Over the next few days, I am going to recap our trip to Walt Disney World last week. We went for four days, and I did not participate in any RunDisney events. Every trip since 2011 has be surrounded by some running event. We decided to make this trip a true vacation, without a race. In fact I did not even run while we were there. I wanted to, but the rains interfered. Also, on this trip, we took our 7 year old nephew, which made things more exciting.
So here is a recap of Day One of our trip. On Thursday, May 2nd we drove down to Disney World an got there around lunchtime. It rained for most of the trip down, but we still made good time.
When we arrived, we checked into our DVC resort, Beach Club Villas, and strangely enough, our room was ready! After we transferred everything from the Jeep to the room, we grabbed our lanyards and headed out.
We decided to eat lunch at the Beach Club Marketplace at the resort. This was a really slow counter service, and ate up valuable park time.
After eating, we walked over to Epcot to catch the monorail over to the Magic Kingdom. However, before we caught the monorail, we stopped in to Guest Relations to activate our new DVC discounted premium Annual Passes, that have the new RFID technology. These were really awesome, as it really speeds up checking in to the parks! You hold you pass against the Mickey icon reader, place your finger on the biometric scanner, it turns green indicating you are clear to enter!
We then hoped on the monorail and headed over to the Magic Kingdom. When we arrived at Magic Kingdom it started to rain again, but this didn’t slow us, as we came prepared! We just threw on the ponchos and continued to ride the attractions, as others headed for the exit. We had fun until it was time for our dinner reservation.
Our Thursday night dinner reservation was at 1900 Park Fare at the Grand Floridian Resort for the Cinderella’s Happily Ever After Dinner.
This was a buffet dinner with the characters from Cinderella (Cinderella, Prince Charming, Lady Trumaine, Anastasia, & Drizella. It was a great dinner, and great character interaction. As you can tell in the one picture, Cinderella needs to look into some RunDisney action! Anastasia actually danced with our nephew.
After dinner, we took the monorail back over to the Magic Kingdom, and hung out for a few more hours in the rain. However, at one point in Adventureland, our nephew told us to look up, and there was a beautiful rainbow over the Magic Kingdom!
When it was time to head back to the resort, since it was raining, we decided on the bus. Boy was this a bad decision. We have all but given up on the Disney buses. They are slow, crowded, and very inefficient. It took us almost an hour to get back to the resort from the Magic Kingdom.
Stay tuned tomorrow for the Day 2 installment of our trip!
