From Steamboat Springs to Teamboat Springs: Grumpy Rope Drop at DHS (11/11 Update)

Wow. What a week. I hope everyone is safe out there during this tragic hurricane season. I was all prepared to post this update last Friday, but instead I found myself making travel plans. My amazing, strong 97-year old Grama suddenly passed away and that eclipsed everything else for the past week. Here’s a pic of us sisters with her:

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It was a pretty tough week… Sigh. Now that I’m finally home (my Grama lived down the street from my parents and Brie in Michigan) I think I’m going to take some me time and share this update….

Day 1: Saturday, June 3rd, 2017 – Resort: AKL – Parks: None

I finally found my journal where I kept my notes from the trip and I totally forgot what was a heart stopping moment for our Disney family. The agent who checked our bags at Frontier was super helpful, but as we put our first bag on the scale she proceeded to start tearing off our yellow DME tags. Both my husband and I literally screamed “NO!” She was so surprised, we stopped her in mid-tear and we were able to salvage the tags. Of course, being a good Disney traveller, I had extra tags in my travel folder so in any case we were all set. I just can’t believe she hadn’t seen DME tags before! Talk about disaster averted, I certainly didn’t want to wait around for bags at 6 am EST. No thank you.

Anyways, back to where we left off … We boarded our flight just after midnight on Saturday, June 3rd. We got the girls cozy and they went to sleep almost immediately. Yes, they slept. The girls and I had a row and we got them super cozy with pillows and blankets. Caz and I had neck pillows and although we snoozed it was more of a twilight sleep. I swear the flight attendants made it a point to open and close cabinets as loud as they could, thus waking us up every 10 minutes or so. Overall, the flight went well and we landed early. I would say our first red-eye adventure went well. Actually very well.

Before we knew it we were officially in Disney territory:
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And we were ushered onto our DME bus where we waited for about 10 minutes before departing. The girls were tired, and looked it, but they were also super excited. So was I! No more pre-trip anxiety. Whew!

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After a stop at Coronado Springs, we arrived at AKL and its majestic lobby.
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And as it turned out, we didn’t need Papa’s studio after all… The grand villa was ready!!

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But as the rest of our party wouldn’t be arriving until almost noon, and we knew how excited the boys were, we wandered off to take a nap in Papa’s villa. We got lost on the way, but it let us take a tour of our first resort.

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We finally arrived at Papa’s room around 7:45 am EST. Considering that the girls only had about 3 solid hours of sleep on the flight, everyone was doing just peachy, but to avoid burnout early on, and risk beating down our immune systems so early on in such a long trip, it was time for a nap. And nap we did! We put Clara in Papa’s bed (he left to, ahem, “visit the office”) and Eme insisted on sleeping on the couch cushions while Caz and I slept on the pullout. In the end we slept until 10:10 (Eme woke us up with her excitement), so we added about two more hours of sleep to the three we had earlier. Not too shabby!

In the meantime, the rest of the Michigan family was on their way!
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Side note.. I may play around with embedding video in these posts… I am using Google Drive and Photos to organize these pictures and I’m wondering if adding video is just as simple as adding photos. Time will tell. Back on topic… After we woke up we brought our carry-on luggage and Papa’s luggage over to the grand villa - BUT only Caz went in. We had waited so long there was no need to ruin the “grand” entrance as the boys still weren’t with us. We particularly enjoyed the art of AKL. This piece was right outside the grand villa’s door:

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Once we were unburdened by our luggage, we headed out for breakfast - everyone was famished! This was only one of two Disney breakfasts over the span of this 16 day trip, and for that I am not sad. Disney breakfast is so sub par compared to the breakfasts Caz can whip up!

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Clara and Eme found a hidden Mickey at the Mara. Too cool!
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As we were eating, we got word that Buszia and the others were on their DME bus and on their way here. We wrapped up and headed out to wait for them.
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And before we knew it, they arrived!
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And it was time for the big reveal:
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Which will have to wait for our next installation. Got to build up the excitement, right?

See you real soon!
 
First, SO SORRY to hear about your Grama! :hug: She lived a long life and she looks so sweet in that photo. I know it's tough...

Secondly, glad to hear the red-eye went well. Did you upgrade to the more leg-room seats? We ended up being able to get the 1 pm flight in Nov. but if we had done the red-eye; I definitely would've upgraded. I've flown Frontier many times and the regular seats just don't recline at all! Not comfortable for sleeping! :sad2: Too bad the flight attendants were so loud.

Glad you were able to get some more sleep when you got to AKL though! :) Can't wait to see the Grand Villa!! We stayed there a few years ago in a 1 bedroom. We really enjoyed seeing the animals outside our balcony each day and it was a very unique experience. ::yes::
 
First, SO SORRY to hear about your Grama! :hug: She lived a long life and she looks so sweet in that photo. I know it's tough...

Secondly, glad to hear the red-eye went well. Did you upgrade to the more leg-room seats? We ended up being able to get the 1 pm flight in Nov. but if we had done the red-eye; I definitely would've upgraded. I've flown Frontier many times and the regular seats just don't recline at all! Not comfortable for sleeping! :sad2: Too bad the flight attendants were so loud.

Glad you were able to get some more sleep when you got to AKL though! :) Can't wait to see the Grand Villa!! We stayed there a few years ago in a 1 bedroom. We really enjoyed seeing the animals outside our balcony each day and it was a very unique experience. ::yes::

Thank you for your kind words about my Grama. She did indeed have an amazing life.

We didn't upgrade to more space because the kids are so little and we bundled them up on the seats. Clara laid her head on my lap, and Eme stacked up stuffed animals and used the side of the plane to lay her head. Obviously this won't work for your kids as they are older. We're also pretty short, so the lack of leg room wasn't a bother for us. I also don't see much difference between the new seat layouts without reclining and those with reclining, so I may not be the best sounding board!

In any case, I wonder if your family wouldn't mind splitting up and each taking a window seat if and when you try the red-eye. If I travel by myself I would pick the window and lean against it. I also have a pretty good memory foam neck pillow that clasps and can be worn in many ways and I would have layers, but in a way that still keeps your "personal item" in the free $ range. The girls brought blankets, but they are pretty small. Finally, I plan on wearing my headphones with my white noise the next time we take the red-eye, which is this February. We're tying it again as you can't beat the Frontier rates - I joined the Den Club (?) and got the discounted rates for both myself and the girls.

So there's my two cents. On a side note, we flew Spirit today. We got tickets for $42/each, and when you add in the seats @ $10/each and two checked bags at $21/each, it was a steal. This return flight cost less for the whole family than one ticket on Southwest to Detroit at the last minute on Saturday (which really wasn't priced to bad at $240/ticket). In any case, we came prepared... small carry-on personal items, bags under 40 lbs and it couldn't have been smoother. This was not the case for the disgruntled man who had to pay $65 at the gate to check his small suitcase. He was literally screaming at those poor ladies. I am shocked at how rude and clueless some travelers are! Gotta be aware when booking Frontier and Spirit!

Hope that helps! :)
 
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Day 1: Saturday, June 3rd, 2017 – Resort: AKL – Parks: None

I am so excited to share this next update with y’all! Are you ready to check out a first hand account of a stay in an AKL Jambo House grand villa? I couldn’t wait to check it out, and it didn’t disappoint! So let’s do this thing!

Let’s start with the main living spaces, with captions beneath the photos.

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The beautiful double door entry. There was a second entrance as well.

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Looking at the entry way. Although I didn’t get photos, there was another bathroom and a laundry room to the right of the entry doors.

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Living room, dining and kitchen.

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The dining room, kitchen and edge of the living room.

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The dining room, living room and entry into the pool room.

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Looking out to one of three HUGE balconies.

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The pool room.

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Caz and the kids had a blast playing pool.


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This is taken from the first of the balconies. You can see the other two, and the center one had a table and chairs. It was amazing to watch the animals from these babies!

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The art in this villa was remarkable!

Onto the bedrooms, first up the master…
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The master bath was amazing!

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The closet was huge!

The other two bedrooms were down the hall from the dining room and kitchen:

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Caz, the girls and I had the room at the far end of the villa. The door at the end of the room is our bathroom, of which I don’t have any photos. Strange.

And the final bedroom:
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The third bathroom.

And most importantly when staying at AKL, the view:
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And a brief video of the animals:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Q9ZcIChHiv7IY6mt2

So there you go! Good stuff. We all adored the room and decreed that we would happily have stayed there longer. Well worth the points that Buszia rented- we rented our points to get $$ to then turn around and rent this villa. The resort in general was so amazing that it is a destination unto itself.


See you real soon!
 


Loving this so far! The Grand Villa looks incredible and I'm so envious of your large family. Can't wait to read more!

I am truly blessed with my pretty darn amazing family, and the villa was incredible to say the least!

Wow! Beautiful and spacious accommodations!! Thanks for posting the photos!! :flower1:

When you take thousands of photos, the least you can do is share them... Especially of such a lovely place like this villa!
 
Love seeing these pictures again, and makes me keeping thinking about renting points again for our 2020 trip at Christmas to stay in a GV again. Love, love, love the balconies.
 
I hope you guys had some Cigar City brews!

I do believe we enjoyed some Cigar City beer whilst in Florida... Weren't they recently purchased by Oscar Blues? My husband is on Untapped, I plan on consulting his reviews as I write this report. What's your favorites from Cigar City?

Love seeing these pictures again, and makes me keeping thinking about renting points again for our 2020 trip at Christmas to stay in a GV again. Love, love, love the balconies.

I am all about staying at AKL in 2020!

So happy you came back to report the trip! What an amazing villa.

I'm glad I came back too... Summer was so crazy! I'm happy/sad it is over - fall is a different kind of busy. Thanks for coming back to read along!

Hi I'm following along. The villa looks amazing.

The villa was indeed amazing @Stasieki and @dnllmz ! We really wished we were staying for more than one night.
 
Day 1 (Still?!?): Saturday, June 3rd, 2017 – Resort: AKL – Parks: None

I’m thinking I can wrap up our first Disney day with this post, as there was much chilling, swimming and hanging around the resort going on and not much else. Where did we leave off? Oh, yes... After we explored the “room,” the Michigan contingency went to get some lunch at the Mara, and Eme and Clara joined them. In the days leading up to the trip we (like all WDW vacationers) watched the weather, and it was lining up to be pretty rainy - not even partially sunny for the first week of the trip. So when the sun peaked out as lunch was wrapping up, we knew it was time to suit up and head down to the pool.

Oh, and looky here… A beer pic!
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And not just any beer… Cigar City! There you go @mcjaco! And with that, I’d like to take a moment to talk beer… Caz is very active on Untapped, which is an app where you rate and track the beer you drink. Over the span of the 9 days that he was with us in WDW, he checked in all the beers we tried. Both his and mine (27 total, and that doesn’t include previously rated and known quantity beers). Sadly after he left the beer went untracked. Oh well… We’ll cross that lack of beer review bridge when we get to it. For now, here are Caz’s takes on the beers we’ve had thus far…

Here’s the first one from the savannah balcony view in the previous post, which apparently was from Cigar City Brewing. Go figure! It also earned Caz quite a few “badges.”

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And the beers from the above pool pictures…
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And not pictured, but yet enjoyed…
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And the winner is… Jai Alai! Note that Untapped allows you to indicate if you drank the beer in can, bottle or draft form. Can I just say I really appreciate that WDW has branched out with their beer selection? I for one am excited for our February stay at the new Copper Creek Villas as the new bar by the pool has one of my all time favorite beers on draft - Rogue Dead Guy Ale! That is so happening… Anyways, the pool was lovely and I was so grateful for the sun!

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Drea and her totally adorable toes enjoyed a tropical adult beverage:
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There is something so special about the first day of a Disney vacation, and I especially love how we’ve embraced the tradition of not going into the parks on day 1. Anyways, the kids enjoyed the slide and although we always had eyes on them, we didn’t need to be right next to them at all times as they were all tall enough and strong swimmers. They had freedom and we had sun. All was good. About an hour into this swim session, Buszia decided to take the kiddos over to the Kidani pool. All but Josh, that is… The poor kid was exhausted and he zonked out poolside:
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Caz and I enjoyed the hot tub and it wasn’t long before the clouds started rolling in. Stupid clouds. Oh well, we were all thrilled to have had a good hour plus of sun. We headed back to the villa, meeting up with Buszia and the kids along the way. The kids proceeded to have a ton of fun playing in the villa, Brie took a nap, and Drea, Caz and I headed down to Victoria Falls to have an appetizer and drink:
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Caz had the beer, Drea the sangria and I had a white wine of some sort (duh). For our app we had...

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And for the beer review…
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We enjoyed our “happy hour” selections (but not really - there is no happy hour at Victoria Falls - as far as I know) and as we left we paused to introduce ourselves to the bartender, Trevor, who is the son of my parents’ friends. I approached him and started off with “this is going to sound strange...” and then finished with “but our parents are friends.” He looked wary when I said the first part, but then obviously relaxed as I finished. We had a good laugh and exchanged pleasantries - his parents are good friends with my Dad’s cousin, Colleen and her husband, Frank, and the six of them meet up pretty frequently in WDW. With that act of friendliness (also an effort to put a name with a face), we headed back to the villa to enjoy some spaghetti. And not just any spaghetti -Papa’s! YUM!
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After dinner the we took the kids on a tour of the resort:
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And then the three littles wanted to try out the tub, which really was their only swimming option as it was pouring buckets outside:
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While trying to figure out the jets, I proceeded to soak the bathroom and myself with pressurized water. Unbelievably fast water was squirting everywhere! I finally figured it out. It was pretty funny! The kids went to bed with very little fuss not long after that- everyone was exhausted. The adults then settled down to watch the Stanley Cup Finals - Pittsburgh (ugh) vs. Nashville. But apparently when it rains the cable/dishes don’t work at AKL. At all. It was so disappointing! In the end we were able to stream it on Brie’s iPad, but it just wasn’t the same.

I’m going to end this day with a word of warning… If you ever travel with a group, and/or stay at multiple resorts, be wise and turn down some magic bands. For this trip we had over 30 magic bands (10 people x 3 resorts + annual pass bands) and our first set from AKL were not working properly. Caz being the gem that he is, goes down to the front desk to sort them out. The CM has him go back and collect ALL the magic bands and then return. The CMs work for over 30 minutes and then send him back to the villa. Many bands still didn’t work. So this time I return with Caz and 20 minutes later, success! In the end they deactivated 20 (!) bands! And they put all the needed information about all our resorts/FP+ etc. on the 10 (or so) that they left “active.” So there you go. Don’t have 30 bands on one trip. Caz is my hero! And Disney was quite gracious about the whole situation as they added a bonus FP+ to our accounts to use the next day at Epcot. Very cool!

Oh, one last beer review from a beer Papa bought for the room:
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I would’ve liked to have gotten the pictures with the reviews, but to do that required excess navigation through the website version of Untapped and it was a huge pain in the butt. So a partial picture is all you get!

And with that the first day of the trip is over… And what a day it was! Another amazing first day at Disney World! And with that, 1/16 or approximately 6.25% of the trip report is complete. Wow. I have a lot of reporting left to do!!

See you real soon!
 
Your first day sounds great and enjoying the resort sounds like the way to go. We need to do that more. Last trip we tried to and our upcoming trip we're trying to do it even more.
 
Such a great first day! We hit the ground running at Disney, but love the relax the first day idea. I always feel like I'm just figuring out the resort halfway through.
 
Yes to resort stay the first day, especially when we had that wonderful grand villa, in our first choice location
 

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