June 2018 TR - It took me 40 yr, but I'm finally back home to WDW!

I think when they designed Na'vi that they were depending on people having seen Avatar and remembering Avatar. It is a design flaw, there should be enough story built into the ride that you can appreciate it without having seen the movie. Maybe they will somehow fix that as time goes on?

DH & I saw the Avatar movie ages ago when it first came out, but the kids have never seen it. Even though DH & I saw the movie before, though, we still both wondered, "What's the purpose of this?"
 
Before I go into the saddest day ever (the day we have to leave), let's do a fun recap of what my family thought park by park! party:

Overall impressions of WDW:
  • VERY big!
  • And yes, very immersive. Easy to forget that there's a real world out there, especially if you never go off property during your stay. I can see why people love WDW so much just for that reason.
  • Transportation around WDW is a pain in the neck. Did not like that.
  • The much bigger monorail system was pretty cool to see & experience, but the monorail smells just a tad like old stale locker room. It's Florida, though. Can't do much about that.
  • CMs, overall, were more pleasant to talk to in DL than CMs in WDW. But we did have a few shining stars.
  • CMs at ASMusic were blah with the exception of the pool lifeguards and the CM who was running the Mickey tie-dye t-shirt thing at the Calypso pool.
  • Despite the blah CMs at ASMusic, the price on the ASMusic room was ~ $113/night including tax (not including $22/day parking) and for that price, it was a good value. I would not pay $175/night for that place, though.
  • CMs at AKL were really great. They put ASMusic to shame. It's too bad, though, because I think that you should get the same sort of greeting & customer service at any Disney hotel regardless of how much it costs to stay there.
  • WDW FP system is complicated, stressful, & overwhelming. I don't think that I could handle making ride reservations 2 months ahead of time every year. Or making restaurant reservations 6 months in advance. I don't care if you get to eat inside the castle. 6 months ahead of time is insane. My family thinks I'm crazy as it is on our DL trips when I ask them a month ahead of time "Where do you want to eat?"
Epcot:
  • I think that I'd like to give this park 1 more try, but at a cooler time of year. That will mean that it'll be a loooooong time before we end up back at WDW, though, because we don't really ever take the kids out of school for vacation. And I'm not going to WDW during Spring Break!
  • We missed a lot of Future World that I would have liked to see.
  • Didn't get on Living with the Land. But based on YouTube videos, I don't quite understand the fascination of this attraction.
  • We missed half of the international section of Epcot.
  • I don't understand why the international section doesn't open until 11 am.
  • Via Napoli, Voices of Liberty, & the Japan store were great. I could have passed on everything else. Yes, even Spaceship Earth!
  • Most of Future World is just plain ugly in my opinion. Nothing magical about walking through buildings which feel like a 1984 shopping mall.
  • I don't understand why you would need a FP to watch Disney cartoons unless you had so few decent other attractions that this is the best you can come up with to fill in the FP gap for people who can't go on thrill rides.
So yeah, we really did not like Epcot. I am quite the Debby Downer about Epcot. I'd be content with never going back, but I'll give it a go 1 more time at a more pleasant time of year. But I never want to go during a food festival.

Magic Kingdom:
  • This was our favorite park. I would have liked 1 more day at MK (yes, 4 days total because 3 days at MK wasn't enough).
  • I'd be fine with splitting our days on a future trip between MK & AK and probably spend 1/2 a day at HS...well, until Star Wars Land opens. When WDW opens that Star Wars themed hotel attached to Star Wars Land, I am totally going to that!
  • Favorites @ MK: BTMRR, Splash Mtn, the train, Haunted Mansion, Peoplemover, Monsters Inc Laugh Floor, Carousel of Progress, 7DMT, Hall of Presidents, Country Bear Jamboree.
  • Don't care if I never go on it at MK again: Peter Pan, It's A Small World, Space Mtn
Animal Kingdom:
  • gorgeous park
  • VERY spread out
  • LOTS of walking
  • NO transportation. This place needs a train or a tram that criss-crosses the park. Or they need to invent teleporting technology. I'd pay for a FP for that! :rotfl2:
  • VERY hot, just like people said! I didn't really believe them, but they were right.
  • wish we'd had an opportunity to eat a meal at AK because there were a couple of quick service places I was interested in.
  • Favorites: Kilimanjaro Safari, Flight of Passage, Festival of the Lion King
  • Just ok, we'd go on it again if there was nothing else to do: Kali River Rapids, Dinosaur
  • Don't care if I never go on it again: Na'vi River Journey
  • Stuff I'm sorry we missed: almost everything else we didn't do! With the exception of It's Tough To Be A Bug. We did that 1 time 6 yr ago in California at DCA. ONE AND DONE! NEVER AGAIN! :rotfl:
 
So what's up with the "I don't want to go to Epcot during a festival" thing?
I'll explain! :thumbsup2 Back in March, we went to DL w/my sister because she wanted to go to the DCA Food & Wine Festival. Similar sort of set up to Epcot's multiple festivals per year - they have a Flower & Garden thing, right, with food & drinks? And then the fall Food & Wine festival at Epcot with food & drink booths and special music groups and everything.

A couple of years ago, DCA started doing the same thing. It's become quite popular. It draws a BUNCH of southern CA residents. My sister is a foodie, so she wanted to give it a try and I am always up for a Disney trip! We had a very nice time, despite me injuring my foot before that trip and needing to rent a scooter last minute because Baby Groot got stuck in my toe. :rotfl2: The food & wine festival @ DCA lasts about a month with the food booths scattered all around the park. A number of them at DCA are lined up along this one main drag that goes past the entrance to Carsland, the entrance to Bugsland (which will soon be no more!), and as you walk toward the Little Mermaid ride.

My sister & DH really enjoyed the food & wine festival. But I could take it or leave it. For a couple of reasons:



    • the music that they were playing through the speakers all in front of the food booths was...so...bleh. It did not feel like Disney music. It felt like cheesy music festival sort of music. Not appealing at all.
    • Foot traffic bunched up all in front of the line up of booths. People stopping in the middle of the walkway to look at posted menus from 20 feet away. People trying to eat and walk at the same time (and doing a poor job at both). DL & DCA felt like it had way more people on scooters than WDW did. Scooters & wheelchairs, so the whole thing made for a traffic nightmare.
    • Loud drunk people - I'm just not interested in hanging out with a bunch of loud drunk people. In my opinion, DCA is a half day park anyway, so I'm not going to spend an entire afternoon & evening playing Frogger on DCA walk ways with them. :rotfl2:
    • The food at the Food & Wine booths is definitely more on the exotic side and while ODD is fairly adventurous, YDD won't ever eat any of that stuff. So why in the world would I WALK around trying to eat my lunch while dragging a hungry child who has her heart set on Flo's V-8 Café, where we can not only sit down while we eat, but we can eat indoors in air-conditioned space, AND we can watch the cars on Radiator Springs Racers race by us during our entire meal. I can do that or I can fight foot traffic with slow, loud drunk people. :rotfl:
    • I don't like music festivals. And I don't care very much for food festivals either.
    • The prices for the 'small bites' @ DCA's food festival were pretty high. DH & my sister each on their own ended up spending about $40/day for the equivalent of 1 meal at various booths.
So when we go back to WDW at a cooler time of year, I will need to do my homework so we can avoid food festival time! And I want to avoid race weekends, too, so that narrows things down a lot. LOL...it probably limits me to 1 week in January or February if you consider my "WDW return criteria."



    • NO Xmas & New Year's
    • No Labor Day weekend
    • No Spring Break
    • Not during the summer
    • Not during the kids' fall break in October since the weather is still pretty dang hot in central FL in early October
    • Not over President's Day weekend
    • Not over Martin Luther King, Jr weekend
    • Not on a race weekend
 


Actually I think you'd like Flower and Garden festival if you time it right. Remember Epcot had the blessing of size, so you don't generally have the traffic jams of people. Early May is a great tune to go, but now with kids in school (which is why it's a great time to go lol). My one day i got to do in May we had good weather- warm but cloudy so not oppressive hot, but rain in afternoon. March trip I had long pants on at end of day!
 
The whole WDW vs DL thing is like asking somebody to choose between 2 fabulous desserts and say which one is better. Let's say you're an ice cream person. Normally, your 'go to' flavor is double fudge brownie. But sometimes, you really enjoy coffee ice cream with chocolate chips in it. Which one is better? It's almost impossible to say. Do they both taste really really good? You bet they do! Do they both satisfy your craving for ice cream? Heck yes! Do you go away satisfied from that yummy dessert? Yes, you do.

WDW vs DL is the same thing.

You wouldn't eat double fudge brownie ice cream and then go on and on and rant and rave about how come the double fudge brownie ice cream isn't like coffee w/chocolate chips. But that's exactly what some people do. "BUT IT DOESN'T TASTE LIKE THAT FLAVOR I HAD LAST TIME!" Yes, that's because it's a different kind of ice cream. They're both ice cream. They just taste different. They're both great and wonderful and amazing.

Don't go to WDW expecting it to be just like DL. If you want it to be just like DL, then you should go to DL. And don't go to DL expecting it to be just like WDW. If you do, you will be disappointed.

Were there a few things on our trip that didn't turn out like I had hoped? Yes!
Did that ruin the trip? Absolutely not. We adjusted our plans.

Did we have a great time? YOU BET!
Do we want to go back? YES! Is the sky blue? :cheer2:

I love both WDW and DL. But I love each of them for different reasons. I still want to spend 1 night at the Contemporary Resort some day to satisfy that bucket list thing. I would LOVE to be able to spend an entire week staying at Animal Kingdom Lodge. That would be just glorious. Spend the morning in a theme park, spend all afternoon sitting on that balcony watching the animals, then head back to a theme park for the evening.

Some day, I'd love to stay at the Grand Californian Hotel.
Some day, I'm going to go on that Walk in Walt's Footsteps tour at Disneyland.
Some day soon (like in the next 6 months, I think), I'm going to go on Bob Gurr's monthly Disney bus tour through LA (go to www.waltland.com for more info).
Some day, I will have dinner at California Grill at the top of the Contemporary Resort.
Some day, maybe we will get to go back to Club 33 at Disneyland!
Some day, I will go on that special 3-4 hr early morning safari thing that they do either at AKL or AK.
Some day, I will stay at Wilderness Lodge.

On a funny note, yesterday was ODD's first day back at swim practice. It was 107 in the shade here in the Phoenix area. YDD and I lounged around in the shade and used our portable swamp cooler (aka the WDW battery-powered squirt bottle fan) to keep ourselves cooler. YDD declared, "Mama, it's hot out today. But it's not Epcot hot!" :rotfl2:

Up next...resort day at AKL, The Void at Disney Springs, and flying back home.
 
So our very last day at WDW (Saturday, 6/16) was finally upon us...

We ALL slept in. But I woke up around 8:00 am, which on this trip WAS sleeping in. HAHA! Everybody else was still fast asleep. I spent some time lounging on the balcony to watch some more animals, but it was pretty quiet out there that morning. Just the African cranes to look at. That's when I discovered the egg that they were protecting! But I don't have a photo of the egg.
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This is how close that nest was!
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I quietly showed and got dressed while everybody else slept. Then I packed up my luggage since we all needed to be checked out and have everything out of the room by 11:00 am. Around 8:30, DH woke up. He quickly got dressed and the 2 of us went up to the 6th floor club lounge for the breakfast-y stuff that they had there from 7:30-9:30 am. ODD woke up shortly before we left and I let her know where we were headed. She's 12 & mature enough to handle watching over her sister for a little while.

The club lounge was pretty popular that morning. DH & I had our fill of breakfast options. The pastries were VERY good! There was also this African breakfast casserole thing that was very good, but I don't remember the name of it. From the club lounge, you can get a really great look at the underneath side of the thatched roof architecture. Looks like somebody lost their Mickey balloon!
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Here's another one of those African artifact/art pieces that we saw everywhere. This was a beaded crown.
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There were also beaded slippers that went with it. Both were from the Yoruba people in Nigeria.
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DH & I then went back to the room. I convinced a cranky ODD to get in the shower to get the previous night's Animal Kingdom sweat off. My original plans had us going to Sanaa that morning for breakfast. But when I looked at the clock and then I looked at the train wreck of luggage and stuff in our room yet to be packed and THEN I looked at how slowly we were all moving...and THEN I looked at the AKL map and realized that we would have to DRIVE over to Sanaa, I thought, "Oh forget it! It's not worth it at this point." :rotfl2:We'll go to Sanaa next time.




 


By 10:00 am, we still were not all packed and ready to go. The kids were moving as slow as molasses in winter. YDD finally woke up about 9:45 am. I convinced YDD, too, to shower so she'd feel human again. :laughing: There was much grumbling from soon-to-be-hangry 10 yr old who was cranking about Mickey waffles & bacon yet again. :crazy:

So with YDD finally showered, we all set to doing the very sad task of packing our bags. I almost took YDD's gigantic Stitch up to the club lounge to ask the concierge's help in getting Stitch shipped home because I wasn't sure if we'd be able to get him on the plane as a carry-on. Thankfully, all of that worked out and we smooshed Stitch in the overhead compartment on the plane later that evening. Going TO WDW, the kids and I each had 1 carry-on bag and DH had 2. Going back home, we each had 2 carry-on items because: (1) YDD's huge Stitch; and (2) 2 extra backpacks that DH got at the conference.

With demands of Mickey waffles & bacon and time slipping away, I started barking at my family to hurry the heck up because it was now 10:40 am and breakfast was ending downstairs at The Mara in 20 minutes. By the time we'd carried our luggage downstairs to Bell Services (I left DH there to handle all the bags while the kids & I beat it over to The Mara), I got in line to order at The Mara at 10:55 am.

For some reason, this order-your-food line was taking FOREVER! And right after I got there, they stopped taking breakfast orders where you'd be given a buzzer. So all of us who wanted breakfast had to stand in a separate line to the left...and the CM handling the breakfast orders would take 1 breakfast order, make it, then give it to you before he'd take the next person's order.

I'm just grateful that they were still allowing all of us to still order breakfast! I didn't actually have the kids' food in hand until about 11:20. So 25 minutes standing there waiting at quick service. Mobile ordering didn't work. I checked! Mobile ordering didn't work at ANY of the locations and I checked every day that we were at WDW.

Both kids got bacon & waffles and were happy campers and no longer hangry, grumpy campers. So what to do now? Earlier in the morning while DH & I were in the club lounge, I suggested to him that he ask the concierge if they can help us get a reservation at The Void in Disney Springs so DH could do that Star Wars VR experience for Father's Day and his birthday. The concierge was able to get us a reservation for 1:15 pm that afternoon. Yay! It was expensive - about $30/person. You pay when you make the reservation.

We still had a rental car, of course, and now it was almost noon and we had our Void reservation in an hour and 15 min, so what to do? We went back to the club lounge to sit on their comfy couches, watch part of a Disney movie, and just do...absolutely nothing. It was kind of nice. With kids & DH implanted into the club lounge couch, I went downstairs to the gift shop to get a couple more souvenirs before we went home. Then went back to the club lounge, looked at the time, and said, "Ok, time to head over to Disney Springs!"

Everybody grumped about that. "Do we HAVE to?" "I don't want to go anywhere." "Why are we always having to be somewhere at a certain time." So I used the same technique that works every other time they get grumpy at Disneyland....

My voice gets really calm (think like Mr Rogers sort of calm). I acknowledge that they're feeling frustrated, grumpy, tired, whatever it is. And then I offer them an "out," knowing full well that they will not take the "out" and they will come with. This time, it went something like this:

Me: I totally understand. You're kind of tired, aren't you?
ODD: Yes! I'm just tired of having to BE somewhere at a certain time. Why do we have to do this?
Me: Well, you might recall that this was your idea
ODD: I KNOW (cue preteen emotional angst), but do we HAVE to?
Me: Well, we have already paid for all of our tickets to do this. Of course, you do not HAVE to participate...
YDD: But I want to go!
Me: And of course you can go. But (turning to ODD), if you really don't want to do it, you can stay here in the lobby for an hour and a half playing games on your phone while you wait for us to return. You may not be here in the club lounge without Daddy or I.
DH: Come on, ODD, just come. It's going to be a lot of fun. Listen to your mother. She knows what she's talking about.
ODD: So you would just LEAVE ME HERE?
Me: If that's really what you want, yes.
ODD: BUT I WANT TO GO, TOO!
Me: Ok, that's settled then. We're all going. Is everybody ready? Should we fill up the water bottle with some ice? Do you guys need a bathroom?
ODD & YDD: NO!

And then we left for Disney Springs. :rotfl2:
 
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Back to the trip report!

Instead of taking WDW buses to Disney Springs, we opted to drive. According to the map I looked at on the WDW app on my phone, it looked like it would be best if we parked in the Lime parking garage, which is on the end of Disney Springs where The Void is located. Great plan, right? Except when we approached Disney Springs, the sign for the parking garages said that the Lime garage was full, so we'd have to park in the garage on the other end of Disney Springs....like a 1/4 mile away.

It was VERY humid and sweaty that afternoon. And by the time we got parked, we were pretty close to running late. It took probably 10 minutes to walk from the Orange garage all the way to the other end of the Disney Springs universe to The Void. So although our reservation was for 1:15 pm, we didn't get there until 1:25 pm.

Ok, so my overall impression of Disney Springs:
  • NOT impressed.
  • Felt like just about every other outdoor upscale shopping mall that I've seen all across southern California and Arizona.
  • We were NOT really interested in going in ANY of the stores other than a couple of the Disney stores. But those stores basically had all the same stuff that stores in Disneyland have, with the exception of stuff that's labelled at Disney World.
  • I am VERY glad that I had previously cancelled ADRs that I'd made at Morimoto's and at Homecomin'. Just getting there, parking, etc. was a hassle.
There was a bit of a wait to be able to start our Star Wars The Void experience. I think that we waited about 10-15 minutes. They seemed pretty busy that day. But the wait was TOTALLY worth it! You have to be at least 10 years old and 48 lb in order to participate. The gear that you put on is heavy. There's a VR helmet thing with a chin strap and this heavy backpack+vest thing that you put on. You watch a short training video that explains what's going to happen, what your "mission" is, and then you pick which color stormtrooper you're going to be.

Everybody ends up a normal white stormtrooper, but you can tell who each person in your group is based on the color they picked. Their hands and this one shoulder piece is the color that each person picked. In our case, it was easy to tell who was who because we are all different heights. So DH looked like a really tall stormtrooper, ODD looked a little shorter than me, and YDD looked like a cute & short stormtrooper.

This VR experience is VERY realistic! There's a part where there's hot lava and that area actually FEELS hot. ODD and I walked over lava that had sort of 'hardened' and it felt squishy when you walked over it!

On one wall during part of this whole thing, there was a lever and if you touched the lever, you could pull it to down! R2D2 was in another part and if you reached out to touch him, there really was an R2D2 there which you could feel.

It was AMAZING! If stormtroopers shot at you, you could feel it through that vest/backpack thing. It felt like you got a buzz through the vest thing. I won't say anymore than that because I don't want to spoil it for anybody. But it is TOTALLY worth the $30/person we paid for it. I would totally do this again. DH LOVED it. LOOOOVVVED it. Like, he loved it enough that he wants to do it again.

You can't take any photos while you're in it, so I don't have any pictures of it. In the next post, I'll cover the rest of departure day!
 

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