Vexorg
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2006
My wife and I just got back from our Winter Getaway trip to WDW, which also included side trips to the Rolex 24 at Daytona (my wife skipped that one due to not feeling well, although she generally does enjoy auto racing) and Kennedy Space Center. Although I generally don't have time to do any sort of comprehensive blow-by-blow trip report here, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the trip:
Background: My wife and I have been DLR Annual Passholders off and on for a number of years now, but back in April my wife's sister (who we frequently travel with) planned a Disney World trip for a group of 6 people including my wife and I. At the time, we made the decision to get WDW annual passes this year, with the expectation that between the April trip and one additional trip (this one) we'd get enough use out of them to justify the cost. What we didn't plan on at the time was that I ended up having the privilege of making an additional unplanned trip to the parks in late September for a technical conference related to my job. Even though our time in the parks was somewhat limited by attending the conference, that was still a great trip, especially since as part of the conference we were able to attend an after-hours private party at Hollywood Studios and ride everything with no lines. This trip served as our (mostly) annual get-away-from-the-weather trip, since Winters in the Pacific Northwest generally leave plenty to be gotten away from.
Accommodations: For the first few nights we stayed at the Galleria Palms Kissimmee, on 192 in the Maingate area. Nothing too spectacular there, but it was clean and modern, and generally decent (although the first night had some noise from the pool area due to a large student group staying there.) For the remainder of our stay we were at Pop Century, in the 90s building. We had some issues with housekeeping in our room (some things don't seem to have been cleaned very well if at all, and on the last day of our stay the housekeeper was knocking on our door at 8:20 in the morning) and the fridge (it was set way too cold and started freezing things) but aside from that, things were pretty much as expected, and the issues were resolved to our satisfaction.
The Parks: In general, the crowds were fairly low at the start of the trip, increasing as the week went on. On the days we did DHS and Animal Kingdom we were generally able to get plenty done without too much waiting. Magic Kingdom was a fair bit busier, but judicious application of Fastpass allowed us to make fairly reasonable use of those days as well. We only did one short day in Epcot, since my wife does not care much for the place (I like it a lot better than she does, but the sheer size of the park makes it a tough sell, and we rarely make it much past China Pavilion in World Showcase.)
Dining: We only did a couple of dining reservations on this trip (Sci-Fi Dine-in and San Angel Inn.) Sci-Fi is great for the ambience but I found the food rather average. San Angel Inn is great for the view (we were lucky to get a table on the water) and actually had one of the better steaks I've had in a Disney restaurant.) I'd call Sci-Fi a "do it once" type place but would probably do San Angel Inn again. My favorite in the parks would still be 50s Prime Time, which is right up our alley. We generally just ate breakfast in our hotel room, and for the most part we just brought our own lunches into the parks, and mostly ate dinner offsite. It's just way too much food for us to be eating in the parks all the time (my wife in particular is a light eater, and often orders off the kids menu because the regular meals are usually too big for her.)
Side Trips: As noted above, I took a side trip the day after we arrived to the Rolex 24 at Daytona, which I quite enjoyed, but it would have been better to stay for the whole race and camp out at the track. We also did a day at Kennedy Space Center, which I also enjoyed. That one is definitely a splurge (The cost would be around $180 for a family of four, with quite a few things you can add on top of it) but it was cool seeing the Saturn V and Space Shuttle Atlantis.
Other thoughts: This is the first time I've stayed onsite at WDW (I did spend a couple of days at Paradise Pier, but staying onsite is generally cost-prohibitive for us at DLR) and we did it mostly to see how much of a difference it makes. In our case, there were a few things that were nice (being able to send purchases back to the hotel so we don't have to carry them around) but in general I think unless we could splurge for a premium resort (I'd probably pick Wilderness Lodge in such a scenario) it probably didn't make enough difference, especially since we had a rental car for the entire trip so we didn't use DME and probably didn't need to use the shuttles. In general I think the shuttles are good for MK since you don' t have to deal with the trams and TTC that way, but for the other parks I think we'd be better off just driving our own car in since we already have parking covered by our APs.
In general, I also found the MagicBand to be a bit of a pain. If you're using it only for park admission and Fastpasses it's manageable, but it seemed like I always had to take it off for the gate at the resort and for the room, and found it a bit unresponsive at times on terminals, and putting it back on can be trickier than it looks.
All in all it was a fun trip and we enjoyed ourselves, but our APs are expiring, and it will probably be a while before we're back at this point. I think the next time we go will probably be DLR again (since it's so much easier for us to get to and we usually have a cheap place to stay near the parks there) but my wife also seems to be getting ideas about trying to buy a vacation home in Florida at some point...
Background: My wife and I have been DLR Annual Passholders off and on for a number of years now, but back in April my wife's sister (who we frequently travel with) planned a Disney World trip for a group of 6 people including my wife and I. At the time, we made the decision to get WDW annual passes this year, with the expectation that between the April trip and one additional trip (this one) we'd get enough use out of them to justify the cost. What we didn't plan on at the time was that I ended up having the privilege of making an additional unplanned trip to the parks in late September for a technical conference related to my job. Even though our time in the parks was somewhat limited by attending the conference, that was still a great trip, especially since as part of the conference we were able to attend an after-hours private party at Hollywood Studios and ride everything with no lines. This trip served as our (mostly) annual get-away-from-the-weather trip, since Winters in the Pacific Northwest generally leave plenty to be gotten away from.
Accommodations: For the first few nights we stayed at the Galleria Palms Kissimmee, on 192 in the Maingate area. Nothing too spectacular there, but it was clean and modern, and generally decent (although the first night had some noise from the pool area due to a large student group staying there.) For the remainder of our stay we were at Pop Century, in the 90s building. We had some issues with housekeeping in our room (some things don't seem to have been cleaned very well if at all, and on the last day of our stay the housekeeper was knocking on our door at 8:20 in the morning) and the fridge (it was set way too cold and started freezing things) but aside from that, things were pretty much as expected, and the issues were resolved to our satisfaction.
The Parks: In general, the crowds were fairly low at the start of the trip, increasing as the week went on. On the days we did DHS and Animal Kingdom we were generally able to get plenty done without too much waiting. Magic Kingdom was a fair bit busier, but judicious application of Fastpass allowed us to make fairly reasonable use of those days as well. We only did one short day in Epcot, since my wife does not care much for the place (I like it a lot better than she does, but the sheer size of the park makes it a tough sell, and we rarely make it much past China Pavilion in World Showcase.)
Dining: We only did a couple of dining reservations on this trip (Sci-Fi Dine-in and San Angel Inn.) Sci-Fi is great for the ambience but I found the food rather average. San Angel Inn is great for the view (we were lucky to get a table on the water) and actually had one of the better steaks I've had in a Disney restaurant.) I'd call Sci-Fi a "do it once" type place but would probably do San Angel Inn again. My favorite in the parks would still be 50s Prime Time, which is right up our alley. We generally just ate breakfast in our hotel room, and for the most part we just brought our own lunches into the parks, and mostly ate dinner offsite. It's just way too much food for us to be eating in the parks all the time (my wife in particular is a light eater, and often orders off the kids menu because the regular meals are usually too big for her.)
Side Trips: As noted above, I took a side trip the day after we arrived to the Rolex 24 at Daytona, which I quite enjoyed, but it would have been better to stay for the whole race and camp out at the track. We also did a day at Kennedy Space Center, which I also enjoyed. That one is definitely a splurge (The cost would be around $180 for a family of four, with quite a few things you can add on top of it) but it was cool seeing the Saturn V and Space Shuttle Atlantis.
Other thoughts: This is the first time I've stayed onsite at WDW (I did spend a couple of days at Paradise Pier, but staying onsite is generally cost-prohibitive for us at DLR) and we did it mostly to see how much of a difference it makes. In our case, there were a few things that were nice (being able to send purchases back to the hotel so we don't have to carry them around) but in general I think unless we could splurge for a premium resort (I'd probably pick Wilderness Lodge in such a scenario) it probably didn't make enough difference, especially since we had a rental car for the entire trip so we didn't use DME and probably didn't need to use the shuttles. In general I think the shuttles are good for MK since you don' t have to deal with the trams and TTC that way, but for the other parks I think we'd be better off just driving our own car in since we already have parking covered by our APs.
In general, I also found the MagicBand to be a bit of a pain. If you're using it only for park admission and Fastpasses it's manageable, but it seemed like I always had to take it off for the gate at the resort and for the room, and found it a bit unresponsive at times on terminals, and putting it back on can be trickier than it looks.
All in all it was a fun trip and we enjoyed ourselves, but our APs are expiring, and it will probably be a while before we're back at this point. I think the next time we go will probably be DLR again (since it's so much easier for us to get to and we usually have a cheap place to stay near the parks there) but my wife also seems to be getting ideas about trying to buy a vacation home in Florida at some point...
