Sky Pirates Raid the Epcot Food and Wine Festival Oct. 2010

[lilwhiterabbit]

Ahoy mateys! This be a tale of sky pirates, dinosaurs, giant squids, Halloween parties, and that greatest of all destinations, the Epcot Food and Wine Festival. But first, we must introduce you to our intrepid crew.

First of all, myself, the captain:

I'm a divorced mother of one and full time student, majoring in English literature and minoring in professional writing. A few things you should know about myself right off the bat, I'm a big fan of steampunk stuff, hence the sky pirate references, and I used to be a professional costume designer--two things that will actually come up later in this trip report. This trip was my sixth or seventh (I've stopped counting) to WDW and I'm the one who planned most of it.

My first mate and partner, Nigel:

Until recently, Nigel was a graduate student, but has now joined the ranks of the employed and is working for a software company. This was his first trip to WDW since he was a preteen. Nigel is just as big a fan of steampunk as myself and is skilled at creating props and scenery. Between the two of us, we've got three different workshops at home. I guess you can't say we don't have anything in common.

This trip was fairly special for Nigel and I because we were celebrating our two year anniversary. Originally, we were also going to be celebrating his graduation from grad school as well, but that ended up being pushed back. I think the anniversary was reason enough to celebrate, though.

At first we were supposed to be traveling with a group of six people but, by the time the trip actually happened, two of them dropped out, so we were left with only one couple.

Meet Mike:

And his girlfriend, Aldea:

We knew from the start that Mike and Aldea would have very different vacationing styles from Nigel and I. I'm very much a planner; I like to have a game plan and at least a loose schedule. I'm not anal enough to demand that we be on X ride at Y time, but I do make ADRs and try to wake up at certain times. I also don't like crisscrossing parks, but I'll get to the reason why later.

Mike and Aldea, on the other hand, love sleeping in and are very much "go with the flow" type people on vacation, so I knew we'd be parting ways quite a bit while down in Florida. Fortunately, letting them do their own thing about half the time seemed to work out best for everyone... except for one specific occasion in Epcot. Want to know what happened? I guess you'll just have to read on, won't you?

 

[lilwhiterabbit]

Table of Contents

Part One: Leaving is the Hardest Part

 

[lilwhiterabbit]

The only real difficulty we had on the trip happened right out of the gate. We were set to leave around 10:00 AM on Sunday, October 3rd to drive from Atlanta, GA to our hotel, Port Orleans French Quarter. I'd allotted about nine hours for the drive down, and had made a reservation at Raglan Road for dinner around 9:00 PM, figuring we'd have plenty of time to check into the hotel and freshen up before heading over to Downtown Disney to eat.

Well, that's not exactly how it happened, but it ended up working out okay anyway.

So first of all, our dog/house sitter was half an hour late. This was because her roommate, who had the car, was half an hour late. This would have been a problem except that Mike and Aldea were two and a half hours late!

Turns out Aldea's ex-husband forgot that week was the week Aldea was going to Florida and thought she was the one who would have custody of their son. So when she showed up at his place to drop her little boy off, her ex wasn't there. Cue Aldea frantically calling around trying to find him, then having to wait for him to get home, then her and Mike having to drive back from Tennessee (her ex lives in Chattanooga) and... yeah. It was a mess.

So instead of being on the road by 10:30 or so as I'd hoped, we didn't get out until 1:30, which put us way, way behind.

On top of that, on the way down, I missed the turn off to get onto the new non-I-4 exit and we ended up getting lost and taking a 45 minute detour through back roads before finally getting to the hotel.

Finally, finally we managed to find it and then we had to wait almost 20 minutes for bell services, even though it was well after 9:30 PM and the place was dead. At the very least, check-in was a breeze, because I'd used online check in and there was no line anyway, but I have no idea what bell services were doing. There weren't any other people waiting for their bags to be checked in or out that we could see and they wouldn't let us take a cart to haul our bags to the room ourselves (we had too many between the four of us to carry them by hand since we were staying for almost a week).

Once we finally managed to get a bellhop to take everything to our rooms, we changed into some non-rumpled clothes and decided to take the water taxi to Downtown Disney anyway, even though we'd pretty much missed our ADR for Raglan Road by half an hour. I told everyone we could go and see if they'd still honor it, but that would really depend on how busy they were. The way things had been going, however, I wasn't holding out much hope.