's over. You had an amazing trip.