January 23rd, 2017
I woke up at 6:30 am to hear our daughter up early feeding the dogs and taking them to play for a few minutes before school. Usually I will be the first one up and I will feed the dogs before work but she wanted to do it today as we won’t see them for a bit and she was going to miss the pups.
She wanted to make sure she had some time with them before we leave. Very cute.
We then fed the kids breakfast and took them to school for the morning before heading home to take the pups to the kennel. The kennel we use is great but there were some tears dropping the pups off for sure.
Next we drove home, finished up the final bit of packing and did some cleaning (always nice to come home to a clean house!).
After putting all of our stuff in the truck we headed off to pick the kids up from school at lunch time and after a couple stops we headed to the airport.
Check in at the airport was quick and easy and going through US Customs was straightforward as well.
Due to how we had booked our tickets this trip (a couple tickets with Airmiles and a couple with the carrier using their travel miles), we ended up sitting separately – me with our son and Heather with our daughter.
They ended up boarding the plane a little late and then we had a delay as they had to fix a radio on the plane, but once we got going they made up most of the time from the delay and we got to Orlando only a few minutes late.
The flight was good and I am always happy to see how well our kids behave on a plane!
We ended up with a nice surprise when we landed too. When I was down for my Goofy Challenge trip earlier in January, I had talked to our DVC client rep and indicated that when we were down for the family trip we were looking to get add-on points for our home resort. It can be hard to get points at the Boardwalk Resort and being from Canada they really couldn’t be put on a wait list in the normal way but our DVC rep said she would do what she could.
With what she had told us we did not expect to get the points we wanted so we had a plan B and C ready for while we were down there. But…as soon as I fired up my phone and it connected to the cellular network I had a message from the DVC rep indicating that the points had come through! Woohoo! We just needed to call and get an appointment time set up while we were down and we would be good to go.
After getting off the plane we headed over to the Magical Express area and caught our bus to Animal Kingdom. In the end we were the 4th stop to be dropped but we were amused by the driver who late stopped for at least 2 stop signs. Pretty funny.
Check in at the Animal Kingdom (Jambo House) was pretty quick and we wandered around the gorgeous lobby before headed to the room. The big fire pit area was just so cool.
We had a room with a savannah view and as soon as we got in the room we had to check out the patio – spotted a wildebeest wandering around a few deer of some kind (never did figure out what they actually were) having a nap just out from our room.
Then did a wander to buy breakfast for the next morning and a quick evening snack before kids went to bed.
Heather noticed a flashing message light on the room phone – called and our luggage was here. They didn’t just deliver due to the lateness (00:25). I asked them to deliver it and they said it would be right away.
An hour later they still hadn’t come. I called bell services and again and eventually the front desk answered. They said they would get the bags to us right away. It took about another 10 minutes after that. They must have forgotten about us the first time we called, yay!
Sleep time.