The Rose Gold Rat Pack Takes on WDW! A July 2018 TR (Update 03/25)

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DIS Veteran
Joined
Jul 22, 2009
Hi everyone!


Welcome to another one of my Trip Reports! For those of you who don’t know me my name is Elle.

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By day I’m a middle school ELA and drama teacher. I’m an annual passholder, so I go to Disney multiple times a year and run a Disney-centric instagram feed under the handle “elleindisney”. I love all things Disney, especially being in the parks or buying cute Disney merch. My favorite characters are Daisy Duck, Merida, Anna, Nick Wilde, Sadness, and Megara. I also did some videoing during our trip. I meant it to be a vlog but then got more into it just filming snippets of my trip with my crazy friends. I’ll still post them up for entertainment purposes.


Along for the adventure were the rest of the Rose Gold Rat Pack. Who is the Rose Gold Rat Pack? Well, back in August 2017 when rose gold ears were hard to come by, my friends and I happened to be walking through World of Disney in Disneyland during a restock. We managed to snag a pair for all of us and wore them proudly for the rest of the week. Nobody had them yet, so between them and our matching backpacks it was a great way for us to find each other whenever we need to split up. Well, on our last day before we all went our separate ways we did a meet and greet with the Evil Queen and the second she saw us in our matching accessories she dubbed us the “Rose Gold Rat Pack”. (Her exact words were a wonderfully condescending "what do we have here, the rose gold rat pack?" For the past two years I've used the One Second Every Day app to do a sort-of video diary and I happened to catch that on film. It's now my favorite Second of 2017!) . We laughed about it and then about three days later started actually calling our travel group by that name.


So, who are the other members of the Rose Gold Rat Pack?

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These lovely ladies! Matching backpacks, matching coffee sleeves, matching ears (not pictured but we all brought them), and pretty impressively in-theme clothing for DAK!

We also had two other travel companions, these ridiculous humans:

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So, let me introduce you to everyone:


First up is Liz and Kyle:
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Liz is one of my oldest friends. She loves Peter Pan and Belle, and has a deep love for Big Thunder Mountain. She is a former parks CM and loves everything Disney, especially planning Disney outfits. She is also a WDW Annual Passholder. There are some cameo appearances throughout this TR of friends of hers who are still CMs or still live in the Orlando area who spent a day or even a few hours with us.

Kyle is our resident guy of the trip. He is also Liz’s DBF. I have known him for years though we have only recently become good friends since he started dating Liz. He's pretty laid back most of the time. He loves Captain Hook and Woody from Toy Story and is also an Annual Passholder.


Next up is Jen and Jenny

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(Jen's in white, Jenny's in green)

Jen is my best friend from high school and the person who is featured most frequently in my TRs because she and I have been going to Disney together since we were 19. She is a former Disney Store CM who is a Disneyland AP holder. She loves Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella.

Jenny is Jen’s DGF and while I’ve just met her last year, we get along very well. She is the brilliant person who happened to find a discarded pair of rose gold ears that led to our discovery of the small cache that led to the name of our group. She is also a Disneyland AP holder. She loves Bruce from Finding Nemo, Genie, and Simba.


Then there's Kristen:

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Kristen actually wasn’t on the trip where we were dubbed the Rose Gold Rat Pack but she is without a doubt a part of our group. She is wholly and officially part of our crazy planning and the next few trips we are going on over the next few years. She and I have been friends for about five years, and she, Liz, and I are very close. She adores Cinderella.


Finally, there's Sadie:
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I have known Sadie since she was little. She is a teenager still, and when she found out that we were going on this trip waaaay back in December she asked if she could tag along. We decided to make a promise that if she could pay for her portion of the room and ticket she could totally join us, with parent permission. She loves Moana, Finding Nemo, and Ursula.



So, the specifics of the trip:


When: July 7-14, 2018

Where: Art of Animation, Little Mermaid room & Lion King Suite(s)

Why: originally it was supposed to be my 30th birthday trip but we really just wanted an excuse to go to Disney again.


I planned the entire thing and it was stressful until the moment we were all together. I haven’t been on a trip with a lot of people like this since I was a teenager when all I had to do was show up, so navigating fastpasses, Magical Express, and dining reservations for a bunch of different people going in different directions was difficult. I was also really worried because it was a trip where we were kind of shoehorning two groups of people together. See, let me see if I can explain how we all know/didn’t know each other:


Liz and I knew everyone involved in this trip. She helped me a lot with planning, and since we have known each other for so long our friend groups kind of intermingle. Kristen, Sadie, and Kyle know each other as well as Liz and I because we all do things at our local theatre together. Kyle's always treated Sadie like his little sister. Jenny only knew Liz, Jen, and I. Jen and Liz are very close friends, but because we don’t live near each other Jen had never met Kyle until our first day of the trip (okay - this may not be true, they did have mutual acquaintances like 10 years ago, but they have definitely never spoken before). Kristen and Jen have met once before at a wedding, but it was a brief meeting where they didn’t really get to know each other.


So, basically up until we got to Florida I was stressed about the group dynamic. Was it going to work? Would we come back out of this alive, with friendships still in tact? Well….let’s find out, shall we?


 


Hi Elle, I'm here! Looking forward to your WDW adventure! It sounds like a really fun trip!! I understand the stress of planning for a larger group that you are used to, but I'm sure you handled it like a pro! :)
 
Following! Sounds interesting, though you lost me pretty early on :'D. I have no idea who is who and who knows who, but I'm sure it will be a fantastic Disney adventure!!
 
I'm here! popcorn::

Welcome!!
So excited!popcorn::

Yay!!!

Hi Elle, I'm here! Looking forward to your WDW adventure! It sounds like a really fun trip!! I understand the stress of planning for a larger group that you are used to, but I'm sure you handled it like a pro! :)

Hi! We had a lot of fun, even though it was stressful. Sometimes my insane over-planning comes in handy :laughing:

Following! Sounds interesting, though you lost me pretty early on :'D. I have no idea who is who and who knows who, but I'm sure it will be a fantastic Disney adventure!!

Welcome! This giant group needs a flow-chart, I get it! lol! Hopefully as we get going it'll get clearer :)
 


Travel days....everyone either loves them or hates them. I barely took notes on our travel day so this is all from memory and probably rough, sorry all! I get better once we get going, I swear!

Prologue? Sure, why not, let's not count chapter one until we're IN Disney properly.

Prologue: Are We There Yet???


The worst part of the travel day for this trip was that it felt like it lasted like six years. What made it worse was that we were leaving in 3 small subgroups in 2 different parts of the country, so once Liz and Kyle left Thursday evening to spend the weekend with friends in the Orlando area I was soooo ready for it to just be in Florida.


We weren’t leaving until around 5 pm on Saturday, July 7 but Kristen and Sadie and I decided that we would get together on Friday and stay at my parents’ house for the night. Our reasoning behind this was two-fold:

  1. Kristen and I were both leaving our cars there so it allowed us to get the cars all situated. My parents’ house is 30 minutes from the airport we flew out of and my mother had offered to drive us so we didn’t have to figure out how to get a car later since we were flying back into a different airport at the end of the week.
  2. We wanted to have time Saturday morning to go through everything we had packed and if we had to run out to the store to grab anything we could do it early without worrying about time.

So, Kristen picked up Sadie after work and they got to my parents’ house around 5-ish. We ordered pizza and watched the first Harry Potter movie, which turned into watching the Harry Potter Musical. We went to bed around 1 am.


Saturday morning we got up fairly early and watched some Disney youtube videos to get us ready for the week as we made breakfast.


As I was making breakfast I realized I needed to go to the bank or a Coinstar. Every year I save up coins in a BB8 cup and by the time it’s full there’s usually about $40 worth of coins in there. That’s not a ton, I realize, but it’s some extra pocket money. Kristen also ended up needing to get something at Walmart so we took a quick drive there before having to head to the airport!

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While we were getting ready to leave for the airport we got the first of two calls about whether or not we wanted to opt out of daily housekeeping. So, for the majority of our stay, we had two Lion King suites - one was in my name and one was in Kristen’s name, but all the contact info including phone number was mine since I had all the planning information. So...when they called me and asked if I was Kristen (using her last name, which they did not even a little bit pronounce right) I was super thrown. I stuttered my way through the phone call because I’m awesome like that.


And then the same poor guy called back a half hour later when I got the airport.


This time I was ready! I answered all his questions! I knew my own last name!


I may have pitched my voice a little bit lower in the worry that he would recognize it. We’re not going to talk about that.


Our flight left without a hitch. Our plane didn’t have any entertainment on it due to a satellite issue which was fine, though I do love watching the plane map while I’m flying. I spent the time reading, trying unsuccessfully to watch Bob’s Burgers on Hulu, and successfully watching Nailed It on Netflix.

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So, the flights from our small local airport to anywhere are two seats across instead of three. So Kristen and I sat together while Sadie sat across from us. The woman sitting next to her spent the entire time chatting with her and once we got off the plane struck up a conversation with us. Sadie made plans to meet up for lunch some time once she got back up north. It was adorable.


We were off the plane! We were in Orlando! We made it to the Magical Express!


We were the first people onto the Magical Express bus. Which means we sat there for a solid 45 minutes waiting for the bus to fill. I spent the time letting people know we had made it and coordinating the next morning with Liz and Jen. Liz was planning on meeting us at the hotel around 8 am, and Jen and Jenny had just finished dinner in LA and were heading to the airport for their red eye.


While we were sitting on the bus it began to rain. It had been sprinkling since we landed but now it was truly raining. We didn’t care though, because Disney! It also ended up being the worst of the rain we personally dealt with all week.


We were the first hotel dropped off and it was the first time I’ve ever stepped foot inside Art of Animation - I’ve been in front of it many a time on a ME bus but never inside. This lobby is seriously lovely:

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After enjoying the lobby for a little bit we headed out to our room for the night. Though we were in the Lion King suites for the rest of the week, this first night we were in a Little Mermaid room for just the three of us. It was a loooooooong walk in the rain.


We also may have gotten lost once or twice. It’s fine.


We got into our room around 9 and marveled at it:

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But we were pretty hungry. We didn’t really want to go to Landscape of Flavors as it was pretty busy when we walked by, and we really wanted to just walk around a little so we headed to the buses.


We were the only ones at the bus stop. At any bus stop. It was a definite “me and all my friends” moment. But our bus came quickly and we were on our way. While we were sitting at a stop light the driver started talking to us, asking us if any of us were frequent visitors. I said I was, and he told me to come see him at the end of the drive. Okay?


It turns out that he was given some of the last RTS cards for the Transportation Trading Cards, and had one left for the night, so he offered it to me. I thanked him and put it into my notebook in my backpack for safekeeping in the rain.

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Excited to just be at Disney, we all kind of skipped into Disney Springs. It wasn’t super crowded so we headed to food first. The Daily Poutine was the first place we went to, so we each got something there:

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I got the traditional poutine and a watermelon lemonade. Kristen got the Italian and Sadie got the Latin, with the yuca fries which looked amazing. We all loved our choices.


Once we were done we wandered through World of Disney. Our basic goal was to not buy something our first night. It was hard. Real hard. Especially when we went in here:

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The Dress Shop is my kryptonite.


We walked through the stores for about an hour before we decided that as great as it was to be in Disney we had to be up fairly early the next morning to move rooms and meet everyone so we should head back to the hotel.


We got back around midnight, ready to shower and call it a night.


We did not yet have our suitcases.


Okay. So we had landed at 8, gotten to the hotel by 9, it’s now after midnight...they’ll be here soon, right?


We sat around for about half an hour before Sadie showered, using the H2O products in the bathroom. Another ten minutes went by before I decided I needed to shower too. Kristen couldn’t use it as there’s something in it that her skin is super sensitive to and she was bummed.


By the time I got out of the shower it was close to 1:30. Sadie grabbed the phone and called the front desk. A CM named….Chad? Chet? Something short with “ch” at the beginning, I don’t know - answered the phone. He was super upbeat for 1:30 in the morning from what I could hear from the speaker. Sadie explained the situation and he started in on the usual “It can take up to three hours” spiel before cutting himself off and telling her to hold a moment. Our guess is he realized it had been over 3 hours about halfway through the standard speech (which was the only reason why we called instead of continued to wait - it had been 5.5 hours since landing at 4.5 since getting to the hotel). When he came back he told us our bags would be right up to us. About ten minutes later there was a knock on our door and our luggage was there! We thanked the woman who had brought it up and Kristen grabbed her shower stuff. I sent Jen a text letting her know that we were just getting to bed and what our room number was in case of emergency in the morning.
 
So true... you either love travel days or hate them!

In any case, it looks like you guys had a long one! :faint: Despite the rain, luggage delay, and exhaustion, it sounds like you guys had a pretty great night at Disney Springs and I love the Little Mermaid room pics!

Cant wait for the next update!
 
I'm here, I'm here!! Checking in and will come back and read in the morning!! Excited to read about the latest adventures pixiedust:
 

I love this outfit!!

matching coffee sleeves

Ok, so when you posted a picture with the coffee sleeve on instagram, I was in California on vacation, and immediately went to etsy and put some in my shopping cart...but then I couldn't decide if I needed them or not. And now I need to go back and see if they're still in the cart and order, b/c there was a sparkly pink and navy Minnie one that I definitely DO need. So good job marketing those, LOL!



She reminds me of Millie Bobby Brown. I think it's the dimples!

The worst part of the travel day for this trip was that it felt like it lasted like six years

Ugh, I relate to this!! I hate travel days

it was the first time I’ve ever stepped foot inside Art of Animation

I really regret not making the time to go over and see it when mom and I were at Pop in October. I always think pictures of the lobby are so pretty, and I want to see all the character areas

We did not yet have our suitcases.

after our December 2016 trip, I decided if I landed after about 6pm, I would just get my own bags. But that was also the trip when everyone's bags showed up but mine, then mine came an hour or so later and it was shredded and ripped.


I'm excited to see how this trip goes with all the different groups involved!! It sounds like it's starting off on a pretty good note!
 
So true... you either love travel days or hate them!

In any case, it looks like you guys had a long one! :faint: Despite the rain, luggage delay, and exhaustion, it sounds like you guys had a pretty great night at Disney Springs and I love the Little Mermaid room pics!

Cant wait for the next update!

We had fun, despite it being a travel day! I love Disney travel days more than anything else because I know I can relax and not have to worry about anything, that I'll be at my Happy Place soon! Disney and all-inclusives are probably the only time I don't worry about anything.

I love this outfit!!



Ok, so when you posted a picture with the coffee sleeve on instagram, I was in California on vacation, and immediately went to etsy and put some in my shopping cart...but then I couldn't decide if I needed them or not. And now I need to go back and see if they're still in the cart and order, b/c there was a sparkly pink and navy Minnie one that I definitely DO need. So good job marketing those, LOL!




She reminds me of Millie Bobby Brown. I think it's the dimples!



Ugh, I relate to this!! I hate travel days



I really regret not making the time to go over and see it when mom and I were at Pop in October. I always think pictures of the lobby are so pretty, and I want to see all the character areas



after our December 2016 trip, I decided if I landed after about 6pm, I would just get my own bags. But that was also the trip when everyone's bags showed up but mine, then mine came an hour or so later and it was shredded and ripped.


I'm excited to see how this trip goes with all the different groups involved!! It sounds like it's starting off on a pretty good note!


Yay!!! Thanks :) I was so excited when I realized that the skirt (which I already owned) matched the shirt/created a perfect Anna disneybound.

LOL! I love my coffee sleeves - I have that one for Disney, I bought us some for our beach trip this year with everyone's names on them so we knew whose water bottles belonged where in our hotel room, and I have a Rey one that I bought for $1 at Target that I use every single day at work. I love them so much. I'm glad I got someone interested in them hahaha.

I told Sadie you think she looks like Millie Bobby Brown and she almost cried because the compliment made her so happy (to be fair, everything makes Sadie cry, but it was still cute!)

I normally pick my luggage up after 8:30 but I really thought we'd be okay this time around. I was clearly wrong. Ugh. It gave me flashbacks to 2013, when we had the Pop Century fiasco. Thank goodness this wasn't anything like that!

Joining in! Super excited to hear about all of the adventures!

Welcome!! Hope you enjoy :)

Hi! Following along! Your Little Mermaid room is adorable!

Welcome!! I honestly wasn't sure how I would feel about the rooms at Art of Animation - they reminded me of the old rooms at Fairfield Inn on Harbour in Anaheim, where they had the wall decals that you can put in kids rooms, but the theming is so great!

OOHHH loving it so far! I want to be a part of The Rose Gold Rat Pack I ADORE rose gold and I ADORE disney!

Thanks!!! Haha, honorary member ;)

Joining in!

Welcome!!
 
While we were getting ready to leave for the airport we got the first of two calls about whether or not we wanted to opt out of daily housekeeping. So, for the majority of our stay, we had two Lion King suites - one was in my name and one was in Kristen’s name, but all the contact info including phone number was mine since I had all the planning information. So...when they called me and asked if I was Kristen (using her last name, which they did not even a little bit pronounce right) I was super thrown. I stuttered my way through the phone call because I’m awesome like that.


And then the same poor guy called back a half hour later when I got the airport.


This time I was ready! I answered all his questions! I knew my own last name!


I may have pitched my voice a little bit lower in the worry that he would recognize it. We’re not going to talk about that.

Haha this is so funny. I often get stuff for Steve because I usually list my contact info because he doesn't do any of the planning and would have no idea what to say anyways!


Yum this looks really good. Will have to catch some of this at some point!

Once we were done we wandered through World of Disney. Our basic goal was to not buy something our first night. It was hard. Real hard.

Oh it's so hard! I often get suckered in Marketplace Co-Op too and Tren-D.

By the time I got out of the shower it was close to 1:30. Sadie grabbed the phone and called the front desk. A CM named….Chad? Chet? Something short with “ch” at the beginning, I don’t know - answered the phone. He was super upbeat for 1:30 in the morning from what I could hear from the speaker. Sadie explained the situation and he started in on the usual “It can take up to three hours” spiel before cutting himself off and telling her to hold a moment. Our guess is he realized it had been over 3 hours about halfway through the standard speech (which was the only reason why we called instead of continued to wait - it had been 5.5 hours since landing at 4.5 since getting to the hotel). When he came back he told us our bags would be right up to us. About ten minutes later there was a knock on our door and our luggage was there! We thanked the woman who had brought it up and Kristen grabbed her shower stuff. I sent Jen a text letting her know that we were just getting to bed and what our room number was in case of emergency in the morning.

I had bag issues on my solo trip as well. It took forever to get to me!
 
Haha this is so funny. I often get stuff for Steve because I usually list my contact info because he doesn't do any of the planning and would have no idea what to say anyways!



Yum this looks really good. Will have to catch some of this at some point!



Oh it's so hard! I often get suckered in Marketplace Co-Op too and Tren-D.



I had bag issues on my solo trip as well. It took forever to get to me!

I really like the Daily Poutine! This is the second time I've gone (we went travel day back in October as well) and it's a very good sized portion and nice and simple comfort food!

I was so proud of myself for not buying anything in the Co-Op or Tren-D that first day. It took a lot of self-control. A lot.

I don't get what the issues were with the bags! I'm glad it was fixed so quickly though - and the next day Jen and Jenny's bags were in the room so quickly which was nice. But ugh. Almost 2 am is not a fun time to be waiting on baggage.
 
So I started writing up my notes for July 8, but I haven't managed to finish much of it - this week is crazy busy with tech week for our summer musical (which opens tomorrow, ugh!) and our friend's baby shower on Sunday that Liz, Kristen, and I are helping with.

But I have finally (after much fighting with my internet) managed to put together the random videos I took from our travel day into a vlog. So, for your viewing pleasure, here is it!


 

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