April 11, 2010
Day 1, Part 4 In Which We FOR REAL GET TO WALT DISNEY WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, we did really go to Disney World on this trip. This is not a Random Misadventures Report. It’s a Disney Trip Report. So let’s REALLY get this thing going, shall we?
We hailed a cab. And by hailed I mean went up to the nice man standing at a podium that had a list of prices on it, which is not how it goes in New York. I am an expert at hailing a New York City cab, but I try and avoid cabs while at Disney. It is MORE EXPENSIVE than cabs in Manhattan! Nothing is as expensive as Manhattan. Except Disney. If you want to take a cab from the Grand Floridian to the Contemporary it is approximately $145. The rates from the airport to WDW are fixed though, and I actually think those are not bad. But when you’ve got the meter running - watch out. In fact, don’t even take a cab at Disney World. Rent a car. That’s my advice.
Being that I knew I’d be writing a Trip Report, I probably should have noted the fixed prices so I could maybe be helpful to someone reading this. Of course I did not. All I know is that it’s more money to go to the Magic Kingdom resorts than it is to go to the Epcot ones. I think ten dollars more.
The guy told us it would be $55 from the airport to our resort. It ended up being like $70. With the tolls and tip and all that.
It’s so funny how things work out - I never in a million years thought I’d be taking a cab from the airport to Disney World. After our Rent-A-Car check-in disaster, I considered going to the Magical Express desk and asking if there was any space for us, but like I said, the line was INSANE. Hours long. I just wanted to get to Disney. ONCE AND FOR ALL!
In the cab, we talked about using Disney Transportation once we arrived on property, just for the meantime. We needed a Rent-A-Car on the 17th, because that was the day we were supposed to drive to Clearwater Beach. My mom had really wanted a beach day. I wasn’t too excited about this, being that we live right by the Jersey Shore, the beach is a huge part of our summer. I LOVE the beach, don’t get me wrong - but I can go to the beach any time in the summer. Florida beaches are different, my mom said, and she was DYING to go. So I agreed to sacrifice one Disney day so we could go to the beach. It turns out that by our second day at WDW, mom was saying the beach wasn’t so important to her anymore - she could wait til the summer and go to our local beaches - she didn’t want to sacrifice a Disney day either!
So we ended up just never getting a Rent-A-Car and using Disney Transportation the whole time. For the most part I like Disney busses, which is why I didn’t demand we figure out what the heck happened at Hertz or rent a car from a different company. I also think that I was in the Disney bubble and just happy to be there and didn’t care at that point.
I LOVE the spiel on the Disney busses and all that, and I love that they just feel Disneyish, but I can’t believe more people don’t just rent a car. To me, the price of the car is nothing compared to the TIME you save! HOURS! Think about all the time you spend waiting for the busses. Think about the time you spend ON the busses while they stop at other places. Of course, it’s free, and some people will or need to sacrifice all that time to save the money. The Disney busses are still great, but being able to just GO wherever you want on property is eight million times better and saves so much time and stress. They don’t stress ME out, maybe annoy me a bit.. But my mom would get pretty stressed sometimes on them. It just takes so insanely long sometimes which I expected, but hadn’t told her about I guess. Also, getting on the busses at night after you are so dead tired and your feet are dying and having to stand in a sea of sweaty, tired people… yikes.
It was an uneventful cab ride except for the fact that WE WERE LIKE MINUTES AWAY FROM DISNEY WORLD SO I WAS FREAKING OUT. But so elegantly.
I looked out the window and saw cows on a farm. “COWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” I yelled, “LOOK MOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Yeah… everything is exciting when you are on your way to Disney World.
I was bouncing. Up and down. VIGOROUSLY. And giggling excessively. And repeating, “I can’t believe this. We’re almost there. Almost at DISNEY WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!”
“HEY YOU!!!!!! PIPE DOWN BACK THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE CAB IS SHAKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
That was the cab driver.
Actually… it wasn’t. He didn’t say that. But he kept saying “What?” thinking I was talking to him. Because I was so LOUD, I guess he assumed I was trying to reach him. Nope. Just excited cause I was almost home. I’m normally pretty loud but I’d say my volume increases drastically at WDW. Again, I am a joy to be around.
FINALLY WE ENTERED DISNEY WORLD!!!!!!! Insert photo of WDW entrance here that I was to enthralled by to actually take. HAHA! My mom said “Too bad you don’t have your camera out.” But I’m pretty sure all I could hear was Mickey in my head saying “Oh BOY are we glad you’re here!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Big doings going on, so let‘s get started!”
So, what resort were we headed to?
I have kept all my PTR and TR readers in suspense about where we stayed. Saying we had a split stay: 6 days at a moderate, 3 at a value. That’s all I told you guys.
We stayed at:
DISNEY’S CARIBBEAN BEACH RESORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yay! This was our first stay at Caribbean Beach. We LOVED it. But it is not our favorite. I will be telling you why specifically we chose it and what we love and don’t love about it as the report goes on.
We pulled into Caribbean Beach and the anticipation I felt was like nothing else. I can’t explain it. You’re finally there. The months of planning and living in the real world have all lead up to this, and here you are! You are the happiest you ever are in your life because you’ve just arrived at Disney, you’re feeling the magic, the troubles are melting away and your vacation is just beginning. The possibilities are absolutely endless. You’re finally there.
I could not wait to go check in and see our room. I was shivering with anticip
..........
ation, Dr. Frankenfurter style. I thought someone was the Candyman but it was just our cab driver. AGAIN. Cause we were still in the cab. Stuck there, quite frankly. He was trying to assist my mom in getting out of the cab. Which she couldn’t do on her own because she was literally trapped in the there.
Yep.
It was… bizarre, to say the least. The cab driver pulled up to the Custom House, which is Caribbean Beach’s weird way of saying that this is the building you go to check-in and check-out. I don’t know why they didn’t just put check-in at Old Port Royale aka Centertown, where everything else is, but whatever!
I wanted to get out of that cab FAST. And truly begin our Disney trip.
I unbuckled my seatbelt with ease. My mom did not. Her seatbelt just would not unbuckle. I mean it would not budge. We tried and tried. All of us. My mom, myself, and the cab driver. Who didn’t speak a whole bunch of English and was kind of awkwardly trying to help my mom. It’s weird when a random cab driver is all up in your business trying to unbuckle your seatbelt. Cause really… what could he do? The seatbelt is a pretty simple machine. You stick the thingy in, it buckles. You press the button, it unbuckles. If you press the button and it doesn’t unbuckle, what do you do? What can you do besides keep pressing the button? Really. But he kept trying, God bless 'im. And had to crawl in the backseat with her and try all kinds of ways of getting it unbuckled. He was a perfect gentleman about it, but still. Weird.
My mom started getting a bit claustrophobic and it was just not the way to start off a Disney trip. It was not the way to start anything, really. Maybe it could be cute if the cab driver ended up being her soulmate but I didn’t think that was the case. She started freaking out a bit and I was trying to explain to her that she could probably slip out of the belt without actually unbuckling it. You see, this wasn’t a normal cab, it was one of those family-sized van-cab thingies. So there was space in between the seat and the sliding door. I calmly told her to just slide into that space and under the belt. It was a small space but I could see that she would fit. She took one look at it and said “NO!! I CAN’T FIT!” Sigh.
“You CAN fit,” I re-assured her, “Calm down. You’re trapped in a cab, not in a dungeon. If Nelson Mandela sat in that tiny cell all that time, you can handle this. You can fit.”
I could tell this was really stressing her out now. I don’t get it…if it were me I would have been laughing my butt off and talking about how typical it is that we are at Disney FINALLY but stuck in a freaking cab. I mean… that IS PRETTY FUNNY when you really think about it. I understand though… it’s not a comfortable situation. So finally she tried my suggestion and was able to wiggle out of the seatbelt without unbuckling it.
FINALLY.
For the love of God.
We sprinted so fast to the check-in desk that no one even saw us. Like ninjas, or the Roadrunner. You know those cartoons? That was us. All people saw was a trail of dust.
During our sprint, I managed to snap these:
Caribbean Beach’s Custom House:
We waited on line at check-in for about ten minutes. During that time I asked my mom if she was feeling OK in the aftermath of the cab incident. She said that she was totally fine now and that it actually was really funny and crazily ironic that we’d finally be at Disney but not even able to leave the cab. LOL! All was well.
Check-in went totally smoothly. While waiting I realized I totally forgot about online check-in, but the wait wasn’t too bad so I didn’t care.
The CM we got was a young guy who seemed pretty nervous, like it was his first day maybe. He was checking and re-checking everything, so I made sure to tell him he was doing awesome. He breathed a sigh of relief and said thanks. I was so cheery, bouncing up and down, so excited for him to hand me that precious Disney folder and our room keys. Is this really even happening?
I had researched Caribbean Beach (CBR) beforehand and knew what buildings were the best for us. It was important to be close to Old Port Royale (OPR) so that when we wanted to refill our mugs, shop, swim in the main pool, or get some food, it wouldn’t be a huge time and energy consumer. You need to think about stuff like this because CBR is huge. There are internal busses you can use, but who wants to stand around and wait for a bus to come just so you can go get your morning coffee? This is where staying at a deluxe comes in handy, it would be awesome to just head downstairs to do these things. Say you want to get breakfast in the morning before making it to a park for opening - if you are far from OPR this can end up taking much longer than you’d expect and make you super late.
I put in a request for a room in one of these three buildings: Aruba 51, Jamaica 45, and Martinique 22. We ended up getting Martinique 22, which was a fantastic location. Here is the CBR map:
http://www.wdwinfo.com/resortmaps/cbrmap.jpg if you want to see where that is!
I absolutely loved it there. The walk to and from Old Port Royale was BEAUTIFUL and so relaxing. I enjoyed taking that walk so much every day. CBR is so beautiful that I wouldn’t mind just walking around the entire property if there wasn’t an entire Kingdom out there to see.
They told us we could walk to our room (which was sort of far from the Custom House) or Bell Services would drive us over there. We chose Bell Services, which was a bit of wait but I didn’t really mind. I was sitting there happily looking through the folder they give you upon check-in, and I noticed my mom staring at me, smiling.
“What?” I asked.
“You loooooooooove that folder they gave you!”
“They give everyone this, mom.”
“I know. But YOU
love it.”
She was right. I
loved that folder. It represented that I was finally here and FINALLY free!
Outrageous!
I've heard of people having a really hard time getting in there!
