WDW On Short Notice - Part 7 (8/27 and 8/28))
Primary Cast:
Me - 26 y/o dude, lost count of how many times I've been to WDW many years ago. 20 times would be a reasonable guess.
Mom - Indeterminate age. She too has been to WDW many times.
Dad - Slightly younger than dirt. He has been to WDW many times, but doesn't necessarily remember. (Dad: "Wow! The Boardwalk is nice! Do you have to be a member to stay here?" Mom: "...No. WE stayed here two trips ago! Don't you remember?" Dad: "Hmm?")
Extended Cast:
Aunt T
Uncle S
Cousin S
Cousin A
Day 7: Goodnight Irene
The only reason we had to wake up at all was because of our breakfast reservations at Ohana, but those were fairly late so we did get to sleep in quite a bit. Breakfast was okay - the eggs were unusually salty, although I like them salty (until I had to drink all of the juice the Polynesian could pour). We had no lunch reservations that day, because our original plan was to be leaving right after Ohana, but thanks to Hurricane Irene we stayed an extra night, so we would be in WDW for that whole day. I used my Mobile Magic app (I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's an awesome thing to have in the parks) to make a lunch reservation for that afternoon at the Wolfgang Puck Cafe at DD because they had availability and they accepted the dining plan. We actually already had a dinner reservation at Boma - we were originally going to have breakfast there on Day 4, but my parents were too tired to wake up early for it so we canceled. We then booked a dinner at Boma for our last night, using my app.
After breakfast we took a ride out to the Disney Character Warehouse at the Orlando Premium Outlets on International Drive. I got a couple of t-shirts (including a NY Jets shirt, of all things). Then we went to Downtown Disney to look around the shops, and that's when things got interesting. First I used my handy-dandy app to look at a map of DD and I found Wolfgang Puck's...only to get there and see that it looked like a counter service place, and not the kind of place that would even accept, much less actually need, reservations. Lo and behold, Disney has TWO Wolfgang Puck locations, and we were at the wrong one. The other one is at the West Side, so we got back in the car and drove over. No harm done. We get in, we say we have a reservation, but that didn't matter because no one printed a list of reservations and the place was deserted anyway. We sat down, ordered our drinks, and gave the waitress our room keys because we were on the dining plan. She came back and said there was a problem, and she would straighten it out with the hotel. Eventually it got worked out (kind of), but she had to process the meals manually. So we ate, and we got two white hand-written receipts for our meal plan credits. She had written my parents' room as 4912 instead of 4915, but she said it didn't matter, which it didn't, but we found out why when we got back to the hotel.
We shopped a bit after lunch, and I got a big box of Alice in Wonderland teas and the Walt and El Grupo DVD at The World of Disney store.
We went to the front desk of ASMo to ask them about why there was trouble with our meal plan that afternoon, especially since we had no trouble in the morning at Ohana. The lady at the desk said that our meal plan was tied to the original reservation, which had our checkout date as that day - the 27th. But we countered by saying that even so, we still had those meal points until midnight that night. We successfully used one at breakfast, so we still had until midnight to use our remainder for lunch and dinner. It turned out that the hotels computer had said we checked out, and would be checking in again with different rooms - which wasn't true. When Mom went to the front desk earlier in the week to extend our stay, the woman there (Jacqueline) said that we would have the same rooms, and that we didn't have to do anything else. She even gave us new keys right then and there. But now the front desk was saying that my parents had checked out of their room and should be in 4912 now. It took a while, but they changed the computer to say that my parents were still in room 4915, and then re-activated their keys. They also said that my room was fine and that I was unaffected, and that our meal plan points probably wouldn't work anymore, but they knew we still had points left so they told us to charge meals and snacks to the room, and then bring the receipts to the front desk and they would delete the charges - which sounded very shady to us, and we didn't trust them one bit with that.
Not trusting them with our snacks and meals, we went right to the food court to stock up on snacks for the car ride home the next day. I picked out mine, and then went to the register to charge them to the room...and my key didn't work. The guy at the register said I had to go to the front desk, which is where I just was and they told me my key was fine. We all went back to the front desk, rather angry, and told them that they had to change my key too. Ultimately I got a new key - which was my 4th key for the trip: the original, the replacement for when I "lost" mine on day 3 (I actually found it on Day 5 - I put it in my wallet with my credit cards instead of with my cash where I had been keeping it, and didn't notice it until I bought those t-shirts at DHS), the new key when we first extended our stay, and then this new key just for the one night. However, the upside was that our meal plan points still worked AND I had more snacks than I thought.
It worked out in the end and we got our stockpile of snacks for the car ride home. That night we drove to AKL and had dinner at Boma - another of the many firsts on this trip. I liked the food, but I didn't like the actual restaurant. It was small and crowded - it looked a LOT bigger in the pictures. Also, even though we had a reservation for 8:45 and we checked in well before that, we didn't get a table until almost 9:30. Still, I did enjoy the food and I'd consider going back, but only at a less busy time.
The next day (Sunday 8/28) we packed up and left WDW. We stopped for lunch at a Denny's in Brunswick, GA, and I used the Hotels.com mobile site on my phone to book us a room at the Country Inn in Wilson, NC. That was a very nice hotel, and I quite liked the room.
Final Refelctions
It was nice doing all of those first-time things. We had been going since 1988, and this was the first time we'd ever done The American Adventure or Impressions de France - and I fell asleep in both (although we did AA again and I stayed awake through the whole thing). The American Adventure is a very well-done show, with fantastic audio-animatronics, but...the whole thing kind of bothered me. I can't really describe it. The best way I can put it is...embarrassment. It kind of made me embarrassed to be American. It's far too ostentatious. Mexico and Norway have cute little boat rides, Canada, China, and France have nice films, but America just has to be the giant, overly ornate building in the exact center of the World Showcase. The building is also far too large for the show - you enter a giant foyer, then get funneled into a giant room to go up a huge escalator/staircase only to be on the second level of the foyer you were just in, THEN you have to wait for doors to open to get put into ANOTHER giant room, and from there you finally enter the actual theater which itself is greatly overdone with all the statues. Why so much? It's just a waste of time and materials to make people go through what amounts to be a giant maze for the sole purpose of showing people jingoistic slogans on the walls of an overly elaborate building. A more technical criticism of the show/pavilion is that Mark Twain was very hard to understand. I heard Ben Franklin fine, but Mark Twain sounded very muffled.
I still don't get the appeal of Soarin', and I never will. Bring back Food Rocks, or better yet, Kitchen Kabaret.
Bring back humans on Living With the Land. I want to learn more about the plants and fish. Also, bring back the song! The first time I rode it and didn't hear "Listen to the Land" was one of the most disappointing experiences I've ever had in WDW. That, and the loss of the frozen pink lemonade bars sold throught the MK, were the two biggest crushing disappointments I have ever had as a child.
It's funny how a ride called "Energy Adventure" can actually **** all of the energy out of a person.
I miss the walking tour component of the Backstage Tour at DHS. Remember that, when kids got to ride the giant bee from Honey I Shrunk the Kids and they had the short film with Bette Middler and the lottery ticket?
Sounds Dangerous is dead. Why did they ever get rid of the Monster Sound Show? Martin Short + Chevy Chase = Pure Gold every time! The loss of that was my most crushing disappointment at DHS (which I still want to call MGM. It's so hard to stop calling it MGM, or "miggum" with the phonetic pronunciation).
This concludes the 2011 Family Trip to WDW.
