I’m writing from a tranquil beach listening to Hawaiian music and relaxing from a bout with a fruity rum drink after an exhausting day of travel, and watching calm waters with Polynesian bungalows over top of the water.
We began our day at 3 AM Central. Life is quiet at that time of the day unless you are running to get on a plane. We busted out of the house at 4 and buzzed on up to the airport. We checked in, got harassed by TSA and made it just in time to realize our group was already boarding. We juked our way through and somehow ended up boarding before the next group.
We soon departed on a 3 hour flight to Orlando. Yes, we were going to see our old pal Mickey and his princess friends. This was my birthday wish, to take my family to Disney World while it was celebrating it’s 50th birthday as well.
We were scheduled to be here on the 6th late at night, but a myriad of mishaps occurred that prevented that from happening. The day before we were supposed to leave, our flight was cancelled out of the blue. Nothing like waiting until the last minute, right?
As I was scrambling to get another flight booked, the Southwest web server started having problems. In a panic, I sent an email to our travel agent, Jacki – and got her out of office reply to contact Nancy, her backup. With beads of sweat rolling off of my chrome dome, I quickly sent a prayer for help to Nancy.
Nancy soon called me, then called into Southwest for me. I don’t remember exactly what they told her was wrong but I was soon able to see flights to chose from on the webpage again. I rebooked to something that would work…When the grade school nurse called. Cooper’s back was hurting her. I approved of some Tylenol to be given. I was called back a few minutes later to inform me she had thrown up the Tylenol and she was actively taking her temperature and OH! Now her back ache has transformed into a fever too!
Seeing where this was going, I quickly burst into action before Cooper burst into flames, and rescued her from the school nurse’s clutches. It wasn’t soon enough, the nurse played the Covid card. She can’t go back to school without a negative covid test.
Well, she only really had one symptom – the fever. No coughs, sneezes, headaches … etc … we decided to let her quarantine at home without testing. She already had the days off from school – but this also meant we had to reschedule the trip.
All in one day, we completely rescheduled our trip for the 20th of January at the Polynesian Village resort at Walt Disney World. Again, Jacki’s backup Nancy got things fixed for us. At one point, I had Nancy on the phone while texting with Jacki.
Amy and I began looking at flights to rebook to and only one made sense – the 5:20 AM Thursday flight. This would get us in with time to allow the girls to shop while I worked – it is my company’s busy season and I’m not supposed to take off multiple days in a row. I talked it over with my boss and booked it with the expectation that I would be working at about 10:00am CST. She told me I could have taken the day due to the circumstance and that our work was slowing down a lot. But I didn’t want to be ‘that guy.’
That SOOO didn’t happen. After landing – and we were almost 30 minutes early – we picked up our luggage and went to meet the bus.
The bus is something we are not really used to. We’ve driven here twice and flew one time – and that one time the shuttle was right next to our luggage pickup.
This time, the bus was on the other side of the airport and it wasn’t provided by Disney as they no longer offer this service. Instead we paid for a bus to take us to our hotel. They divided us up into separate lines depending on the hotel we were staying at, then had us all board the bus together – which made us wonder what the point of the different lines was.
Even though we were the very last off the bus, it still wasn’t near time to check in yet. Instead we got everything activated and stored our luggage with baggage services and jumped on the monorail to catch a ride to Disney Springs.
Monorail was a bad idea. It made several stops and didn’t have a link to Disney Springs, so we ended up just catching a bus right back where we started. (Way to go dad!)Disney Springs was nice. I got to work finally (at 11:30 CST) and we also finally got to eat! It had been since 6 PM the night before, so tummies were having rumblies.
The girls spent a few hours shopping while I kept on working and making sure I kept ahead of things. We were soon on a bus back to the resort and were able to complete the check in.
Unfortunately, we received a handicapped room… there wasn’t anything wrong with that but we figured we paid enough for the vacation, we wanted what we were expecting.
It took a while but they switched us to a regular room… and it was amazing (the other room was too, just a bit off for us). The floors are tiled but look like hardwood. Same with the shower. The furniture was all themed to Moana with little pictures of the characters in every detail – but it was very subtle. You wouldn’t notice some things unless you were looking for it.
The girls swam while I finished up and I made a reservation for Trader Sam’s Grog Grotto. This is a bar in the hotel our neighbors told us we had to go to. It had an 1 1/2 hour wait, but we were able to do other things until they paged us for it.
Once we were inside, omigosh! It was based on a combination of Adventureland and the Polynesian resort, so it was pretty much a tiki bar – but when a drink was served, something would happen!
When Amy’s drink was served – a Hippomaitai – the server would ‘shoot’ a hippo twice and everyone in the bar would yell “TWO SHOTS OF RUM!”
When my drink was served – a Nautalus – the bar would submerge and a giant tentacle would move around the bar while everyone swam under the water. The bartender would then blow bubbles under the sea.
Other drinks caused other things to happen. The Krakatoa would cause a volcano shown in a window to erupt. The Zombie would cause the lights to go out and a ghost would fly around.
After we finished with our drinks, we went to eat at Captain Cook’s – the quick service dining room and headed out to the beach to watch the Magic Kingdom fireworks.
This beach has got to be the best place to watch fireworks outside of the Magic Kingdom. You could see almost everything AND they played the music so you didn’t miss anything. And the crowd was sooo much smaller!After the explosions, we headed back to the room to bed – where I tried to write this but quickly fell asleep.Only to be awakened to the words ‘I’m going to throat punch you’ because I was snoring.
Hope you all have a great day!
– Colby
By the way, if anyone needs a great travel coordinator I would highly recommend Jacki. If you need her contact information please DM me and I’ll provide it.