No kids this time -it's like date-night X 7! - UPDATED 8/22 - Page 2 - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
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Okay! Life has finally settled down a bit, so it’s time for instalment number 2. We managed to cater the lunch (one of my best lasagnes EVER – I had leftover spanakopita filling in the freezer and I threw that in with the ricotta – oh yummy) and the wedding is one for the history books. In all our years of catering we have never encountered a “bridezilla” until last Saturday! She even fired her bartender and her maid of honour 2 days before the wedding…who FIRES their maid of honour??
Anyway, we just got the last of the postcards that we sent the kids in the mail, and it’s either finish unpacking our bags or update our TR (guess which option I chose?)
Day One – Priceline 101
For those of you who have never tried Priceline before, I’ll give you some free advice. It’s just something I do…if there is a wrong way, I like to try it first so that I can help out my fellow citizens by showing them the error of my ways. Anyway…we live just north of the St Lawrence River across from New York State, so the best airfare is usually from Syracuse, which is about a 3 hour drive. We have stayed at the Super 8 with their park ‘n fly package – not bad at just under $100, but you know, it’s the Super 8 and this is supposed to be romantic. I heard from a friend that if you punch in 3.5 star hotel in the university area in Syracuse you always get the Marriott which has free parking and shuttle to the airport. I even did my homework and learned that in that part of Syracuse there are only 2 hotels with 3.5 star ratings and they both had free shuttle and free parking, so I went ahead and bid, hoping for the Marriott, but thinking I really couldn’t lose either way. I won the bid for $55 a night but at the Gennesse Grande. That’s okay, I already knew they had what we needed, phew. Well, turns out that their shuttle starts at 7am and finishes at 11pm. Lucky me, I had scored us great flights leaving at 6am and returning at 11:50pm, so there we are, with a non-refundable hotel room that’s a $30 cab ride from the airport…..ooops. Thanks to our new GPS, though, we found our way to the airport in the morning with no problem (‘cuz everyone else was still sleeping) and parked for only $6.50 a day which means we still came out ahead of the Super 8 package, had a lovely Koi Pond in the lobby of our hotel and would be able to make a fast get-away upon our return rather than return to the hotel (or at least that was the plan)
So, now that you have some handy tips for using Priceline, where were we…..oh – the drive was uneventful, the hotel nice enough. To be honest, I found the rooms a little bit tiny and would have been dissapointed to say the least if I had paid full price. We arrived in time to share a glass or two of wine and crash so that we could catch our early flight and arrived at MCO at 10:30am which is a great time for those of us coming from so far north! I wondered how we would find the crowds, given that we usually travel in the off-season, but there was hardly a soul at the DME area. We hopped on and were getting off at Pop in no time. We chose Pop because it basically made us feel better about going without the kids if we didn’t try something new or spend any extra money. We have stayed here twice before and actually quite enjoyed our return visit. We checked in and were assigned a lovely King bed room overlooking the pool. I felt sorry for the CM when I asked nicely if we could switch rooms (I could from the way she presented it that she was very happy to be offering us this amazing room) We are not big fans of the pool noise at bed-time, you know? So we moved over to the 70s building overlooking the little park where the play structure is and settled in. I’ll book some time with my 15yr old tomorrow after school, so he can show me how to add some pictures – I tried very hard to get what he lovingly calls “food porn” thanks to the time I spend on the boards. (does that make me a bad mother that I let my 15 yr old son say "food porn"?) I do know that we shared a Mediterranean chicken flatbread and had a swim and a FAB at the pool while we waited for our bags (with our camera) to be delivered to our room, so there are no photos of that meal. However, if you enjoy artichokes and black olives, I would highly recommend it. We had a tie-died cheesecake for dessert and it gets a thumbs-up too. The colours were gross, but the taste more than made up for it!
I’m off for a few days, so I’ll come back with the second half of our first day soon. It includes a trip to MK and dinner at the Grand Floridian Café.
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After a lovely break by the pool (this trip was punctuated with lots of those – a “first” for us) we got our butts in gear and bussed it over to the MK, stopping first to send a postcard to the kids back home. I enjoy so many things about WDW, but I have to say that the Magic Kingdom is my fav. I think part of the reason I was aching for a trip so soon after the last one is that I didn’t get a chance to spend as much time here as I would have liked. We had planned our last night to sneak in and ride Splash Mountain after dark and we got caught by the parade and made it just as they closed the line ( !) It was so “un”magical! I left feeling like I hadn’t said my goodbyes. So this time, I wasn’t about to make the same mistake. I had a mental list of “must do” attractions that I would be sure to hit.
We made it through the gates with only one hitch - Chris got stuck behind a real spark plug who couldn't figure out how to use the turnstiles even after a CM explained it to her. The lady was pointing her finger tip down at the little pad and then thought she had the wrong finger so she proceeded to try every other finger on her hand (still pointing ) I could see it was killing Chris to stand there and he finally had to tell her it actually reads your finger print, so you need to press the finger pad onto the little glass pad and then it will let you through. You could almost see the little light bulb go off in her head - she did the right thing and faster than you can say "bibbidi-bobbidi-boo" we were in!
We took a leisurely stroll down Main St and went into all the little places that we often skip with the kids in our mad rush to get somewhere. I had never been in Tony’s before and DH apparently used to levitate to the hub, because he’d never been into any of the little stores on the right side (glass blowers, candy, and hats, oh my!) and had never been into the fire hall either. I entertained him with my vast knowledge of trivia (mostly picked up here at the boards) and got a shot of him in front of the candy.
This goes with a fav picture I took of our boys on a previous trip when he had been sick in bed for the morning. We made our way over to Tomorrowland and hopped on the TTA. We decided to pass on any of the big rides for the first day so we headed around and into Fantasyland paying a visit to Mickey’s Philharmagic on the way. There was a lot of “Do you remember when DS8 lost his hat here?” and “Wasn’t it funny when DS15 rode the carousel?” so it was almost like the kids came with us after all!
We headed off to the docks for a ferry ride to GF and caught another first – the flag retreat.
I know that some of you are wondering how we made out doing ADRs less than a month before our trip so I’ll go over that:
We knew we wouldn’t get into some of the busier places, so we decided to try some of the less popular venues. Grand Floridian Café was one of them. We also booked at Tokyo Dining and in Marakesh for our Epcot days, Raglan Road was a return fav from our last trip, and Sci-Fi lunch on our last day was a must, as it was DH’s birthday and we would be spending a long evening in airports and on planes, so thought that having our big meal at noon would be smart. I’m missing a day…guess I should have taken some notes…let’s see, oh! Crystal Palace for dinner on one of our MK days! That was a last minute addition because I was a little leary about us going sans kids. At the same time, I am saving Tony’s for a trip when we don’t have the dining plan, so our options for dinner in MK were a little limited unless we considered character dining. WCC and Ohana’s were soooo booked it was unbelievable, we’ve done the Wave a few times and prefer it for breakfast, so we decided to go with Crystal Palace. We also made a reso for the Captain’s Grille because we wanted to go check out the boardwalk for the first time. We decided we would either cancel one once we got to WDW or we would pay for one OOP – we’d see how it went. Because of our flight times, we had 7 days in the parks and only 6 nights worth of food credits so we knew we could run out of credits.
Back to Grand Floridian Café – it was lovely! The resort is such a quiet, buttoned-down kind of place and we’ve enjoyed 1900 Park Fare in the past. The hostess was a riot and they had a lovely table for 2 near the window for us. It was 7pm and we were starting to wilt a bit, but a glass of their lovely Sangria picked me up just fine. We both went for red meat – oh yeah! I am the worst PPer ever for remembering to take pictures of food...I went for a week last fall with very good intentions and missed totally. I promised the kids I would try to do better and then forgot our first lunch and dinner... Our server, German, took our picture with our dessert and I remembered my promise to the boys and took a close up on our camera too. Last on the agenda for day one was a monorail ride to the Poly to watch the fireworks from the beach, which we did. We scored a lounge chair just as they were starting and snuggled in…at the same time the EWP was sitting in the lagoon just in front of us, so I got to scratch one more thing off my wish list – I had now seen the EWP too. We traded a couple of great pins from the lobby board on our way out – there was a very cool moving Mickey and Minnie Christmas pin that the CM broke as he pulled it off the board, but I still got my 2 fav trades of the trip there. (the boys were sooo happy!) and then we paid for my tardiness by getting log jammed at the MK tryng to bus out. After that, though, we did great every night for busses, so I can’t complain (although I may have whined a little teeny tiny bit while we stood there)
Coming up on Day 2:
Epcot – breakin’ all the rules…and is Chris going to get stuck getting in to EVERY park??
Part 2 – day 1 (MK and Grand Floridian)
*I have been able to figure out how to attach thumbnails, so I have 3 photos here:
1) us, with our dessert
2) We entertained ourselves on the TTA doing our impressions of the lady trying to figure out the turnstiles - here is mine. Sadly, there is very little difference between this and my regular face!
3) our dessert sampler from the Grand Floridian Cafe, and it is every bit as delicious as it looks!
4) Chris in the candy store
Great update. We are taking our first visit to the World without children(well 2nd but the first was our honeymoon) so I am looking forward to your TR.
__________________
They caught us all smiling and looking at the camera!!!
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Great update. We are taking our first visit to the World without children(well 2nd but the first was our honeymoon) so I am looking forward to your TR.
Good for you - we may start a trend here, there are a few of us leaving the kiddies at home!
I see from your ticker that you'll be there during F&WF - that'll be a fun time to be grown ups in the park, for sure.
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Looking forward to more word of your stay at PopC. We'll be on the lookout for the flatbread you had, sounds good! Great start to your report....sounds like you are having a great time. I don't think I'll ever get DH to WDW without the kids until they are out on their own. Lucky you to get to now!
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(one of my best lasagnes EVER – I had leftover spanakopita filling in the freezer and I threw that in with the ricotta – oh yummy) and the wedding is one for the history books. In all our years of catering we have never encountered a “bridezilla” until last Saturday! She even fired her bartender and her maid of honour 2 days before the wedding…who FIRES their maid of honour??
and learned that in that part of Syracuse there are only 2 hotels with 3.5 star ratings and they both had free shuttle and free parking, so I went ahead and bid, hoping for the Marriott, but thinking I really couldn’t lose either way. I won the bid for $55 a night but at the Gennesse Grande. That’s okay, I already knew they had what we needed, phew. Well, turns out that their shuttle starts at 7am and finishes at 11pm. Lucky me, I had scored us great flights leaving at 6am and returning at 11:50pm, so there we are, with a non-refundable hotel room that’s a $30 cab ride from the airport…..ooops. Thanks to our new GPS, though, we found our way to the airport in the morning with no problem (‘cuz everyone else was still sleeping) and parked for only $6.50 a day which means we still came out ahead of the Super 8 package, had a lovely Koi Pond in the lobby of our hotel and would be able to make a fast get-away upon our return rather than return to the hotel (or at least that was the plan)
so that we could catch our early flight and arrived at MCO at 10:30am which is a great time for those of us coming from so far north! I wondered how we would find the crowds, given that we usually travel in the off-season, but there was hardly a soul at the DME area. We hopped on and were getting off at Pop in no time. We chose Pop because it basically made us feel better about going without the kids if we didn’t try something new or spend any extra money. We have stayed here twice before and actually quite enjoyed our return visit. We checked in and were assigned a lovely King bed room overlooking the pool. I felt sorry for the CM when I asked nicely if we could switch rooms (I could from the way she presented it that she was very happy to be offering us this amazing room) We are not big fans of the pool noise at bed-time, you know? So we moved over to the 70s building overlooking the little park where the play structure is and settled in. I’ll book some time with my 15yr old tomorrow after school, so he can show me how to add some pictures – I tried very hard to get what he lovingly calls “food porn” thanks to the time I spend on the boards. (does that make me a bad mother that I let my 15 yr old son say "food porn"?) I do know that we shared a Mediterranean chicken flatbread and had a swim and a FAB at the pool while we waited for our bags (with our camera) to be delivered to our room, so there are no photos of that meal. However, if you enjoy artichokes and black olives, I would highly recommend it. We had a tie-died cheesecake for dessert and it gets a thumbs-up too. The colours were gross, but the taste more than made up for it!
Guess where we were headed??
Disney Magic - Oct 2015
!) It was so “un”magical! I left feeling like I hadn’t said my goodbyes. So this time, I wasn’t about to make the same mistake. I had a mental list of “must do” attractions that I would be sure to hit.
) I could see it was killing Chris to stand there and he finally had to tell her it actually reads your finger print, so you need to press the finger pad onto the little glass pad and then it will let you through. You could almost see the little light bulb go off in her head - she did the right thing and faster than you can say "bibbidi-bobbidi-boo" we were in! 
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