Mooooooooove! An Irma-centric first Disney trip - COMPLETED

Day Three, Part Two: "Baboff"

A bit of background here is probably good. My girlie E is absolutely obsessed with most things Frozen, and especially Kristoff. About 2 months ago I happened upon a gently used set of Frozen figurines (that accidentally also came with Snow White's prince that Jeff thought was Prince Philip, and so named it Philip and once I corrected him it was too late, so he's now Philip forever ...) - and that boy Kristoff goes EVERYWHERE with her. His head has popped off thanks to drops over tile a couple of times, and we quickly super-glue it back on to avoid devastation. He comes in the car with us, he goes shopping with us, he sits on the table while E eats her meals, and she asks for him first thing out of the crib every day. So she was pretty disappointed in the lack of all things Kristoff in the parks, but I knew today we'd at least see her main man on FEA! (She pronounces Kristoff "Baboff", thus our title for this chapter)

First, we followed up our character spot fun by heading over to the Seas. The ride was a walk-on, so we did that and then dumped out and used our FP+ for Turtle Talk with Crush (which also wasn't necessary). I think the adults definitely enjoy this one more than the kiddos, but E has seen Finding Nemo/Finding Dory a fair number of times, so she enjoyed seeing some familiar faces and gamely joined in saying "Duuuuuuude!" whenever possible. After that, we spent a significant amount of time viewing the tanks. I don't find that those photograph well, so I'll just show this one photo to show that we were there :)
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Double bonus - we had spent so much time indoors this morning that we didn't even have to apply sunscreen until we were ready to leave the Seas. As a family of really pale folk, this meant a lot to us. :rotfl: Once that was completed, we headed to the World Showcase - this is normally my favorite part of Disney. I'm a big traveller, and I love taking a relaxing stroll all the way around the lagoon. Plus, it was our first ever F+W festival. We're big foodies too. So what could go wrong? (insert ominous music). But first ...
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She was more excited than she looks, I promise. But she was also tired and it was approximately 762 degrees outside. It was rough. We all enjoyed the ride, although it's interesting that even on the ride you only see Kristoff once. I mean, I seem to remember that even Sven was there at least twice. Show the guy some love! We exited the ride and visited our favorite giant troll friend, who E decided needed a high five.
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And we made our way over to Anna and Elsa's abode. We figured this meet would be a huge hit, but it went a little bit off the rails. First, we met with Elsa, but E could see Anna just a few feet away and spent the whole time asking for "Anna" :confused3
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Side note - am I the only one that thinks all of the Elsas look awful? I have yet to see an Elsa I appreciate. Maybe it's the wig...

So, we eventually finally make it over to Anna, and E starts interrogating her about Kristoff. Now, she doesn't put more than two words together at a time yet since she's just 19 months old, but it was pretty easy to catch her drift. Once I explained to Anna that "Baboff" meant "Kristoff" even she figured out that E wanted to know where he was. Photographic evidence of interrogation:
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Anna pleasantly explained that Kristoff was very busy with his job as the official ice deliverer of Arendelle, and so unfortunately was currently on the North Mountain. E obviously decided that wasn't an acceptable answer.
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At this point, E was wiped. We put her in the stroller, headed clockwise (the only way to do the WS, IMO) and she was out before we hit China. Now, this is where today got a little sad for me. I knew that the best time to try to call airlines and reservations in order to not disrupt "family" time was do call while E napped. Original plan was for Jeff and I to do the leisurely WS stroll and discover all the fun hidden quiet spots, but that all went out the window. It was hot and humid and sunny, so the best way to keep E asleep was to head straight to the fountain courtyard in Morocco and ... circle.
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I eventually spent almost 2 hours on the phone with Southwest as we walked and E napped, and all they would do for me was move our cancelled Sunday afternoon flight to a Monday evening flight that they admitted would probably also get cancelled. But they claimed they could do nothing else. Argh. This will be continued later this night and the next morning ...

Eventually E woke up and we kept walking, and then I got off the phone and was admittedly hot, hungry, and cranky! Only one way to solve that mood issue - F+W festival! It was soooo hot this day I decided I would forgo the alcoholic portion of F+W. I really wanted to at least try some of the hard ciders being offered, but I was already so thirsty and sweaty, I just couldn't get myself to commit.

Before the trip, I had made a spreadsheet of all of the food options available at the festival, along with their prices and where they were located. I rated each one on a scale of 1-5 based on how much I wanted to try it, and Jeff did too. We compiled those, figured out some options that would make us all happy, and had a strategy for which booths to hit :)
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Like any good trip reporter, I diligently took pictures of all of our dishes. But ... it was so hot and muggy this day, the food was *not* visually appetizing, so I don't think I'll share the pictures here. Thankfully, it still tasted amazing! At this first stop, we all shared the Filet from the Canada booth and the Venison Loin from the New Zealand booth. The Filet was melt-in-your-mouth delicious and perfectly cooked. Obviously over-priced for the portion, but that's what you get at F+W. Jeff and I have been to New Zealand before, so we're familiar with their cooking and especially their love of venison, and so this dish was somewhat nostalgic for us. It was so yummy, and we both liked the kumara puree.

After roasting in the heat and eating some hot food dishes, it was time to cool down. What better place to cool down than Mexico, right? Ha. We knew this would be a good break because of the cool and darkness, and because it has a boat ride, and we all know now how much E loves any Disney boat ride. Bonus - this boat ride has fake fireworks near the end, so I thought she would especially like it. We've arrived!
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We completed our Gran Fiesta Tour and then put off returning into the heat by joking around at the various souvenir stalls :)
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I really wanted to get a giant sombrero for E, but how in the world would you actually get one of those home with you?!

At this point, our time in the World Showcase had come to a close. It definitely wasn't relaxing, but E had a great time. If/when we get to go back in a few years, hopefully a hurricane won't be bearing down on us, and I'll be able to enjoy it more :)
 
What day was this? We were there same week and drove back to TN Saturday in the middle of the night. We were at Epcot Wednesday, MK Thrs, and HS and MK Friday. Your family is adorable!!! Hoping Irma didn't crash the party too bad.
 
I'm sorry meeting the Frozen characters to go over better for E! And I'm sorry your WS time was taken over by airline phone calls :( Sounds like you guys made the best of it once E woke up though!
 


What day was this? We were there same week and drove back to TN Saturday in the middle of the night. We were at Epcot Wednesday, MK Thrs, and HS and MK Friday. Your family is adorable!!! Hoping Irma didn't crash the party too bad.
We just missed you! We were at MK Wednesday and Epcot Thrs. We opted for AK on Friday because E loves animals, and we didn't think there was enough to entertain us at HS.

I totally agree.
Thank you!
 
Joining in a little late. I think I just figured out we were there the same time. I bet our paths crossed at some point as I was at MK the same evening and EPCOT the same day. It was my first times seeing HEA also (but I was about half way down main street so not as good a view as you). I liked it! ( I was there 9/3-9/8)
I drove and ended up leaving Friday - the day I planned to but at 3 am instead of 3 pm - I was with all the evacuees on I-75 north - my 7 hour drive took me 12 but I am not complaining as I was going home and not evacuating me home .
Hoping your departure plans work out .
 


Day Three, Part Three: "Babies!"

When we finally emerged from Mexico, it was unsurprisingly still hot. On our way to the nearest diaper-changing spot, we passed an ice cream cart ... and you can guess what happened next. A momentous life event, that's what. E's first Mickey Bar!
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After we downed the Mickey Bar (I made her share with me because I'm a mean Mama), we walked toward the bathrooms to change E. It just happened that the EPCOT baby care center was right next to the bathrooms, so we hopped in there instead. Holy Moly!


Pro Tip: Even if you just have to change a diaper, go to the Baby Care Center! It is so nice, clean, cool, and uncrowded. We didn't want to go out of our way to go to the Baby Care Center, so I changed E in the bathrooms all day at MK. What a mistake! We actually took a picture of the diaper-changing area and then thought it was weird. Ha. Even if it's out of your way, go there to change your baby. Seriously.

We then headed across the park and let E right Journey into Imagination. She likes Figment (I have a stuffed Figment at home), but Jeff refuses to ride because he swears the skunk smell lingers in his nose for days. :confused3 He waited for us at ImageWorks and we let E run around play. It was obviously really crowded in there ...
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E really enjoyed building her own virtual Figment and even named it "Baboo".
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And we got to play with the musical area once we fought through all the crowds of people wanting to do the same (the sarcasm is thick today).
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But seriously, this afternoon was when we really started to notice the unbelievably low crowds. It was apparent that folks had already opted out of travelling down to Florida with Irma threatening,and while it made wait times awesome, it did give us an eerie sort of feeling!

We had some time before the bonus FP+ that I was able to snag for Soarin' (which, again, turned out to be totally unnecessary), so we were going to head to MouseGear to let E do some more souvenir shopping. This was likely to be our least-wet day, so the best chance of getting things back to the room without them getting drenched. On our way, we happened to run into the Muppet Mobile Lab. Yay! I had been wanting to see this show, but unfortunately we only caught the last two minutes. I'm not a huge Muppets fan, but these two are definitely my favorite!
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We spent about 30 minutes in MouseGear, and it was very obvious what E needed to spend her "Nana money" on when she picked up the same two dolls that she had picked up at World of Disney, the Emporium, the Norway gift shop, and here. Every time she would see them, she would exclaim "Babies!", run over to them, and scoop them both up. So we finally let her make the Elsa and Anna babies her very own.
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After adopting two new babies, we headed over to yet another boat ride! E wasn't as impressed with Living with the Land, but she still sat through the whole ride without much issue. I enjoyed spotting the hidden Mickeys.
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Finally it was time for our Soarin' FP+. When I headed over to redeem mine at about 4:30 pm, this was the standby wait time:
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In reality, it was a walk-on. Crazy. This was my first time with the new film, and I did get the middle set of seats, so I didn't notice much distortion. That being said, I really did not enjoy all of the CG elements. I get that it gives them more flexibility, especially in scene transitions, but it seemed like a cheap trick. But, I did get a whole row to myself! (I was really tempted to ask a CM to take a picture of me alone in my row, but settled for a shot of half of the row)
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I got out, grabbed E, and let Jeff take his turn. He agreed about the yucky CG elements. After that, it was time for some F+W dinner options. Again, the food did not look appetizing, so here's a picture of Figment instead :)
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E and I split the Duck Confit. I feel like this dish is a good value, because it's a lot of filling duck and beans and it's very yummy. You get a lot of bang for your buck. While E and I ate, Jeff ran over to get a Handwich, which he ate on his way back to us. I believe he shared some bread cone with E.

Since the weather was looking bleaker for the rest of the week, we decided to head out of EPCOT around 6 this night. Since our flight was *currently* booked for Monday night, I needed to try to add a night to our stay. I had been calling the reservations line intermittently, but it was always so busy that I couldn't even get on hold. We figured I could do that while most guests were still in the parks, and Jeff and E could enjoy the pool. We had a water park day planned for Saturday, but E loves the water, so some pool time would suit her well.

On our way out of the park, I grabbed the Dark Chocolate Raspberry Torte (soooooooo good and chocolatey) and Jeff opted for the Peanut Butter Mousse. We both enjoyed our choices and shared some bites with E. I'll tell the story of the rest of our evening in the next chapter!
 
Have people scan in when they get in line for a bus at a park, then you immediately know how many people are waiting for each resort and for how long ..
BRILLIANT

gamely joined in saying "Duuuuuuude!"
giggles

am I the only one that thinks all of the Elsas look awful? I have yet to see an Elsa I appreciate
agreed

Before the trip, I had made a spreadsheet of all of the food options available at the festival, along with their prices and where they were located. I rated each one on a scale of 1-5 based on how much I wanted to try it, and Jeff did too. We compiled those, figured out some options that would make us all happy, and had a strategy for which booths to hit :)
I love your organization.
 
The pic with E and her babies is adorable!! :cutie:

Great update!!:flower1:
 
So many friends following along! You all make my heart happy :goodvibes

Sounds like a great afternoon! Looks like E really had her heart set on those dolls!
She certainly did! Made it easy on Mama and Dada to figure out what to get her. Jeff tried to convince her that there were other "cuter" dolls available, but he was obviously not successful!

I agree Elsa's hair is terrible! It's very clearly light blonde, not silver.
Thank you. It's blonde in the movie, and then in-person they make it this weird silvery-white.

The pic with E and her babies is adorable!! :cutie:

Great update!!:flower1:
Thank you!! She has loved on those babies a lot every since we've gotten back. Her only complaint is that she wants to "change" and "nakey" them like she can with some of her other baby dolls, and these dolls definitely have sewn-on clothing that won't let her do that.
 
Day Three, Part Four: "Sim, sim, sim"

Our bus ride back from EPCOT was blessedly quick, and I hopped behind 2 other people that were in line at the concierge desk. Jeff and E had plans to go swimming ("sim", as E calls it), but they caught some Mickey Mouse cartoons on in the lobby and plopped there for a few minutes with E's new babies.

Note: if you are just interested in the parks part of the trip report, skip this section. It just deals with hurricane issues.
After a few minutes, it was my turn. I explained my flight situation and said that I would need an extra night of accommodation due to our flight being pushed back one day (for now). The kind man re-iterated that my Monday flight was unlikely to remain scheduled, but he would just add one night to our stay for now and I could come back if I needed more. A little bit of background - I mentioned in my intro that we booked this room on a VERY good deal. We typically stay at Value resorts, because now that E is around, Jeff is a stay-at-home dad and we survive on my salary. I make a solid amount of money, but we're pretty rigid savers and prioritize college fund for E, paying off our mortgage quickly, and saving for retirement - so it doesn't leave much wiggle room for vacations at this point in our lives. That all being said, this vacation was already a stretch of our budget. So adding *any* extra nights made me pretty nervous. I was honestly hoping for some *really* magical pixie dust that would say something like, "Sorry for that big meanie hurricane stranding you here, we'll keep you for free until you can get out." But obviously that just isn't feasible. Fortunately, they were able to get us a continuation of pretty close to our awesome rate and booked us an additional night for $215.33. I figured if we had to swing that, we could do it. And we could eat cheaper than we planned to for the remaining days and stretch our food budget to cover us. More on this later this evening!

By the time I was done, E and Jeff had gotten distracted by all of the animals (who wouldn't?) and were looking at the savanna before they made their way to the pool. I joined them, explained the room situation to Jeff, and we all tried to get that off of our minds for the rest of the evening.
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As we went back to our room to change into our suits, the man at the Disney Cruise Line desk stopped us and asked if we wanted a towel animal. If you stay up with Disney news, you know that by this point, Disney had cancelled all of their cruises for about the next week and a half, so this guy really didn't have anything to do for a while, but I guess he was still getting paid to be there, so good for him :) He made E a beautiful towel elephant and we had a fun interaction all making elephant noises in the lobby. Yay for little magical moments!
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Finally after all of those distractions, we changed into our suits and made it down to the pool. As a family of pale folk, it was really nice to go swimming this late in the evening and not have to lather ourselves in thick white goop! :yay:
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E had a BLAST. This was seriously one of her favorite parts of the trip, I think. We go to the pool at my parents' house a few times each summer, and E had a 5-week swimming class at the local pool over the summer, but this was so much better than either of those. I attribute a lot of that to the zero-entry pool that she could walk in and determine the water height herself. She seemed so much more comfortable than we've seen her in the water before.
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I got in and enjoyed pool time with my family, and generally just tried to appreciate being in this beautiful resort. It was such a fun and relaxing time.
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One more bit of the hurricane saga
After we got E into bed, Jeff and I checked email and news and realized that at this point, Irma's path had shifted to directly over Orlando, and arriving in the wee hours of Monday morning. It was almost a foregone conclusion that our Monday flight would be cancelled, and we'd be stuck here a while. We talked about the financial impact of having to stay a few more days, and decided that I should try to get on the phone with Southwest again and talk over options. So I literally went into the bathroom, turned the fan on, and got on hold with Southwest - hoping that when I started talking, it wouldn't wake up E.

I should mention that I'm much more comfortable just changing my itinerary online, but since E was travelling as a lap infant, all bookings/cancellations had to happen over the phone with customer service. Thankfully I got a helpful person on the line. First she checked Saturday flights for us before the airport was closing, but there was nothing available to get us to St. Louis :sad2: Then she confirmed that our Monday flight was likely to be cancelled the next day (Friday), but that since so many people had been rebooking (apparently the agent from that afternoon was an unhelpful one that didn't give me all of my options), we wouldn't be able to get a flight to St. Louis until THURSDAY. Eep. I thanked her for the information, told her I needed to talk things over with Jeff, and we would be keeping the Monday flight for now and praying.

As we discussed, I started doing the quick calculations in my head. $215.33x (4 extra nights) = over $850. :teacher: And we definitely didn't have enough diapers to get us through to Thursday, so we'd have to do a Prime Now order to get some of those, plus probably additional food for our room in case we were stuck there. There had been bad stories about Disney charging $13 for wimpy boxes of food during Matthew, so our food budget would be expanding too. Suddenly our vacation budget was going to go up by over 50%. Jeff calmed me down, said there was really nothing we could do about it right now, and that we would be fine riding things out. I was upset that I couldn't really enjoy Disney when I was worried about how we'd have to make up for all of the additional expenses, but knew he was right and eventually drifted to sleep ... after all, tomorrow was supposed to be a beautiful day at the Animal Kingdom, and I could focus on that for a while!

Stay tuned - more hurricane drama before we even get to Animal Kingdom! (but then a nice full park day for those more interested in that)
 
I can't imagine the stress you were dealing with! Especially when it came to money matters and knowing how much your budget could potentially be blown. I'm glad you were able to enjoy the pool time with your family though!
 
Following along. We were there for Irma too (staying at POFQ). Interested to see how your experience was at the Deluxes!
 
I can't imagine the stress you were dealing with! Especially when it came to money matters and knowing how much your budget could potentially be blown. I'm glad you were able to enjoy the pool time with your family though!

Yikes - how stressful!

Yes and yes to the stress! I know that all vacations bring a certain amount of stress (did I forget anything, did we lose anyone:rolleyes1), but this one definitely took the cake!

Following.
:welcome:

Following along. We were there for Irma too (staying at POFQ). Interested to see how your experience was at the Deluxes!
:welcome: Good to hear from a fellow Irma-impacted traveler :)
 

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