February 1st:
I got up early to sign up for Dopey Challenge for January 2018 as I had it in my head that the pre-registration for Annual Passholders started today. I was mistaken though, whoops!
We had decided that our next family trip to Disney World was going to be over the Walt Disney World Marathon weekend the next year and it apparently can be tough to get DVC rooms at Boardwalk Villas for that period. We wanted to start our stay on January 1st, and with Boardwalk Villas being our home resort that meant that this morning had our 11 month window opened up. Apparently some people do lots of tricks like walking forward reservations to try to save a spot and other things so getting just what we wanted was going to take timing.
I tried to do a DVC booking at about 8 am for Jan 1 to Jan 8 but the online booking was down until the 9 am EST and the DVC offices don’t open until 9 either.
It was going to be a mad scramble to get what we wanted! The availability tools seemed to indicate that it was available but we just couldn’t book it with the online booking down for maintenance.
I started hitting refresh every 10-20 seconds just before 9am and managed to get in and actually booked exactly what we wanted! A minute or so later there was no availability. That was tight!
We then did the final pack up and got out the door of the room shortly after 11. Dropped the bags with bell services to be picked up when we get on the Magical Express this afternoon and started our final tour.
We walked to Epcot, wandered through and took the monorail to Magic Kingdom (TTC) – we did one more check for K’s glasses at the lost and found with no luck and then took the monorail to the park. Got warm today so we enjoyed the heat – was not enjoying my cold / allergies though.
We made sure to do TTA people mover and It’s a Small World. We had lunch at Cosmic Rays and after some more wandering we headed out to the busses. We waited and waited and no Boardwalk bus came so we got on the second Yacht and Beach Club bus we saw come through. Hopped off at the Yacht to do a walk through there before heading out to the Boardwalk area to walk to the hotel.
We let K and T play a bit in the play area and we checked out the DVC Community Hall before getting our luggage and settling in to wait for the Magical Express bus.
It came a bit early – or they let us on a slightly earlier bus. Mixed blessing – don’t like waiting but don’t want to leave too early either.
Magical Express used to drop at both A and B side depending on what carrier you were with but it appears that this has changed. We were dropped off on the B side and we had to walk to the A side to drop our bags with our carrier.
After a bit of a wait to do that we headed straight through security which was a bit slow and then took the small monorail to our gate.
We had independent snacking along the way and got on the plane. I got in to the window seat to try to sleep because of the cold meds I was on but managed to break my Kindle in the process. Yay!
The flight was good though and after we landed it was a quick and easy run through Canadian customs but we ended up having to wait a bit at the back of the line since the kids needed to go to the bathroom just as we were getting in line.
Short wait for our luggage and headed out of the secured area to pop open our bags and find warm jackets. Then out into the deep cold to get to the truck.
Quick ride home and kids straight to bed around 1:30 am.
We managed to get them up and had them at school on time in the morning!
Next was breakfast and then we went to pick up the pups from the kennel and bring them home.
It was a good trip!
