Stop Making Me Laugh Or I'll Pee My Pants! Go Back! I Lost My Shoe! Trip Report!

[MadilynnsMomma]

Oh Lisa - I want to be at CBR NOW!!! Thanks for feeding my daily addiction of pictures of places I just have to see to believe!

 

[MICKEY4EVER!]

Mornin' Lisa! Looking forward to hearing more about your adventures in Disney today. Happy Birthday to the boss man. Sorry about that cake. It always happens like that, doesn't it? The most important cakes, the ones that JUST CAN'T MESS UP, always mess up! Arrrggh! I bet Oddball was glad tho.

 

[mickeystoontown]

The update was excellent. I love those corner rooms. Don and I had one at CSR. The girls were on either side of us. But I guess those cm's knew who was important. They make the room seem bigger and all that light. Well all those clouds and rain drops. Lucky you on your upgrade. Totally excellent.

I had the day from somewhere not on this earth. No computer, no internet. It was the pits. I swear it lasted 42 hours. I came home, took a nap and Don fixed his own dinner. What a good man.

Ginny

I can't remember if you posted pictures of the CSR in your trip report. If ya did, I'm going back to take another look. Gotta keep my options open.

I know what you mean about looooong days and nothing turning out right. Hate thosek inds of days. Hopefully, today will be better.

There's always Sara Lee!

I'm sure Oddball and the racoons will enjoy.

John and I nibbled on it last night and it didn't taste bad at all. A little packy but it tasted good. We will probably just throw out the rest.

The boss will just have to wait until another day to get a pound cake.

Great CBR pictures, as always Lisa!

Thanks! I will be posting more today.

 

[mommytothreeboys]

I told you I'd be here first thing! I'm all caught up...all 15 pages!

First...so exciting that Lacey is able to join you. I can't imagine what it will be like to take vacations without all 3 boys. That time is quickly approaching though...time sure flies. My oldest, Dan, starts HIGH SCHOOL in a couple of weeks!

Second....so uncanny how Lacey looks just like you and Hunter looks just like John! WOW!!

I am so sorry that your family had to witness the horrific accident on your drive to WDW. I'm sure it would have played in my mind over and over as well. So sad. I remember when I was very young, my parents witnessed a similar accident on the highway and they have not forgotten it to this day. (Thankfully my brothers and I were asleep.)

I LOVE that 20 Questions game! We got it for the boys a few Christmases ago and that thing is CREEPY!!! We even got it to guess "booger"....okay so it said phlegm, but that's close enough! Crazy thing!

Love the pics of your room at CBR! We got a corner room at POR as well and the extra window really does make it seem bigger. I love all the detail pics of the room. I'm always so excited to be there, that I don't take enough pictures of the room.

Just have to say that your family is awesome! I love that you laugh and joke and are silly together...you remind me of us! We all just get a kick out of the same crazy stuff....and we laugh about it for weeks! And we are big on tradition as well...we would so stop at the same McDonald's every trip just for tradition's sake!

Can't wait to hear more about this fabulous trip!!!!

 

[mickeystoontown]

Lisa that is terrible. You poor dear. It is so aggravating. The price of the ingrediants, the work put into making it and then boom. Total disaster. I guess you will get a veggie tray. Put a candle in it. What did you get him for his birthday? I'm the worst birthday picker outer ever. I always get my boss a gc to the bike shop.

I was aggravated. I usually am quite good with desserts. Who knows what happened.

I'm going to take another stab at a pound cake but probably won't do it until this weekend. Heck, I've gotta go buy more eggs before I can start. This one took 6!

My boss is hard to buy for. He and his family are all really active recycle people. They never buy books new. They hit up book sales and library sales or he goes on Amazon and orders them used. He likes old Sci-Fi stuff so I stopped by Cracker Barrell on my way home last night and got Volume I and Volume II of Twighlight Zone. It was my lucky day because they had all their DVDs, buy one/get the second half off.

HOLY COW Lisa!! Page 15 already??? I'll start first thing tomorrow...right now I need to go to bed! See ya in the AM...can't wait to read about this trip!

Hopefully, you'll get caught up today.

Oh! Lisa; so sorry to hear about your cake!
I don't bake especially from scratch;but, I love to cook!
your soup sounds good; I never ate tomato soup until we ate at "Earl of Sandwich" at DTD. Ashton is our soup eater, I may need your receipe.

have a great night!

I absolutely love to bake. At Christmas time, I have an entire day that I do nothing but make sweets. Then, I put them on platters and John and Hunter deliver them to our nextdoor neighbors for Christmas. I also make candies and cookies for John's customers. Never hurts to remind them that we appreciate their business and to come back for more.

 

[mickeystoontown]

Oh Lisa - I want to be at CBR NOW!!! Thanks for feeding my daily addiction of pictures of places I just have to see to believe!

I know. That's the exact same thing I think when I post my CBR pictures. Why can't I be there right now?

Mornin' Lisa! Looking forward to hearing more about your adventures in Disney today. Happy Birthday to the boss man. Sorry about that cake. It always happens like that, doesn't it? The most important cakes, the ones that JUST CAN'T MESS UP, always mess up! Arrrggh! I bet Oddball was glad tho.

By the time that the cake fell flat as a flitter (don't know if ya'll have ever heard that expression but my Mamaw used to say it all the time), it was too late to start another. The cake had to cook for an hour and twenty minutes. There was no way, I was staying up until 11:30 p.m. or Midnight to wait on the cake to get done.

 

[mickeystoontown]

I told you I'd be here first thing! I'm all caught up...all 15 pages!

First...so exciting that Lacey is able to join you. I can't imagine what it will be like to take vacations without all 3 boys. That time is quickly approaching though...time sure flies. My oldest, Dan, starts HIGH SCHOOL in a couple of weeks!

Second....so uncanny how Lacey looks just like you and Hunter looks just like John! WOW!!

I am so sorry that your family had to witness the horrific accident on your drive to WDW. I'm sure it would have played in my mind over and over as well. So sad. I remember when I was very young, my parents witnessed a similar accident on the highway and they have not forgotten it to this day. (Thankfully my brothers and I were asleep.)

I LOVE that 20 Questions game! We got it for the boys a few Christmases ago and that thing is CREEPY!!! We even got it to guess "booger"....okay so it said phlegm, but that's close enough! Crazy thing!

Love the pics of your room at CBR! We got a corner room at POR as well and the extra window really does make it seem bigger. I love all the detail pics of the room. I'm always so excited to be there, that I don't take enough pictures of the room.

Just have to say that your family is awesome! I love that you laugh and joke and are silly together...you remind me of us! We all just get a kick out of the same crazy stuff....and we laugh about it for weeks! And we are big on tradition as well...we would so stop at the same McDonald's every trip just for tradition's sake!

Can't wait to hear more about this fabulous trip!!!!

I'm glad that you've caught up with your reading.

We were extremely excited that Lacey was able to come along with us. We only get to see her 2, sometimes 3, times a year. Everybody always asks us why don't we just drive to Georgia and see her for a long weekend. Believe me, we would but she does a lot of her missionary work on the weekends. We would drive 10 hours to see her for maybe half a day if that much. The hotel we have to stay at is 20 minutes away because they only have one hotel in her town and it's not worth staying in.

I love corner rooms. Like you said, it makes the room seem bigger. Optical illusion, I know.

I have so got to tell Hunter to use booger as one of his 20 questions items. I don't know how that little $5.00 ball can figure out the answer 9 out of 10 times. We've only tricked it a few times. Once we had wagon and it said skateboard. Then, we had a mood ring and it said button.

Your family does sound a lot like our's. We like to do things together as a family, we camp, we help with church kids' camps (we don't do VBS anymore just kids' camp) and we laugh at lots of silly things.

We love being a silly family!

 

[aaaateamsgrandma]

Happy birthday to the big boss. Hope he has a great day. I love Twilight Zone. That would be a good present for those of us who like it.

I don't think I posted any pics. Actually I don't think I even took any. Don has it all on video so I'll take snapshots of those and post them. The room was awesome. Even with all of our crappola.

Have a great day.

 

[mickeystoontown]

Now that the pictures of the room have been taken, we head back down to the car to unload all of the other stuff from the car. It took just two trips and it was all in the room.

While I was looking at the stack of luggage and figuring out what to do with it all, John called the front desk and they connected him to bell services. They had our Garden Grocer order which was delivered some time before we arrived. They said they'd have it right up. In just about 10 minutes, a bell man came with our order. I tipped him $5.00 and off he went.

Placing an order with Garden Grocer was the best way to go. We usually drive to a Publix grocery store and buy groceries for our stay. This year, I simply went online and placed our order. Much much easier than going out and doing it ourselves and wasting our precious vacation time.

I'm not real good at living out of a suitcase if I am in a hotel for more than 2 days. Lacey, on the other hand, is used to living out of a suitcase since most of the time, her travels lead her to sleeping in a church basement or the backroom of a homeless shelter or at a host family's house. She kept most of her stuff in her bag but I did convince her to take out the two dresses she was going to wear later in the vacation.

I brought along a dozen hangers and there were probably 6 more already in the closet. I hung up most of John's shirts and some of Hunter's. I did decide to just leave my shorts in the suitcase but to put my shirts in a drawer.

The dresser had plenty of space to put all of our socks and underwear and other clothing.

The bench in the room is really deep so we put all of our empty duffle bags in there, the backpacks, and a few other things. Lacey had brought along her laptop so she could download/upload (whatever you do) her pictures from her camera. It was too large to go in the safe so we just kept it in the drawer beneath the duffle bags. I know that was probably not the safest thing to do but we also did that with the video camera. They were never touched by mousekeeping.

Somewhere, I have a picture of the safe with our stuff in it. John takes a lot of meds for his epilepsy and one of the bottles cost over $700.00. That and the other's combined were over $1,500.00 for a month's supply. Needless to say, those were immediately locked up in the safe. As was Hunter's PSP, our extra money and the extra set of keys. Later on in the trip, we did the pick-a-pearl and we put our jewelry in there as well.

Once everything was unpacked, we were ready to take a walk around the resort. But, it'd have to be a quick one because we were anxious to get to Downtown Disney. We had a 9:00 ADR at T-Rex. Yes, that's late but it was the only time they had so I took it. We also wanted to get in a little shopping prior to our ADR.

You may remember what the sky looked like from the pictures I posted while driving down World Drive. Yep, stormy. When we walked out the door to our room, it was sprinkling rain. Shoot!

Now, on to pictures. These are the views/things, I saw when I stepped out of our room. This was the building number hanging on the corner to the right of our room:

Our views from the balcony/walkway:

This was growing on one of the trees:

Looking straight down from the balcony/walkway:

We waited on the balcony a few minutes to see if it would quit raining. It did and off we went on our CBR adventure. First stop? Old Port Royale. I had to see if they had the 2009 Mickey that Connie wanted me to pick up for Ashton.

Our building was right beside Old Port Royale. It took us maybe 3 or 4 minutes to get here:

We walked in and the very first thing that caught my eye was the Mickey. I almost ran to get one. I don't know why because there was a whole barrel full. Ashton's Mickey was the very first purchase I made on Disney property. Hunter found a pirate pistol that he just had to have so he paid for it with his good grade money. We knew we'd be back to the store again and we needed to get ready for DTD.

We walked out Old Port Royale the "back" way so we could get a good look at the new pool. It was really awesome. I remember taking pictures but I can't find them. Here's one of the kid part of the pool though.

We started back toward our building and we spotted this:

You know me, I take pictures of everything. Here's the pizza delivery parking sign:

Ever the rule breaker, John had to hop in and pose for a picture:

****Interruption: The boss just came in. Not happy that he's working on his birthday. Hey, I told him to take off work. Did he listen to me? Apparently, not!

 

[aaaateamsgrandma]

Excellent update. I so love the serenity of the grounds of the resorts and the cleanliness. They theme everything so well. That naughty John. Some day he is gonna get caught and you are going to be too busy laughing to help him out. Alex would really love that pool.

I can't live out of a suitcase either. One or two night maybe but that is it. Everything gets put away and the luggage stored.

Anxiously waiting for more

Ginny

 

[Momof2Disneyboys]

Great update Lisa!

We love all that extra space in the bench in the room too. I can't believe your DH got in the pizza-mobile!


Great pics!

 

[aprilisis]

Great update! The kids area of the pool looks cute.

 

[mickeystoontown]

Excellent update. I so love the serenity of the grounds of the resorts and the cleanliness. They theme everything so well. That naughty John. Some day he is gonna get caught and you are going to be too busy laughing to help him out. Alex would really love that pool.

I can't live out of a suitcase either. One or two night maybe but that is it. Everything gets put away and the luggage stored.

Anxiously waiting for more

Ginny

While we were there, there were groundskeepers trimming trees and foliage. They had a big mulcher out near the road (not close to the buildings). They were also scrubbing down the sidewalks. They do a good job at keeping the grounds well maintained.

John is always doing something silly. If he sees a sign that says "keep arms and legs in at all times", he's gonna stick a little of his arm out even if it's just for a second and to pester Hunter. Crazy boy!

Great update Lisa!

We love all that extra space in the bench in the room too. I can't believe your DH got in the pizza-mobile!


Great pics!

The bench is great for storage. The one thing in our room that was in need of repair was the bench. The right knob kept coming off. John, ever the cabinet builder, said it was stripped and if he had another screw he'd be able to fix it right up.

Yes, John is a goof nut!

 

[Momof2Disneyboys]

The bench is great for storage. The one thing in our room that was in need of repair was the bench. The right knob kept coming off. John, ever the cabinet builder, said it was stripped and if he had another screw he'd be able to fix it right up.

Yes, John is a goof nut!

Hey maybe you could get him a job at CBR and you could just live there!

 

[mommytothreeboys]

CBR is beautiful! That pool looks so fun...my boys would love it!

I always unpack EVERYTHING and put it in drawers. I absolutely hate to live out of a suitcase! The vacation can't start till I'm settled in!

John is cracking me up! He should have taken a little spin in the pizza delivery truck! Now that would have been breaking the rules!

Can't wait to hear about T-Rex. Especially because Hunter is older, like my boys. I know mine seem to be growing (or already HAVE grown in some cases) out of dinosaurs. I'm curious as to how he enjoyed it!

 

[aaaateamsgrandma]

They were constantly working on our grounds too. They keep everything so neat and tidy. I did inform Don he could take a lesson. He said if his leaf blower was as big as theirs we could get rid of the dogs next door.

 

[jenseib]

Love the updates. I am really thinking next trip if the price difference isn't tooooo much, I might go with CBR. I think Claire would absolutely love that pool with the pirate ship. We never actually make it to the parks though. LOL!

 

[mickeystoontown]

CBR is beautiful! That pool looks so fun...my boys would love it!

I always unpack EVERYTHING and put it in drawers. I absolutely hate to live out of a suitcase! The vacation can't start till I'm settled in!

John is cracking me up! He should have taken a little spin in the pizza delivery truck! Now that would have been breaking the rules!

Can't wait to hear about T-Rex. Especially because Hunter is older, like my boys. I know mine seem to be growing (or already HAVE grown in some cases) out of dinosaurs. I'm curious as to how he enjoyed it!

Unfortunately, every time we thought about going to the main pool, it was busy but that was okay because we actually prefer the quiet pools. Not as many people.

Believe me, if there had been a key in the delivery truck, he would have at least started it up just to scare us.

Hunter loved dinosaurs as a young boy. Now that he's getting older, some things aren't just as cool as they used to be. As you'll see in my next post, he absolutely loved T-Rex as did the rest of us.

They were constantly working on our grounds too. They keep everything so neat and tidy. I did inform Don he could take a lesson. He said if his leaf blower was as big as theirs we could get rid of the dogs next door.

The one thing that I did see that needed to be done to the CBR grounds was the stairways and walkway to our building needed to be sprayed off. Somebody spilled some really sticky red stuff (not a whole lot) on the walkway and apparently somebody stepped in it and tracked it all the way to the stairway (they were in the room next to the stairs). Had it been something really gross that I had to walk through, I would have complained.

We hardly ever saw trash around the CBR grounds. If we did, Lacey would pick it up. Part of her volunteer work is cleaning up neighborhoods (the child never stops) so she notices every little scrap of paper. If it was sticky or something, she'd leave it and by the time we had come back, it had been picked up.

When we went to the Wilderness Lodge to eat, I was very surprised at just how much trash there was on the resort grounds and even on the floor of the lobby. I don't know if they were just understaffed that day or what but it was very noticeable. Even Hunter said something about it.

Hey maybe you could get him a job at CBR and you could just live there!

You know, a year or so ago, John started talking with one of the castmembers who worked in construction for Disney. You know, the ones that you see when you take the Backlot Tour. They chatted for a while and finally the guy said, you know, you should come talk to my boss. I am sure you'd be able to get a job here easily. If it were up to me, I'd hire you right now. Believe me, if my mother didn't live in Louisiana, I'd have taken the guy up on the offer in a heartbeat!

 

[hhockman]

AAAGGGRRRR!!! Your TR is already making me crazy!!!

I just sat here chanting to myself "three more weeks, three more weeks, three more weeks..." How is it that I started out with 373 days and now that I'm down to 22 it feels like FOREVER!

LOVE all the pictures. I'm so glad you're a detail person. It almost feels like we're there.

I can't WAIT to see TRex. We're going on our first night too.

Three more weeks....

OH! I hope your boss had a good birthday.

 

[WDWisOurHappyPlace]

Hey Lisa,
I hate that you had the scary experience on your trip down, but I'm loving your trip report! I especially love looking at your CBR pictures, the visual is still so fresh in my mind and I now know exactly what I'm looking at. (Make sure you post all of them.) It's great that you got an upgrade, I loved being so close to OPR also. As so many others have told you, you really do have an awesome family. I'll be reading until this report is done. Thanks!