Vacation Blog VI: might as well enjoy some more relaxation time!!!

3:00 AM - Why exactly am I awake right now? And this isn't one of those "I'm going to get up and pee and then go back to sleep" awakes....this is a "Hello world! It's time to start our day" awakes. At some point I go to the window and notice that the world just responded "Fuck you, jackass, it's still pitch black out here, go back to sleep".

OOOOOOOK then.

The bed is ridiculously comfortable and getting back to sleep happens eventually.

8:45 AM - Let's try this again.

HELLO WORLD!

World: "Meh."

Anyway the sun has come up and it's already really hot. Our night at the Hotel has come and gone and we are supposed to check out around 11 but you can tell they are pretty flexible on that. We have breakfast reservations at 10:25 AM at the character breakfast down in the lobby.

It's similar to the character breakfast that we always attend at Storyteller's Cafe in the Grand Californian. The food isn't quite as good (I've always said that the SC is the best breakfast buffet on the planet) but it's still very good and the characters that come through are better here. We see Pooh and Tigger, and Alice, the Mad Hatter, and Mary Poppins. Not characters you see every day, in fact this was the first time I've had a pic with the Hatter.

After breakfast we hand our bags into the bell to hold them until it's time to leave and head back to the pool, expecting to have another 3-4 hours at the pool before we head to the Magic Kingdom. It's nice today but not as nice as yesterday, as there are some clouds and a significant breeze which actually makes it a bit cold from time to time. When you add in the annoying family of Gingers sitting behind us, we decided to cut our pool time a bit shorter than we had originally intended.

This is my favorite exchange between mom and the 4 year old boy:

Do you want to eat?  No!

Do you want to go in the pool? No!

Do you want to go back to the room? No!

Do you want to play with your monkey (not making that up). NO!!!!! He seemed particularly offended by that suggestion

Do you want to lie down in the shade? No!

Tell me what you want and I'll do it. No!

At this point he stopped waiting for questions.

No!

No!

No! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

I wanted to drown the little fucker at this point. Or, better yet, sentence him to about 2 hours in the sun with his alabaster skin.

Mom mentions to him that they don't want "a repeat of yesterday". Obviously this kid is just a real joy to be around.

2:30 PM - Enough with the clouds, the breeze and especially the Ginger Cookie family, so we change into our park clothes and leave the pool. We drop off our pool bag with the bell and head upstairs to the 2nd floor where we hop on the Monorail for the short ride to the park. Gotta be the best way into the park, a 2 minute walk from your hotel room to the Monorail.

So, some of you may be asking, why did we stay here for one night? We already had a spectacular resort, we didn't NEED a Hotel room.

True. The most obvious answer is that we didn't want to risk driving back to the resort after all the wine we consumed at Victoria & Albert's. Second most obvious is that we just wanted to know what it would be like to stay here.

Those are both true, but it went a little farther than that too. This entire trip germinated during our first Caribbean cruise, in 2014. The entire cruise was great but we totally fell in love with Key West during one of the stops. We HAD to plan a trip that encompassed Key West.

So the idea of this trip was born: One week Caribbean cruise (the Eastern Caribbean this time), 1 week at this timeshare resort, 2 days at one of the spectacular resorts in Key West, and 5 nights at the Grand Floridian. We proceeded on the assumption that would be our itinerary all along.

And then the Canadian Dollar went into the toilet. It's one thing to pay $700/night for a hotel, it's another thing to pay $700/night plus 30-35% exchange.

AND....we had lots of extra timeshare weeks available. So we changed up our plans, and booked a second week at this resort and probably saved ourselves $5K USD over what we would have paid to book the GF and Key West resorts; so it didn't seem like a waste of money to book ONE night at the GF.

Of course, that means we STILL have to go to Key West at some point!

3:00 PM - We arrive at the Magic Kingdom and breeze through tiny lines at security and the gate. It doesn't seem as busy today, but that is just a ruse. All the activity is inside.

Honestly I'm not feeling that great. Terribly dehydrated and feeling stuffy. Some fluids help, but we are dragging our asses around the park, waiting for our dinner reservations at 4:55. Tracey is always such a trooper when she's not feeling 100% and we have plans, I feel like I should do my best to try to soldier on as well. We get on the Disneyland Railway and take a tour of the park. The shade helps me but at one point I thought I was going to pass out. It's really NOT that humid today, we have been so lucky with the humidity; but I've spent more time in the sun in the past 24 hours than I have most of my life and I think it's getting to me.

But oh man am I ever tanned. The wife, who doesn't tan (at best she may get a rosy hue), isn't impressed with me.

4:55 PM - We are into the Beast's castle for our dinner at the Be Our Guest restaurant. I think I had forgotten how gorgeous this restaurant is. The food is also absolutely terrific; Tracey loves her chicken and I have one of the better salmon dishes I've ever had from anywhere not-at-home. They have the salmon flown in daily from Scotland apparently. Hmm.

During dinner I consume 2 glasses of Diet Coke and 3 glasses of water to try to re-hydrate enough to get me through the night. The problem is that I am freezing cold, which probably indicates dehydration. Hopefully getting out of the restaurant and back into the sun will help that.

For dessert I have some of the Grey Stuff (it's delicious) and then we are on our way. I'm totally stuffy now but didn't think it appropriate to use nose spray in the restaurant where our neighbors are only about 18 inches away. They do pack them in here.

Over to Peter Pan, our first Fastpass of the day. Tracey loves this ride. When we are done we have about a half hour until the real fun begins, our first ever ride on the new Seven Dwarves Mine Train which opened since we were last here.

We have time to shop a little bit and we notice that the posted wait time for Ariel's Undersea Journey is only 20 minutes. As with most Disney wait times, they under promise and over deliver. We are on the ride in around 13-14 minutes. Although the actual ride is identical here to the one in California, the big difference in the queue, which is really well done here. If you are going to have people waiting in line, you might as well entertain them while they wait.

7:10 PM - It's time! Our first experience on the Seven Dwarves Mine Train! And it's really really good. Quite a bit like Big Thunder Mountain but with some really nice themeing as well. One complaint: The ride buggies are really small, I could barely get the bar down over my legs. I know I'm a big guy and I have big legs in particular, but there are a Hell of a lot of people in this country a lot bigger than I am, and they would never fit. Never.

At this point we've done the most important things we had scheduled for today so I am tapping out, We head back to the Monorail to take us back to the Grand Floridian to get our bags and car and drive home to the resort. It's really so nice to get back 'home' to this beautiful resort. We aren't sorry we stayed at the GF for a night.....but at the end of the day, a beautiful hotel is still just a hotel. Our 2-bedroom townhouse at this resort is just so incredibly comfortable.

I'm exhausted and not feeling great so I take a bunch of medication and a sleeping pill and hit the sack. Tomorrow we were planning a Universal day but we have changed our plans to make it a resort day, so we can just hang around and relax and make sure I'm feeling better for the rest of the trip.