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[Jillybean]

Friday, August 30

Upon waking up, Thom discovered that he had forgotten two things. The first and more “fixable” of the two was a volleyball (we’ll get to the second thing later ). Mary Devall was in the midst of volleyball tryouts at her middle school and she really needed to practice over the long weekend since the final cut was the next week. Thom had meant to bring her volleyball from home, but had left it in his rush to get out of the house (and I probably married the one person who is more forgetful that I am ).

He was planning to hop in the car and run get one before Mary Devall even woke up, but he was letting himself back in the room ten minutes later holding a volleyball. When he asked at the front desk where he should go to buy a volleyball, they directed him to their fitness center instead where he could check one out to play on one of their many beach volleyball courts. Wow! Fate was definitely looking out for us because now they could practice on an actual court with an actual net!

He roused Mary Devall out of bed and they took off for a quick thirty minutes of practice. Of course, little sister had to go too, so I was able to take a shower and take my time getting ready while enjoying a cup of that I made in the room. I also checked out the view from our room, since we actually had a balcony (Carol and I didn’t last year).

True to their word, they made it back to the room in thirty minutes. That’s about the time that Thom admitted to me the second thing that he had forgotten. If you remember our trip last fall with his family, you will also remember that we had to make a pit stop by Stein Mart on the way because he had forgotten his hang up clothes on the back of the door. Yep, he did it again.

Now he did have t-shirts and gym shorts, but no polo shirts and no dress shorts. This normally wouldn’t be a big problem at “laid back” Disney, but, at his request, we had booked dinner at Shula’s for the following night. After a little back-and-forth as to whether Thom should drive somewhere to buy “nicer” clothes for Shula, we decided to play the practical card once again and bag the Shula’s reservations.

Once that little mini-drama had passed, we finished getting ready and headed down to the bus stop. I had already raved about the bus service from the Swan, so I was hoping that Disney wouldn’t make a liar out of me on this trip. This ended up being our longest wait of the trip, but it was really no more than 15 minutes until an MK bus pulled up.

Once at MK, the resort monorail was sitting right there waiting for us, so we were at Chef Mickey’s in no time. I had made this ADR for 10:30 since I figured we might sleep in after our late night, but it was just a few minutes past 10 a.m. when I approached the hostess desk. She took my information, but told me we might be seated closer to our original ADR time.

I grabbed my family from the Outer Rim bar where they had found seats and moved towards the waiting area inside Chef Mickey’s. We had just passed the hostess desk when our pager went off. At first, I thought they might just be sending a test page, but when I took it to the check in desk they were ready for us. We were ushered to the elevated area that looks out over the front of the Contemporary which seems to have become “our” place on our last few visits.

We had a fantastic breakfast here with great food and character interaction, but sadly we only have two pictures to show for it.





I bought a new camera (nothing fancy, just a good basic “point and shoot”) this summer specifically for indoor and low light photos since the pictures with my iPhone aren’t the greatest in those situations. My plan was to take most of our pictures with it and I stuck to the plan.

The problem is that when we returned home I was formatting the pictures one evening and did a “save” of the formatted pictures from the first day on the memory card instead of a “save as” to the computer (which is what I normally do). When I realized what I had done, I didn’t think it would be a big deal because I had done this before one or two photos . . . but never about thirty. I’m not sure what happened, but the pictures from our first day saved as “white space.”

I freaked out, but decided to leave it for the night and try to salvage the pictures the next morning after a good night of sleep. I did some research the next day, but none of the suggestions I found online worked. I finally downloaded photo recovery software that you could try for free which thankfully recovered almost all of my pictures from that first day - - with the exception of Chef Mickey’s. Only two photos were recoverable which, oddly enough, are of Chef Mickey himself.

Ironically, if I had taken pictures with my iPhone, I would still have them (the girls might all have green glowing eyes, but I would have them ). I honestly was just thankful that most of the pictures were able to be saved. Goodness knows, we have enough pictures of us at Chef Mickey’s already!

Once we were good and full and had met all of the characters, we decided to make our way over to MK. We took the short walk over and were soon in the park. Maddie had requested to ride BTMRR first, so Thom suggested that we take the train to Frontier Land.



Once on the train, I had a text from Sharon asking where we were today. We soon discovered that both of our families were in MK today, but we ended up being at cross purposes all day long and never managed to find a good time to meet. Don’t worry because we would soon rectify that over the next few days!

When we arrived in Frontier Land, we were excited to see that the standby line only had a 10 minute wait. Essentially, that was just the time it took to walk through the line because we were soon waiting on our train (the pictures taken on BTMRR were not recoverable, so you’ll just have to imagine us hoopin’ and hollerin’ ).

After a great ride, we split up with Mary Devall and I going to ride Splash Mountain and Thom and Maddie hanging out in the Laughing Place playground. We probably only waited about 15 minutes before we were assigned the back row.



We both are huge SM fans, so we laughed and squealed the entire time. We’re trying to get better about posing for the camera before the big drop, but once again, we hunkered down to miss the soaking before our picture was taken.

With Frontier Land taken care of, we picked up Thom and Maddie on our way and mosied over to Adventure Land where we only waited about 10 minutes before we rode PotC. I was loving these wait times especially since we had waited over 30 minutes to ride PotC at the beginning of the summer.