Feb 12th
Breakfast reservation this morning for the character breakfast at Tusker House in Animal Kingdom. This meant we had to get up and moving quite early compared to what we had been doing – we were all out of the room by 8:30! Crazy.
We got to Animal Kingdom just after 9 and got our first indication that the park was going to be crazy – there was a very long wait for back check and we just got to Tusker House in time for our 9:25 reservation.
Overall the food was good – fresh and a very good selection. The characters took longer to come around then what I remember from other character breakfasts but it wasn’t a bad wait. I would go there with the kids again.
After breakfast we abandoned the park because the lines were already crazy.
After a few minutes back at the hotel we decided to try Blizzard Beach – it was the first day of the trip where it was warm enough to actually go to a water park and we wanted to hit Blizzard Beach at least once while we were there. Every time we have gone in the past Blizzard Beach has been closed for winter reno and we have gone to Typhoon Lagoon instead – this year we lucked out and they were switched.
We got to and in the water park at around 12:45 but surprisingly they hadn’t opened until 12:30 (was supposed to be 10). I’m not sure what the issue was but it did mean the park wasn’t that crowded and we were hit everything without too much of a wait.
In the end we did every slide and kids’ area except for the Downhill Double Dipper as it was closed for some repairs. Several of the slides we did more than once. It was a lot of fun and I think in the end we enjoyed it more than Typhoon Lagoon.
We left the park around 4:45 (after stopping at the med station to get a bandage for scraped toe) – we then waited for a bus until 5:30. That was a just plain irritating frankly. And then to make it worse the bus got stopped by some kind of weird traffic jam on the way back to the hotel – we sat on one of the roads for pretty long time. Once we got going though there were many cheers through the bus!
The bus stopped at French Quarter first and after a quick discussion with Heather, I decided to get off there and run to the hotel room while she continued on the bus with the kids. We would then meet up back at the room. I have been trying to run every day as part of a challenge to run every day of 2016 and I hadn’t run in the morning so I needed to get that run done. So I hopped off and met up with everyone after a couple miles of running.
After that we had supper at the resort and did a bit of shopping through the general store there.
Later I took our son to the arcade for a little while (whoops – found out later he had lost his resort mug there).
Then we went back to the room to crash and have a relatively early night for a change.
Feb 13th
I got up and out for a run at around 9 and man, were my legs ever beat up after the day at the water park the day before. Ouch. The run was fairly slow due to a lot of extra traffic at the resort.
When I got back to the room our daughter was up and all dressed wanting to come run with me – so back out we went and did a little tour while having some daddy-daughter time.
After a quick cleanup we all went and had breakfast before coming back to the room to get changed to do some more swimming. The main pool at the Riverside was closed for reno while we were there and we decided to go try the French Quarter pool today.
So we walked over to the French Quarter (there is a shuttle as well but we decided to walk down) and spent a few hours there swimming and the kids enjoyed the slide and doing a bunch of the pool side trivia games, etc.
They were in the process of building a new splash pad area at the FQ pool when we were there and it is probably open by now. They were also in the process of putting extra gates around the pool (I suspect to ensure that only hotel guests are coming into the pool areas such as what was done at Art of Animation).
We also took a few minutes to let the kids run around on the play structure before we caught the golf cart shuttle back to the Riverside.
We decided to head to Hollywood Studios to see if we could get into Fantasmic that night as well as see Symphony in the Stars. On the way to the bus stop we stopped and talked to the Disney Vacation Club guy there and decided we should probably just do a tour. We go frequently enough and with how we vacation at Disney it would probably make some sense for us to get into DVC. Granted the Canadian dollar was fairly awful at that point but we figured if we did the tour and got the info we would be in a better place to make a decision once the dollar gets better. So we booked an appointment for the next morning.
Then off to Hollywood Studios! Very busy there as well so we didn’t end up getting on any rides but we did manage to get into SciFi Dinner for supper. The last time we were there our son had gotten a bit freaked out by some of the movie shorts they had been playing and he really didn’t want to go this time but they had changed just enough of the movies that he had a blast.
After supper we did a wander around the Launch Bay Hanger to get a look at all the Star Wars merchandise – it would be easy to lose a fortune in there…
We watched Symphony in the Stars right in front of the Great Movie Ride – it was a beautiful thing. Fantastic fireworks but the power of the music was great.
We went then to see if we could get into Club Disney that I had heard about a while back but apparently it was no more – that didn’t last long…oh well.
So then we went and got a seat at Fantasmic and had a great time before heading back out of the park to catch the bus to the hotel.
At this point we needed to get some laundry done so I went down to the quiet pool and the laundry facility to see if anything was available. Found out about something I had never heard of before – there is a laundry tracking site for all the laundry rooms at Disney World. You go to the site, pick the hotel and the laundry facility and it will tell you which machines are free and where the active machines are in their cycles (including time to completion). That is a phenomenal thing! Super convenient. www.laundryview.com/disneyworld/