Hi folks,
We made it safely home from our trip around 2am yesterday. I’m going to try to share what I can over the next few days between work & catching up at home. I love reading other trip reports, so I’ll do my best to share mine as well.
Background:
This was our 3rd family trip in 3 years. We did do a whirlwind trip (insert link) for MNSSHP in September. Otherwise we hadn’t been to Disney since October/November 2018. We were a family of 4 then & I was in my second trimester with our youngest. We’re now a family of 5- DH & myself, DD5, DD3, DD10 months.
My parents (DGm57 &DGp57) joined us again. They traveled with us in 2017 as well. They were not involved in planning & only offered that they wanted to eat good food & watch the kids have fun.
Our trip dates were 12/2-12/11. We originally planned to fly out the morning on 12/3, but Southwest changed our flight to 5:00am which meant leaving our house around 1am. I was able to change our flight to the night before & eventually after several weeks of trying added a night to the front of our hotel stay.
We stayed 6 nights @ Pop Century in 2 standard rooms. We had 6470 & 6471 which were not the exact room # requested but matched exactly my TP room request. We were SO happy with the rooms. Highly recommend them! We switched to Beach Club on Sunday 12/8 for 3 nights. Rooms here were fine. We did not get connecting rooms but did get rooms right next to each other.
DH & I have annual passes we just activated since we’re returning for our anniversary in the fall. Everyone else had 9 day park hoppers. We also had tickets for MVMCP.
We were quite the spectacle at the airport between our luggage, a single stroller, a double stroller, and all the various things we brought with us 
. And baby did super great on the flight as well. About half way through the flight they paged over the intercom asking for medical help for a fellow passenger. Turns out it was only me (I’m a pharmacist). No other nurses or doctors on board. The flight attendant apparently did not consider me a health care professional & kept questioning if I should be helping because I wasn’t a nurse. Whatever. The passenger was having classic heart attack symptoms. I did what I could for her with what was available & we received priority landing at MCO where she was deplaned by paramedics. Multiple passengers stopped and thanked me on the way off the plane which was very kind. I gave her husband a hug before we left. I really hope she is okay.
The staff operating DME were not providing any updates or information, they were not answering questions. There was one guy in particular who was quite inappropriate & loud mouthed. Around 2:15am he came over and tried to put me & my 3 kids who need carseats in a cab. Without carseats. I explained that I would be doing no such thing & surely he was not attempting to transport my children illegally as FL law requires a carseat for all children until age 5. He became very aggressive & said “you’ll just have to wait for a bus then & it may be a very long time.” He would not answer when a bus was expected stating that no one knew. I stated if they did not have a way to transport us legally that they needed to provide us with a room at the airport & we would travel tomorrow when a bus was available. He just walked away. I ended up with some sort of smooth talking Mears supervisor who kept trying to twist my words around to make himself look better. The “official” statement was that the interstate was closed & had been for 3 hours and supposedly no busses could get there. However based on some conversations with Liners, it does not appear that this was actually true. And given the number of cabs that were in and out transporting families, it does not appear that all traffic was blocked. I suspect they did not plan enough busses & made this story up.
Once at MK we zipped through security & took the monorail to GF. What a beautiful resort! We eventually found 1900 PF and had a 15 minute wait or so until we were seated. We really enjoyed the POG slushies they had in the waiting area- particularly DD3!
We headed to Dumbo which they also loved. We skipped the play area for the sake of time. We still haven’t gotten a chance to let the kids play there in 3 trips! After Dumbo we all rode Mad Tea Party together. This is DD3’s favorite ride & she can spin the teacup pretty fast considering she weighs 26 pounds soaking wet. We headed to use our last 2 FP at Peter Pan & Enchanted Tales with Belle. Neither girl would participate at ETwB, but DD5 did go up to get a bookmark and photo at the end of the show.
We all just ate at Pop again. We ended up riding the Skyliner and taking the girls to Ample Hills for ice cream. Then called it a night.