Tenth year anniversary trip - with a couple of tag-a-longs!

[Michelle_R]

Well this is my first attempt ever at a trip report, but I learned sooo much from these boards that I thought I would give a report a try!

A little background: My husband and I had never been to Disney as children, so our first (and only until now) trip to Disney World was our honeymoon. We had a wonderful time. We stayed at Dixie Landings. We didn't even have a computer and played the entire trip by ear. Can't imagine doing that now.

So, moving up to last January. I was planning our tenth year anniversary dream trip to Hawaii. We've never been there either. I had the hotels picked, intinerary started, but nothing booked yet. Then, lo and behold, we get a coveted pin code in the mail. Wait, we're not planning to take the kids to Disney for two years yet. Oh well, we'll have to go now, after all, we got the pin!

Thanks to the Disboards, planning was going along fairly well. Until July! Midwest gounded all of it's MD 80's and cancelled our flights! Eventually, we were able to get on their smaller plane, but it was nerve wracking for a while.

We arrived at the beautiful Wilderness Lodge at 12:30 on the 24th via a Happy Limo town car. The Lodge was breathtaking. Fortunately, the check in line was not very long. I had put in a request for a 3rd-5th floor inner courtyard room. I had a lot of difficulty hearing and understanding the check- in CM (very noisy). I did gather that I was not given the requests, and I gathered that I could not have them (yes, I know they are only requests). Because I was having such difficulty hearing and understanding the front desk CM's, I took the keys, went up to the room and immediately called the front desk and nicely asked for the front desk supervisor. We were promptly moved to a wonderful bear face 3rd floor inner courtyard room!

We headed off to HS for the afternoon. We immediately headed over to TSM just to see how long the line was. Of course it was 90 minutes. No thanks, we'll be back on Wednesday. We went to a couple of shows and ate at Prime Time. The food was good, but there was not enough to fill us up.

I'll try to write a dining review later, but overall we were not too impressed with dining. The best food was at Rainforest and T-rex, then Prime Time, Cinderella's and Garden Grill. Counter service was not impressive. But hey, it's ok, we had sooo much fun just being at Disney.

Saturday we went to AK. EE was a blast. We enjoyed seeing the Safari. The Dinosaur ride was a bit scary for my kids, so we only went on it once. Loved the bug show! Rainforest Cafe was cool.

Just a note about crowds. We used TGM, so I'm sure that helped alot. We also used the fastpasses alot and made ropedrop. It still seemed crowded to us. However, we live out in the country near a town of 2,500. So what seemed crowded to us, might not be to someone else. Based also on stand by line waits, it just seemed busy. Busses were pretty good, except for Epcot day. Two and three busses came for each park, still waiting for Epcot! however, overall it was not as bad as we expected.

On to Sunday. We went MK on this day. We loved MK. Sooo much to do. We loved Space Mountain, Thunder Railroad and Buzz Lightyear. We went to CRT for lunch and enjoyed it so much.

Monday was our Epcot day. Test Track rocked! Mission Space got mixed reviews. Soarin was cool. Turtle talk was really neat. Crush picked my son to talk to, and my daughter helped out too. It was sooo awesome, dude! We ate at Garden Grill for an early supper. We really enjoyed the character interaction as well as the revolving floor.

Tuesday we went back to MK for the morning and then headed to DTD for the afternoon. We ate at T-rex. The kids loved it! The food is similiar to Rainforest. So then it was back to the room to change into costumes for the MK Halloween party! What a fun time we had. Talk about alot of candy! Wow!
The shows were fun, as was the parade.

Our last day was spent at HS. We hit rope drop and headed over to TSM, which was delayed. We got fastpasses for about 10:30 and then got in line. It opened up in 20 minutes. We then went back after 10:30 and got another set of fastpasses for the afternoon. Yes, it was worth it! My kids loved it!

Well, I didn't mean for this to be so long, so if you've read to this point, thanks so much! Have a great day!

Michelle

 

[PamelaASmith]

Hi! I see we are doing the same thing this morning. I just posted my first ever trip report as well. We stayed at Wilderness Lodge as well!

You found the same problems at Toy Story Mania that we did. We learned a helpful tip a little too late in the week. The CMs at the fast pass distribution centers have a bunch of extra tickets they can pass out if they wish. We learned this at the Rock and Roller Coaster. We had a bunch of free Towering of Terror fast passes that a CM had given us, but I was the only member of the family that liked that ride. What to do? We went to the Rock and Roller Coaster and asked if we could trade in our fast passes for that ride instead. No problem! We tried to trade in some other fast passes for TSM, but they were completely out of fast passes for that day. There were none left to pass out.

Another tip we learned along these same lines. We wanted to see Peter Pan again but the fast pass available was for 10 pm that night. We knew the girls were tired and probably wouldn't last that long. My husband talked to the CM and she was able to give us fast passes for 7 pm instead. Nice!

Anyway, I just wanted to say hi and say I enjoyed reading your thread. Glad you had a good time!

 

[Michelle_R]

Hi Pam,

Thanks so much for posting. Great advice about the fastpasses. Our kids are about the same ages. My DD is 8 and my DS is 6. Now I'm off to find and read your report.

Michelle

 

[PamelaASmith]

I meant to ask you- what is the pin code you mentioned?

 

[Michelle_R]

I meant to ask you- what is the pin code you mentioned?

The pin code is something we got in the mail from Disney. It gives you a reduced room rate of 20% - 40%. We were fortunate to receive the 40% off. From what I understand, it really is just kind of a random thing. However your name and address has to be in their system, ie, order a planning dvd, previous visit, etc.

Michelle