The Trip - Part I

The thing about vacation is you plan for months and it's over in the blink of an eye.  In this case, it was too short in some ways but too long in others.  Here's the recap...

We left right on schedule and began the long ride to Florida.  The drive down went extremely well.  As planned, we slept all day and had no trouble at all driving through the night.  Punky woke up every time we stopped for gas, coffee, or to pee (thanks to the coffee), but she fell right back to sleep once the truck was in motion.  We got stuck in construction in D.C. around midnight and lost a good hour of driving time, but we still managed to have breakfast at a Waffle House in some rural part of South Carolina around seven.  By noon, we were in St. Augustine, Florida.  And damn, it was hot.

In reality, we were only about two and a half hours away from our booked hotel in Orlando.  We thought about just trying to check in there a day early, but we were awake almost twenty hours at this point so we decided to get a room and call it a day.  We had a good meal at a diner across the street, a quick dip in the hotel pool, a short walk so Punky could expend some more energy, and a good night's sleep.  

We finished the drive in the morning and arrived at the Disney hotel about two hours before the rest of my family who took the easier travel route in the sky.  After a minor mix-up with our rooms (ours only had one bed), we were finally settled and ready for some fun.  We had already passed the enormous pool a few times and Punky was chomping at the bit to get her tiny hiney wet.  

See Punky in this pic?

We spent most of the afternoon swimming and settled for pizza delivery for supper.  In the evening we checked out the rest of the hotel complex.  Each building was themed after a Disney movie, complete with gigantic props and room decor to match.  Our building was Herbie the Love Bug.  It was cute for the kids, but honestly I wasn't that impressed with the rest of it.  

I love this picture

The rooms were small and dark, the furniture was cheap, we only had double beds instead of queens like most hotels these days, and the complex was simply too big.  And too crowded.  Of course, our building was at the very rear which meant a long hike back to our room after exhausting days at the parks.  The only place to eat was basically a food court with extremely long lines full of rambunctious children dying to get through breakfast so they could board a bus to the park (my child included), irritable parents exhausted from days of such a routine, and not enough staff on hand to keep the place functioning efficiently or the tables cleaned properly.  And the food wasn't even that great.  

I'll drive us to the playground!

There was no shade where we waited in long lines to board the shuttles.  Did I mention that the state was experiencing near record high temperatures the entire week we were there?  The heat index was around 105 most days, and the humidity had to be at least 90%.  It was ridiculous.  I think I peed three times all week.  The rest of my liquid intake seeped out in streams of sweat from everywhere, including places I never knew had sweat glands.  Talk about gross.  

So, you see, standing in the sun while waiting for a bus was a big deal.  By the time we boarded, it looked like none of us showered that morning.  Between the sweat and the sunblock, we were some slimy-looking creatures.  Take a minute to consider how sweet the bus smelled on the return trip at night when it was full of people who spent the entire day sweating from every crack and crevice.  Once all the seats were full, the drivers packed others in like sardines to stand in the aisle and hang on for dear life.  On one hand you were lucky to be up far enough in line to get a seat, but on the other hand that guaranteed you would have someone's butt in your face swaying way too close for comfort every time the bus took a corner.  Okay, I'll get off the bus rant.  I hate buses.  There, I'm done.

Now where was I?  Oh yeah, the hotel.  Suffice it to say that it was way under my level of expectation for a Disney property.  Granted it was one of their low-end resorts, but I still expected more bang for the buck.  The very expensive buck, I might add.  We didn't even have free internet in the rooms for all that cash.  They wanted ten dollars a day to connect, and it wasn't even a wireless connection.  Unreal.  Even Holiday Inn's have free wi-fi in every room these days.

To be fair and not sound like a total whine-ass, I have to say the beds, while small, were super comfy and the pool was awesome.  Oh, and they had good coffee.

Monday morning we were ready to face our first day in a park.  Where would you start with three kids age five and under?  The Magic Kingdom, of course.

To be continued...