A Quick Trip of Firsts

KJTex

Mouseketeer
Joined
Aug 14, 2014
We took a quick 3-Day trip to Disney over Thanksgiving. DH, DS15, DD12, and DD9.
I titled this a trip of firsts because although I have been to Disney dozens of times, this was the first trip: 1) where we stayed at the Dolphin hotel, 2) where we use mid-day passes and 3) where we used club-level fastpasses. This was also the first time where all of my children were tall enough to ride all of the rides. My 9-year-old is on the shorter side and is just now measuring at 48”. 😊 This was also the first trip since they started PhotoPass, where we did not buy Memory Maker.
 
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Hotel
We stayed in an Alcove Room (which is what qualified us for Club level fastpasses) on the 6th floor in the East Wing of the Dolphin hotel. The room was nice for 5 people, but had way too much furniture in it, so it was hard to find a place to put the cot. The room location was not the greatest and we felt pretty far from a lot of things. The 6th floor must be where housekeeping hangs out, because there were housekeeping carts in the hallway all of the time and noisy housekeeping staff chatting in the hallways. I would not stay on 6th floor, East wing again if I could avoid it. But the hotel was lovely, and I loved all of the restaurant choices. We ate at Fuel, Picabu, and the Fountain. All of the food was fine. Nothing great, but did the job. The salads at Fuel were probably the best thing we ate while we were there.
 
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Day 1- Epcot
Crazy morning at the airport. We had a 6:30 AM flight, but my husband got sick at the airport after eating breakfast there, and ended up going to Urgent Care instead of getting on the plane. My 3 kids and I went on without him. We landed in Orlando at about 10AM and were met by Tony Hinds. I love using his service. We stopped at Publix to pick up a few things and then were dropped off at the Dolphin hotel a bit before 11. Of course, the room was not ready yet, so we hung out for a minute in the lobby, freshened up in the bathrooms, stored our luggage with the bag check folks, and then were on our way to Epcot. We walked over and entered the park at noon, which is the earliest time allowed with the mid-day pass. We did have Club level fastpasses, so I had booked the following:
12-The Land
1-Soarin
2 – Spaceship Earth
3 -Mission to Mars
4- Test Track
5 – Frozen
This was the Monday before Thanksgiving and overall the park did not feel too crowded, but it was nice to be able to have a fastpass for all of the Tier 1’s. We also managed to squeeze in The Seas with Nemo right after Soarin and before Spaceship Earth.
Also, between Mission to Mars and Test Track, we were walking around and found Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy with no wait. My kids made me happy and agreed to a character picture.
The kids favorite ride was Test Track. They liked it so much that we waited on the single rider line and waited to do it again (after we had already done it once via fastpass). I am shocked that my 9-year-old was willing to ride by herself, but she was in the car directly in front of me, so I could keep my eye on her. My other 2 kids got to ride together a couple of cars back from us.
Frozen was okay. I am glad we did it, and I did like it better than Maelstrom, but I do not feel like we need to go on it again. We are not Frozen fans.
My parents live in FL and were nice enough to come over and do Frozen with us and then we ate dinner at the quick service Chinese restaurant. It was good. Lots of food for a decent price. My teenage son decided to run over at get a bratwurst instead, but he came back with his food and ate with us.
After dinner, we all went on the Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros ride in Mexico. It was no wait. Then we just walked around the countries and shopped. My daughters also did the KidCot Fun stops which they loved. We found the best shopping for stuff we liked in Japan. The mochi candies were delicious. We had 4 pearls from past trips that we brought with us, so we got all of those set into earrings and then I picked a pearl and made a ring for myself.
Since we had been up since about 3AM, the kids were exhausted and we headed out of the park before seeing the fireworks. My son walked back to the hotel, while we waited for a boat. When he called to tell us he was at hotel, we were still waiting for the boat. We ended up taking the boat to the Boardwalk and then just walked from there.
We all showered, ate lots of candies from the various countries that we bought and went to bed.
 
Day 2 – Animal Kingdom
A text at 6AM from my husband confirmed that was feeling better and he had gotten on a flight and was heading to Orlando. Yay! Since we had mid-day tickets, there was no need to wake up kids early, so I let them sleep in until about 9AM, and then I went downstairs to get them breakfast while they got ready and cleaned up the room. Dad surprised them by knocking on the door at 10:30 pretending to be housekeeping. My girls were screaming they were so excited to see Dad. Hopefully everyone on our hotel floor was already awake. 😊 We left the room at about 11:30 and went down to catch the bus. Looks like we just missed it. Boo! I suggested we call an Uber and my husband did and the Uber pulled up right away. We got to the park pretty much exactly at noon. The fastpasses that I had for the day were:
12 -River of Light
1 – Flight of Passage
2 -Dinosaur
3 -Rapids
4 -Everest
5 – Safari

Overall, the lines for rides were long, so I was happy to have my CL Fastpasses. We ate lunch at FlameTree barbeque and thank goodness for mobile ordering. Instead of waiting in the crazy long line, we just ordered from our phone and picked up our food within minutes. Super Easy.
We had time to do Primeval Whirl in between Everest and Safari, and were on the safari during sunset which is exactly what I wanted. I still think first thing in the morning is best time for Safari, but sunset was a close second. Since sun was down, we went back to The World of Avatar so that we could see it in the evening. It was cool, but we were ready to leave, so we headed back to the busses and were probably back to out hotel by 8-ish. We grabbed some food to go from Picabu and from The Fountain and ate at the table in our Alcove hotel room. The 9 year-old wanted to go to the pool, but it was cold, and I only lasted about 15 min before I made her get out and go back to the room.
 


Day 3 -DHS
Again ,because of mid-day passes we had a leisurely morning. My DD12 really wanted to rent a surrey bike at Boardwalk, so we did that. My DD9 was not tall enough to pedal, so she got to sit in the front section and ring the bell. It was so much fun. I have not laughed that hard in a long time. My kids are super competitive, so we were going pretty fast and each lap we did, we tried to beat our time from the prior lap. This was definitely the highlight of the trip.
At 11, we then went over to the swan boats at the hotel and we rode those around that little lake. It was a lot more relaxing than the bike since there was no one on the lake to compete with for time 😊
After that, it was about time to head to DHS and luckily a boat was just about to leave as we ran over. They held it for us, which was super nice of them.
Basically, our day at DHS followed our fastpasses:
Noon – Star Tours
1 -Indiana Jones show
2 -ToT
3 -RnRC
4-Toy Story Mania
5 -Slinky Dog Dash
I booked the Indiana Jones show just because we had to pick another Tier 2 fastpass, but my kids actually really liked it. It was warm that day, so we got drinks and just sat with our drinks and watched the show and it was really quite fun. My 9-year-old is a nervous rider, but did all the rides at DHS with no problem. I chickened out on ToT and RnRC, so my 12-year old used my magic band and fastpass to ride the ToT for a second time and my 15-year-old got to use my magicband/fastpass to ride RnRC again. Overall, Slink Dog Dash was our favorite ride.
We ate dinner that night at Woody’s toybox, again using mobile ordering which was a lifesaver. Everyone ate their food. It was good enough for park food.
We then had reservations at Oga’s for 7 and the Droid Depot for 8. It was about 5:30 when we were done with everything else, so we walked over to SWGE and found where Oga’s was. We asked the person what time we should get in line for out 7pm reservation and she said 6:40. Okay, we have time to spare, so we walked around a bit and found where the Droid Depot was. My husband asked them how long the stand-by line was to build a droid and they said including building the droid, it would take about 45 min, which was the exact amount of time we were trying to waste before our Oga’s reservation, so we stood in the stand-by line and they removed our 8pm reservation. Each kid built a droid. It was super crowded in there and felt a tad rushed, but all 3 kids had a great time, and there are definitely worse souvenirs to buy, so overall, happy that we did it. My girls each built a droid that looked like BB-8 and my son built one that looked like R2-D2. After that, we got in line for Oga’s at exactly 6:40. The lady with the tablet finally got to us and checked us in and rudely told us that we were there too early and we would not be called until our reservation time. I told her that we were told to get there 20 min early, but she had already moved on to the next guest. Overall, I actually found the folks at Oga’s to be less than friendly. As a line, we were collectively yelled out for being too far out and that we needed to push against the rocks, which we did. My girls were then yelled out for leaning against the rocks. So, I guess they wanted us to be super close to the rocks, but not touching them. Whatever. It was a weird, stressful vibe there. We got inside and were assigned to stand at a table with about 3 others. It was loud and crowded. And my kids did not want to stay. So, they actually had the good idea to get our drinks to go. It took us 20-30 min to flag down a waiter, order, get our drinks and pay. We then took our to-go drinks and waited in like for Smugglers Run. The total wait for us was about 1 hour, but the line seemed to move and there were some interesting things to see, so the time went by fast. My son and husband took the pilot positions, my daughters were the gunners (I think that is what they were called) and I was an engineer, along with the single rider that they paired us with. The single rider told me that he had waited 45 min, so did not seem like that big of a delta from the regular line. He also told us that he had been on the ride dozens of times. He seemed less than impressed with how we did. So glad we did it, but 1 hour is probably my limit on how long I would wait for it.

Walking back, we saw that the Alien saucer ride was only at 20 min wait and my kids wanted to try that, so we waited. That was our last ride for the night and we started the walk to the front of the park and the boat to take us back to the Dolphin hotel. We got to see some of the fireworks from the boat. Back at hotel, we ordered some pizzas from Picabu and relaxed.
 
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Day 4
Today was Thanksgiving and our departure day, but we did manage to get some good pool time in in the morning. We asked for a late check out, and they allowed us to check out at noon. We picked up our rental car from downstairs and left at noon to drive to Ft. Lauderdale for the second part of our Thanksgiving trip.
 
Overall Thoughts
My kids thanked me multiple times for getting mid-day passes. They have done many trips with me where we are getting up at 6 or 7 to be the first bus out for extra magic hours, and they do not miss those days. We saved $30/day by using mid-day passes. I spent $50/day for Club level fastpasses, so really, the delta was only $20 more per day that a typical ticket. Money well-spent. For the most part, I did my 3 regular fast passes first on the schedule, so that I could try for a fourth fastpass in the afternoon, but I did not really find any fourth fastpasses available for the days we were there. I mentioned that I did not buy the Memory Maker ahead of time, like I usually do. This was a good call. The lines for some of the photos were insane. No way could I have made my kids agree to a lot of waiting for a photo. Besides, my DD12 likes to do her own selfies. Of all of the photos that were on our account, there were 2 ride photos that I just had to have, and so I bought those for $34. The rest were just meh anyway. Happy to answer any questions that you have.
 


Sounds like a good trip! Good to know you liked the mid-day passes and they worked out well for your family. What was wrong with your husband after all? What did he eat? Airport food often gives me pause. The Ova’s experience sounds pretty miserable.
 
Sounds like a good trip! Good to know you liked the mid-day passes and they worked out well for your family. What was wrong with your husband after all? What did he eat? Airport food often gives me pause. The Ova’s experience sounds pretty miserable.
It was a combo of an allergic reaction and an esophageal stricture( I think that was what it was called). He could breathe, but couldn’t really swallow or talk.
 

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