Trip Report - Old Key West - 10 Days - Mid September 2011

[ScottJayhawk]

This is my first trip report - just getting that out there so when it's lame you'll have some mercy on me.

Each night on the bus ride back to the resort I composed in my head a daily report. But by the time the kids were in bed and I had a moment to sit down I didn't feel much like typing it all up. Plus, I knew once I started posting a trip report with a day-by-day strategy I was making a commitment to update nightly (at least in my head I was) and just wasn't ready for that. So here I sit midway through the trip and I've decided to use a summarization technique to report our trip.

Just a bit of background: As you can see by signature below we (DW and I with DS 1) first visited Disney in 2004 then again in 2007 (DS now 4, DD 1) then in '09, Disneyland in 2010 and now back to the World in 2011. I am a planner - and regular reader of DISBoards so for what it's worth I do consider myself pretty knowledgeable on traveling to Disney.

So here we go......

DS 8, DD 5, myself and DW spending 10 days at Old Key West very much attempting to target the lowest crowds of the year. When your first trip is following 2 (or maybe even 3) very rare Central Florida bulls eye Hurricanes with the next one tracking the same (Ivan - although it turned North before hitting Florida) the parks tend to be empty and we got very used to (and loved) low crowds so that is a priority in planning. Plus with young children who are used to a pretty good routine and regular early bedtimes at home the shorter hours are just fine with us.

So here we really go......

Magical Express
Love it. 3rd time to use - love it. No dealing with luggage, nice little movie on the ride and always had great luck. This trip, no exception. Minimal wait and great trip.
Landed MCO at 2:05 pm, checked-in, checked out the room (it was ready) for a few minutes and headed to Epcot ... we were inside the front gates at 4:05 pm. 2 hours from airport to hotel to park.

Online Check In
First time using online check-in. Not impressed. Guess it was a bit faster but barely noticed it. The online check-in dedicated lines had people at them, 2 other CMs ready to help at "traditional check-in" so one helped me. Perhaps just a bit faster I suppose but seemed a lot like a normal check-in.

Room Requests
I'm not going to comment much simply because it's a request, not guaranteed and I really didn't know what I wanted. Well, I did: top floor, with golf course green and water view. In other words I wanted Building 64 but I didn't request that because I didn't know until a few days of being here. Apparently I requested "water view" - that's all it said in my online check-in reservation confirmation e-mail. I emailed MS to clarify and add a bit more specifics to my request - I assume it happened but if so, didn't get honored much. The view isn't great but the location is nice, building 14 first floor, very close to bus and HH. I guess I did comment some

Old Key West Resort
First time staying here and had read many wonderful things and the recent refurb had us excited. But most of all the decision came down to this - points for 7 days at most DVC resorts or 10 days at Old Key West. We liked 10 days!! Like I said, it's the end of day 5 as I type this so not fully through the experience and perhaps I'll update but so far, not impressed. It's perfectly lovely and worth 3 extra days but I don't know, it's just average and I expect more from DVC then average. We are in a 1 bedroom and the place is very big which is nice but there's no desk, no back access to bathroom, only 1 bathroom. Our last 2 stays were Grand Californian just after it opened and Jambo House which was still pretty new so perhaps the newness of those has us skewed a bit on what to expect. But water stains on the ceiling in one corner, a rather dirty porch area in back and the carpet seems old doesn’t scream recently refurbished to me. Plus problems with ice maker (fixed promptly which was nice, although the old one was just left in the sink) and trouble with the whirlpool tub didn't help. Everybody has been very nice but overall it's just not fantastic IMHO.

Bus Service
Last stay at WDW was at AK Jambo House and the bus service left a lot to be desired, partially because it was far from everything except AK which we only go to once in a trip. So far here it's been fantastic - never waited more than 8 minutes for a bus at the resort except the Typhoon Lagoon bus and that was maybe 12 minutes. Back to OKW from everywhere has been a very short wait at the parks. Only negative is about 10-12 minutes to get through the resort when you're at the HH stop.

Teppan Edo
Really enjoyed Teppan Edo. We've been to Japanese Steakhouses before so we weren't in awe of the style of dining but the chef was very good, very interactive and the food was very good - just not much of it. I had read the complaints about portion size and completely agree - not much food for the money but what we got was delicious. It was also rather loud in there making it hard to hear the waitress - maybe we just had a soft spoken one, we could hear the chef pretty well.

Cinderella’s Royal Table - Breakfast
First time with this experience – eating IN the castle – very cool; meeting the princesses – very cool. Make no mistake about it – that is what you are paying for. The food is fine but absolutely nothing special. I get frustrated reading the complaints about the food at CRT – with any research at all you know what you’re getting for the money – princess meet and greet in the frickin’ castle. We did Askerhus on our last trip – it is the same experience sans the castle and price tag. Unless you must have the castle experience do Askerhus and save some money.

Liberty Tree Tavern
Very good service, decent food; not great but I think better than some of the recent negativity towards it I’ve read.

Captain's Grille
We arrived 30 minutes early and were seated right away which was nice. Kind of went downhill from there. Service was slow and only adequate at best. And there was a bit of a problem – which happens, I get it but it wasn’t handled well. I ordered the strip and what I got was clearly the ribeye. When politely pointing out that I didn’t believe this was a strip to our waiter I was told that yes it was. I’ve had my fair share of steaks and I know the difference between a ribeye and a strip – apparently our waiter does know this difference despite it being rather obvious or simply didn’t want to bother with it (I suspect the latter). I took a few bites and now any doubt I had allowed myself to have for some reason was gone. To make it worse, my wife always ordered (and got) a strip so at the same table a quick comparison made it obvious. After several minutes of 2 different managers walking by and making absolute certain they didn’t make eye contact with anyone and a few similar passes from our waiter I finally got his attention and told him that I was now certain this was not a ribeye. Still offering no apology he did say “ok we’ll take care of that”, grabbed it, and whisked it away. Surprisingly (even impressively) quickly a strip had arrived – looking nothing like what I had before. He asked me to cut into to make sure it was cooked properly – the end I cut was – the other end was undercooked. We won’t be back.

Le Cellier
We went here last time and LOVED IT! So despite the change to 2 dining credits (did I mention that although we are DVC we did still buy the DP – more on that later and doing the math) we made sure to go again. This boils it down for me: Still excellent and if it were 2 dining credits and that’s all I ever knew it as I think I’d have been fine with that but this is the same thing I got 2 years ago (or 6 months ago) for 1 credit – that’s disappointing. Not that it’s not worth 2 credits, I just don’t see the difference from the previous experience.

Okay – not that it matters since I’m going to post this all at once anyway I’m pretty sure – I’m stopping now. Since I reference a few times that this was being written half way through the trip it seems fair to mention that for the rest of the post that will not be the case.

 

[ScottJayhawk]

I’m back – of course you didn’t really know I was gone.

Trip now complete, back 2 days. First, a few updates. Rereading above I was a bit hard on the resort, still the least favorite of the 4 DVCs we’ve stayed at but it is very nice and the pool area was nice with a cool way to open the water slide as the lifeguards came on duty – kids loved being part of that!

And a quick update on bus service – we did have 2 instances of longer waits then I mentioned above. One morning shortly after 9am (park opened at 9am – we were running a bit slow that morning) we waited about 25 minutes for a MK bus – a bit frustrating watching FIVE Animal Kingdom buses roll by and 2 from Epcot and HS, even Downtown Disney had 2 buses in that time! Another day a similar story with a 20+ minute wait in which we did have one MK bus stop but not let anybody on because it was full. But otherwise, Disney Bus Transportation was great!

On with my report….

Narcoossee's
The service started out a bit slow but was fine once we finally got our server who was very good – not outstanding, but certainly good. The setting is outstanding – love the view and we thought the food was excellent. Both DW and I debated over Lobster vs Surf & Turf, both went Surf & Turf – it was excellent! Love the lemon mashed potatoes! We will absolutely be back. Worth every bit of 2 dining credits.

Quick (Counter) Service
I’m not going to review them all individually because let’s face it – they’re all essentially the same. I will point out a few things that stood out. Pizza Planet moved VERY slowly. The rotisserie chicken at Cosmic Rays is the best QS we’ve ever had. The service at most CS restaurants was below average. And I can’t confirm its 100% accurate but I believe the kids menus all say that kids meals come with grapes and carrots. So if on the dining plan the kids get appetizer, meal and dessert they should get the meal which clearly states grapes and carrots (or some have applesauce) AND a cookie, not a cookie instead of one of those choices; they don’t.

Crowds
As previously stated, we focus our plans on low crowd times. So my question is this – how can you even move in the parks during peak crowds? It’s September, and again I admit I have no comparison, but there were people everywhere. I can’t even imagine what it’s like when it’s actually busy!!

Wait Times
So perhaps my answer to crowds is that everybody is in line. Because, much to our happiness wait times were pretty low most of the week for most of the rides. Not completely dead with everything a walk on like I was reading about for the previous week but a wait of more than 15 minutes was very rare and with the get fast pass then ride and return later in the day strategy effectively used at MK we rode everything on our list (Peter Pan, Small World, Pooh, Snow White, Tea Cups, Space, Buzz, BTMR, Splash, Pirates) at least twice each day we were at MK. Wait times later in the day were a bit higher but our mornings had very low wait times and fast passes for later in the day meant low waits most of the time. Exceptions were mainly at other parks – Test Track got very busy later in the day as expected as did Soarin’ and Toy Story Mania (only ride we wanted to ride more but only rode once).

Parks
I’m not going to break down each park visit by visit, but hit on a few things that made an impression. Love the new meet and greet set ups for Minnie/Mickey and the Princesses – we saw the princesses twice on main street – total wait, 3 minutes!! One visit we had the room to ourselves!! This had always been 45 minutes plus in the past!! Fantasyland construction was not an issue at all, in fact it made the walkway in front of Pooh very wide – that was nice. Can’t wait for it to all be done!! The new Pooh Queue is pretty cool – hope to see more of that in the future. Really sick of the Disney Parks merchandise everywhere, can we get more park specific, resort specific or at least DW vs DL specific merchandise please?

People
People suck.
I shouldn’t generalize – we met some very nice people and encountered plenty of common courtesies from many folks. But there were way more rude jerks then you should ever encounter. Just a few quick rants: If you just walked up to a full bus stop seconds before a bus arrives – you are not first on the bus. If you bump into somebody say excuse me!! It happens, get over it and be polite about it. Having 1 person in line so your party of 5 more can join you just before you get on an attraction is not cool. If I hold a door or a gate for you, say thank you and do the same for the next person as you walk through – don’t just blow by me like I’m your personal doorman. No flash photography seems pretty clear in its meaning. Move all the way to the end of the row also seems rather self explanatory. Just because you have a scooter does not automatically mean you have the right of way no matter what. If your child is crying during a show, most of us understand that it happens and will tolerate it briefly – if it continues you need to take the child out of the theater.

Weather
It is hot and humid in September. Very humid. At it rains every afternoon. It just does, if it doesn’t consider yourself lucky – if it does then you should have known it was going to, because that’s what happens in Florida in September.

Summary
I probably forgot some stuff. But all in all it was another great trip and we can’t wait to go back. We’re planning 4 days in the parks, then 7 day cruise, then 3 more days in the parks for late 2013 or early 2014 but not sure we can wait that long 

 

[Jedimike]

I enjoyed the read, thanks for posting!

 

[melmar136]

Totally have to agree with so much under the People section. I have pretty much the same rant in my TR!