Today’s pic comes from our last family trip to Disney World in Feb 2014. We stayed at the Beach Club resort on that trip and one day my wife Heather was busy doing some quick shopping at the hotel and I wanted to get the kids out and burn off some energy before we headed into a park.
So thinking about this…Disney wants you to shop and spend all the money but they understand kids well enough to know that sometimes they just have to run. With that in mind all the resorts and to some extent even Downtown Disney have some kind of place where kids can run around while shopping can still happen.
At the Beach Club the lawns on the Boardwalk / International Gateway are part of the ambiance of the area but people are more than welcome to go on them.
On this day I let the kids run themselves crazy while we waited and they enjoyed themselves immensely – I took a major number of pictures that day of them on the grass, on the beach and just generally having fun. It was nice to not be on an agenda or be rushing to get to one ride or the other, they were just able to run and loved it.
That is one of the great things about staying on site at a Disney hotel – you can put aside time for this kind of thing without feeling like you are missing precious park time. In my mind it is also one of the big draws for the hotels in the Boardwalk area – by being able to just walk into Epcot or Hollywood Studios you get that family fun time built into getting to the parks instead of spending a half hour in the vehicle driving, parking and then walking to the entrance of parks. Now there are definitely benefits to being offsite but to me recovering that driving time for family time makes the Boardwalk area more than worth the money.
