First off, we had a great time! The weather in Orlando was amazing the entire trip. We had a lot of fun and surprisingly, we only went into the Disney Theme Parks for a couple of days. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
We were scheduled to fly out on Thursday evening at about 8:30 PM. It was a late flight, for sure, but we wanted to be able to settle in and have our travels out of the way so we could start the next day fresh and ready to go. Unfortunately, I didn't quite work out that way. We had a delay at the airport. Basically, our flight was the last flight out of Nashville that night and, due to some delays in other cities, they held our flight for about a dozen passengers who had been trying to get to Orlando all day. That was nice of the airline and only a minor inconvenience for us. We left about 10:00 PM and arrived about 1 1/2 hours later. We grabbed our luggage and made our way to the car rental stand. We opted to get a car this trip so we could go to places outside of Walt Disney World (WDW), like Universal, etc. When we got to the car rental stand, their computers were down, which slowed things down a bit. Fortunately, it was about 1 AM Orlando-time, so there wasn't a line! Lucky for us they upgraded us to an SUV! We got to drive a brand-new Nissan Rogue with only 6 miles on it when we left the garage.
After a trip down the 528/I-4 corridor, we were at WDW! We were staying at one of Disney's smaller resorts, the All-Star Resort, in the Music section. It's not nearly as "nice" as the Swan & Dolphin Resort that we stayed at last year, but it was clean and comfortable. For the first two nights, we had to stay in a room with two double beds (in the Broadway section, for those who know the resort very well). Fortunately, Disney accomodated our request for a King-size bed once one became available. As you can imagine, King-size beds are not the norm in a resort that's family-friendly. But once we got the bed, I have to say it was super comfortable - maybe even more so than the "heavenly beds" we had at the Westin resorts we've stayed at before.
But enough of the hotel! Our first day in Orlando we slept in, then went and got coffee at the Starbucks in the town of Celebration. For those of you unfamilar, Celebration is a town that Disney designed and developed in the mid-1990's. World renowned architects like Michael Graves, Robert AM Stern, and Robert Venturi designed many of the main buildings in the town center. The rest of the town is filled with nice, well manicured lawns and beautiful homes. For more information visit Celebration's official site.
After that, we drove a few miles down the road to Giordano's Pizza, a Chicago-based pizzeria with a few locations in the Orlando area. The pizza there was amazing, and even though we just got a small, we could only eat about 2/3 of it! After the lunch, we decided to go drive around the WDW Resort grounds a bit. In particular, I wanted to show Jen Disney's Wilderness Lodge, one of my favorite resorts at WDW. The whole resort is bult of logs and is very reminiscent of the Lodges found at National Parks in the west. The campground next door, Fort Wilderness, we drove through and checked out more for curiosity sake. Then we headed back to the room for a nap.
That evening, we headed out to IKEA, the Swedish superstore that specializes in well-designed home furnishings for affordable cost. We wanted to window-shop for furniture and decor for the new house. We found some things we really liked, particularly a rocker for Jen in the nursery and some mirrors and light fixtures for the home. We resisited in buying anything, hoping to visit the IKEA outside of Chicago later this month where we don't have to pay for any shipping! Then we had dinner at IKEA's cafeteria, where they have the best swedish meatballs on the planet. SO GOOD! After that, we hopped in the car and made our way to downtown Orlando to see Coldplay perform at the Amway Arena. The show was amazingly good, almost up to U2-quality staging and lighting. They played all the hits and were very energetic. The highlight of the show to me was when the rigging about the floor of the arena started blowing neon-colored confetti shaped like butterflies onto the crowd. Then, they flooded the arena with blacklight and all you could see was neon butterflies flying everywhere. The effect was simple but stunning and slightly surreal. Great show, and I'd love to see them agian!
The following day was our first day going to the WDW parks. Jen wanted to sleep in, so I left a little early to try to get FastPasses to the newest ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios, Toy Story Midway Mania. I was blocked from getting the passes (Jen's ticket hadn't been used yet, so it wasn't valid to get us a pass), but we were able to get back pretty quickly after opening and waited a reasonable amount of time. The ride is great! Imagine riding through a 3-D videogame where you are playing Midway games (ring toss, dart throw, baseball toss) with the Toy Story characters computer generated and rendered in 3-D. The games were fun, but the technology was very impressive. Imagine shooting 3-D objects into a 3-D movie and having effects on what you saw onscreen. That's exactly what happened in this game and it will be impressive to see where they go with this kind of technology in the future.
After strolling around and taking in the sights at the Studios, we took off for Epcot and the main event: Epcot's Food and Wine Festival! Before we did anything, I ran and got FastPasses for Jen and me to ride Soarin'. It was shortly after 12, but our Fastpasses were for 6:30! So glad we did that first thing. Then we took a ride through the iconic sphere at the entrance to Epcot, Spaceship Earth. The ride has been heavily renovated and, although very similar to what was there when Epcot opened in the early 1980's, it has been enhanced with the latest robotic figures and a new finale that takes place on interactive screens built into the ride vehicles. The overall impression is that the ride has been greatly improved, but I still miss the fiberoptic whirlpool you passed through in the finale that was in place in the 1990's/early 2000's.
After that, it was time to eat! We made our way to World Showcase, and picked up something new Disney was trying. They were selling small gift cards attached to wristbands that you could charge up with whatever amount you wanted. When you went up to one of the booths, instead of pulling out your wallet, you could swipe the gift card. It was a great idea, in that it keeps you aware of how much money you are spending and saves time at the individual food kiosks. I won't go into too much detail about the foods we ate (suffice it to say we tried almost everything on my "wish list" from the previous post). I will say it was all quite good, with the exception of the Milk Chocolate Crème Brûlée and the lemon tart. The exceptional dishes were the Roasted Beet Salad with Goat Cheese and the Seared Beef Medallion with Cheddar Cheese Polenta. After eating about halfway around the lagoon we took an afternoon break and returned to our hotel. We went back in time to use our FastPass for Soarin', then continued with the "dinner" stroll around the lagoon. At 9, we stopped for the grand finale fireworks "IllumiNations" over the lagoon and leisurely made our way back to the car and to the hotel to get some rest.
And that's where I'll stop things for now. I'll pick up later this week with the rest of our trip.
-chadley
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