We just checked out Sunday from Aruba 55 second floor. We had a 5th sleeper room and I know there aren’t a ton. It was a slight inconvenience to carry/truck the strollers up and down steps. I am with you. I did like the proximity to the Riviera S and Skyliner station though!
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I love that Annapurna Zing and my mom stole my light up lotus flower. She still has it on her coffee table!
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This sounds like a really lovely day!
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W commandeered mine almost immediately as “banshee food”.
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The only time it was really a problem for us was the night that my husband ran over to the main building to do something and W fell asleep - I had to make a very sleepy B make his own way up the stairs while I carried W and temporarily abandoned the stroller at the bottom. Otherwise the proximity to everything outweighed the hassle, I think.
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Holy hell from where did you acquire this little snap of glory?
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I had planned for this thing to be finished by now and then I got a cold which has completely incapacitated me all week. Oh well, better catch something on the flight home than on the flight there!
Day Five – Hollywood Studios
This is the point at which I started to regret having so few rest days. The park opened for early entry at 8 and I thought we should probably leave for the Skyliner at 6:45. At 6:35 my kids were still asleep so clearly I was going to have to adjust my expectations a little bit. I decided to relax a teeny little bit and figured that we’d bang around a little and make some noise, plan to be in the room for the whole 7am booking of everything, and then leave from there.
Being a good liner and having read All The Things, I did a speed test and discovered that the internet in the room was about half the speed of the internet outside on the walkway. So with the kids pulling themselves together Jay and I stepped outside the room at 6:58, having set up Our Days, etc, and tried to stop our hands from shaking long enough to fulfil these incredibly important tasks (the shaking hands might have just been me).
For some reason I had it in my head that the Genie Plus rides changed times but the Individual Lightning Lane times did not – I knew you could pick your time on those ones. So I gave Rise to Jay and I tasked myself with getting Slinky. 6:59:59, I yelled “GO!”, we refreshed. Jay busily worked away on his while mine spun. And spun. And then said something went wrong, and I had to refresh again, and then I had a 12:30 pass which actually is pretty good for an error message, I thought, but was still kind of disappointing given that I had literally trained for this. Then I realized my husband was cursing. I had told him to pick something in the 10 o’clock hour, which he had done, but by the time he’d gotten through all the legal stuff and the apple pay, etc. it was for 2:30. Which very much did not work with our plans to take an afternoon break. So I was pretty annoyed by that and Jay was basically incensed, and muttering things about buyer protection and getting what you paid for.
Regardless, we hoped that we could do something about it at the park, rallied the kids, and headed over to the Skyliner. The line was a lot shorter than we’d seen the other day, which I kind of chalked up to us being later than I’d planned, but figuring that Runaway Railroad, which we planned to rope drop, was probably at most third on the list of HS’s most popular rope drop destinations we hoped we’d still be ok.
I was surprised that the Skyliner ride was so much shorter to HS than to Epcot, so we arrived quickly and tapped in and scouting ahead, I was surprised by how far forward we were. I commented to Jay that we actually probably could rope drop Rise, but we decided to stick with our plan. At about 7:45 they actually let us in and we went up to MMRR, hopped in line, and walked right in, which surprised me – I had figured they’d hold us in line until 8. We were in the first preshow theatre, and were hopping on Goofy’s train in no time. We’d been on this ride once before, on opening day – it’s so cute! I really enjoy it. I’m not sure if they’ve changed something, if it was just me, or what, but I felt much less like I was actually going over a waterfall this time, though – who knows.
When we got off I checked ride times and Slinky was posted at a 40 minute wait, with Touring Plans saying 15 minutes. That seemed too good to be true but we decided to walk over and check it out, figuring that it if looked busy we’d just go to Midway Mania but we got there and it didn’t look busy at all, so we jumped in line! Less than 15 minutes later we were zooming around on my personal favourite ride – it’s so fun and so cute! I laugh the whole way through this ride every time, I find it totally delightful.
After that, and hardly able to believe how well this morning was going, we jumped across the road to Toy Story Midway Mania and walked right onto that (further making this the best day ever, I beat Jay!), then bopped over to Alien Swirling Saucers, and by 9:20 we had knocked out the bulk of our plans for the day!
We celebrated our success with a Num Num cookie which B ate a shocking amount of, considering that he claims to not like chocolate. W, however, was in a mood and refused to eat any of it, so we decided that we should probably find some actual food.
Note that while Jay and the kids got the cookie I chatted with a Guest Experience person about our Rise time. She was extremely unwilling to help, shrugging that “it’s a live system, somebody must have been a little bit faster” and saying that all she could do was refund the passes, which is an extremely unsatisfying answer – I get that it isn’t their fault, so I didn’t press it, but we KNOW you can do better because you HAVE done better and there’s no reason it has to be like this! But anyway.
W wanted to watch the Turning Red preview in One Man’s Dream so we decided that I’d head to Starbucks while they did that, and then they’d meet me, so I headed that way, waving hello to Chip and Dale who were having a picnic on the grass before hopping in line and commiserating with the woman behind me that they should sell Genie Plus for Starbucks (a topic of conversation that surprisingly came up more than once in Starbucks lines!). Shortly thereafter I got a message from May that grumpy W had changed his mind about the Turning Red preview and they were across the street, and he was going to try to talk to another Guest Experience person.
It is family lore between the two of us that he’s the one that can Get Things Done – he once had somebody offer to waive the fee on a new credit card, when I asked for the same I was flatly told that it was impossible, the agent then talked to Jay and in under two minutes had done it. So I wasn’t too surprised when he texted me a few minutes later to say that they’d moved us to the 10:20 time he’d originally selected. He said that the cast member said no, they couldn’t do it, at which point he started talking about Apple Terms of Service and before he knew it they’d called a manager and it was done. By the time I got out of Starbucks it was 10:15 so we headed off to Batuu!
The last time we’d been here W had been too small for Rise, so I’d taken B on it and we’d planned, with rider swap, for him to ride again with Jay but he’d flatly refused because he said it was too scary, which is the point at which I realized that he’d thought he was really being shot at by Stormtroopers and had genuinely feared for his life. Parenting fail. So we had gone to great pains to explain to W that there was going to be a lot of noise and shooting and explosions and stuff but it was all pretend and it was just a ride. He got it, but he was still a little nervous. But ultimately we – saved the galaxy? Didn’t give away the location of the secret base? Joined the Resistance? I just realized I’m not actually clear on what we’re doing on this ride – and landed back home, heading out to stock up on Resistance fighter essentials.
We did not buy that helmet but B did buy another lightsaber, and W acquired a Stormtrooper shield and zapper (the kid always has an affinity for the bad guys) and a shoulder-Porg.
We had some time to kill so we wandered around for a while, checked out the marketplace, compared the blue and green milk (blue was the family favourite but I like them both), B had a chat with Kylo Ren, W found a really pleasing stick that we not only took back to the hotel with us but we then moved to the Poly and in fact brought back to Canada, which I’m only now realizing might actually be illegal? Is there a concern about importing foreign bugs that might be in the wood? Anyway.
I put in a mobile order for Woody’s, assuming that the kids, who by that point had been complaining that the options were always cheeseburger/chicken strips/macaroni and cheese, would be excited by grilled cheese sandwiches, so at the appointed time we picked that up and sat on a curb in the shade to eat it (I was, of course, wrong, because you should never assume anything with kids) and then hit up Slinky for our second ride before hopping on the Skyliner back to the hotel.
This was our last day at CBR so I assumed the kids would want one last visit to the pool but B said that the water hurt his eyes and he wasn’t going back in without goggles (which I had forgotten to bring) and I think they were just both really tired, so they held a formal ceremony where they introduced Porgie to the other stuffed animals and watched Coco. Jay headed over to the gift shop to look for goggles but they were sold out, and a stockcheck on every other Disney shop in the area showed that everywhere was sold out, which I found surprising – it seems like goggles should be a staple for a place with so many pools. So then we set out on a quest to Instacart some, which was surprisingly difficult, but finally tracked down a pair that could be delivered later that day. We were moving hotels the next day so we also tried to make a lot of progress on packing, with fairly good results.
The kids had been interested in seeing the Indiana Jones show so around 3 we headed back over to Hollywood Studios and were first in line for that, and it was a huge hit! They don’t watch too many live-action things and don’t have much familiarity with stunts in general but they thought it was so cool to see the explosions, they laughed at the jokes, and it was super fun to watch how much they enjoy it. Indy is one of the few things I remember from both my university visit with friends and my childhood visit with my family – my dad was picked to be one of the extras – so I liked sharing that with them.
When the show let out I mobile ordered a wookiee cookie and ran over to pick that up – WOW was it ever good. And also enormous! Highly recommend. So we snacked on that while we headed over to Millennium Falcon for our Lightning Lane, which I’d booked earlier – throughout the day I’d been stacking them up for the evening so we, at this point, had Smuggler’s Run, Tower of Terror, and Midway Mania lined up over the course of the night.
W, however, had decided he didn’t want to do it, I think because I’d told him that two years ago he hadn’t liked it and so he decided it was scary. No amount of pointing out that two years ago he’d only been three would change his mind. So we set up rider swap, and Jay and B went in to do that while W and I wandered around and watched the Stormtroopers. Once they were done their tour as gunners, we headed off for our reservation at Sci-Fi.
We’d never been here before – we had reservations on our first trip but that time, after waiting 45 minutes past our reservation time they told us there’d been a fire in the kitchen and they actually had no idea when they’d resume seating people, so we ended up elsewhere. It was really cool! Surprisingly dark, and I wasn’t blown away by the food, but it was worth it for the atmosphere – the kids really loved the car set-up and watching the clips. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the Buffalo Chicken salad, though, it was pretty limp, but that’s on me – when you’re at a burger restaurant and you order a not-burger you’re always kind of taking a risk.
When we finished dinner it was just getting dark, and we headed over to Tower of Terror. This was one that seemed like a very bad idea to take W on but he’d insisted that he wanted to do it. I think he might have had regrets when we got in, and he definitely seemed to be having them once we got past the library and into the “basement” (I was not expecting a secondary line down there, and I didn’t realize they were only running one elevator until we got down there so it was pretty slow) but he insisted that he wanted to go on it. I hadn’t been on ToT since university and my husband had never been – he LOVED it. B also really liked it, W said never again. I think it didn’t help that there was a group who had, I think, enjoyed some beverages with dinner and were doing extremely loud and exaggerated screaming when anything mildly spooky happened. But anyway.
We then used a completely unnecessary LL for Star Tours – we walked right on, but so did the family who entered the standby line at the same time as us, and our room was only half full. Then we wandered over to Toy Story Land for our Midway Mania LL where I beat Jay AGAIN, and then B and I headed through to Batuu to do the rider swap for MFSR while Jay and W went to ride Alien Swirling Saucers.
Through a little bit of head-counting and a little bit of luck B and I got to be pilots – he’d been saying he hoped he would so that was fun. The previous time I’d ridden this I’d been an engineer and between reassuring W that it was all pretend and he was ok and trying not to throw up from motion sickness I hadn’t enjoyed it much. Turns out that being a pilot was a lot better – more fun and also somehow having something to focus on made me feel much less sick, the only time I had to close my eyes was at the end when the autopilot took over anyway. We got one shipment but then smashed into the train, but not a bad showing for two novice pilots, one of whom is 8!
While in line Jay had texted me that Saucers was a walk-on so they’d done it again, so we both wrapped up around the same time. Jay’s main goal for the day had been to wander around Batuu in the dark so we did that for a while, taking some photos, and then headed out. We hit Hollywood Blvd around the same time that their nighttime show was going on so we stopped to watch that and then caught the Skyliner just in time to watch the Epcot fireworks, which was an excellent end to an excellent day. We finished up the packing and headed to bed, planning a more leisurely morning the next day as it was going to be a long one with Epcot Deluxe evening hours.
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I am notorious for this exact kind of behavior. I get fish at the fried chicken restaurant, chicken at the burger place, and always end up disappointed for some weird reason. LOL
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Love that Porgie was formally introduced to the other toys! Woody and Buzz would definitely approve. 
I recently went to DLR with my niece and her family. She has a couple of kids who don’t like surprises so they actually watched ride videos for arise and MFSR. It really helped I think. They ended up loving Rise which I had hoped they would. But the ride is so immersive that I can totally see a kid freaking out thinking it’s real.
B and W both seem like very interesting and fun little guys. You’re a lucky mama!
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Amazing! How does Apple Terms of Service play into this.
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Honestly I didn’t really ask because I didn’t want the explanation but I think it has something to do with agreeing to purchase something (a 10:10 pass for Rise) and then receiving something different that we hadn’t agreed to (a 2:30 pass for Rise).
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That makes sense. I can see with Genie+ what you are agreeing to pay for is is not a specific time on a ride but the ability to book whatever is available for ILL you are agreeing to a certain time. But I can also seeing Disney saying we’ll just give you your money back and then we are not violating the Apple policy. Now what about Android users? 
What is this? “You’ve replied to @erinkippen 3 times, did you know you could send them a personal message instead?” LOL
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Adorable that they had the Porg introduction ceremony. Kids are so precious like that. And I totally agree the wookie cookie is amazing! Sorry you’ve not been feeling well.
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Agree! They actually were nice enough to comp mine last summer. I wasn’t complaining, just telling the truth when the waiter asked if I was enjoying my food.
Also, I can’t believe how much you remember after being home with a head cold for a few days! Hope you’re fully recovered and writing this up is as fun as it is to read.
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Can I borrow him for a day? Or do you rent him out? 
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Your story about the kids introducing the porg to the other stuffed animals reminded me of this picture I took at Disneyland. These are all the toys left behind on Rise that day. The CM’s put them out with a sign in hopes that their families wandered back by.
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That’s adorable! Poor abandoned porgs.
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Day Six – Epcot
We woke up pretty excited for the day – we were moving to the Polynesian and had a late night planned with Epcot’s deluxe resort hours. This was originally going to be a relaxed morning with us taking time to get packed and organized before the 10am Epcot opening and then, as is becoming a theme with this report, Disney adjusted and a 10am opening became an 8:30am opening, which meant 8am with early hours. The best laid plans! But the kids were sleepy, and even though I really wanted to ride Remy again the feelings of everybody else ranged from “Sure I guess” to “No it was scary” so we “took our time” getting up and getting ready, ironic quotation marks thanks to the fact that at 7:10 I overestimated how ‘all packed up’ we were and called bell services for 7:30, which led to 20 minutes of frantic stuffing things into bags, trying to figure out what we’d need for the day but also what we might want at the Poly if our bags didn’t show up until later. So right as the bell – person? – showed up we finished up and headed for our last Skyliner ride.
This was also the first time we shared with somebody else, so that was interesting! Chatted a bit with the older couple who rode with us, B was very interested in her shoulder-Groot. I had held out hope that we still might get on Remy but when we rode over France the line seemed pretty long, so we decided to not bother, hoping we’d be able to get on that night, and headed straight to Soarin’, because that had made a real impression on W. From Soarin’ we rope dropped Starbucks, where B, who is soccer obsessed (keen observers may have noted that he’s been in some sort of soccer jersey almost every day of this trip - he packed his own suitcase) and had insisted on bringing his ball, ran a bit of a clinic for W while we wanted, and then we decided to walk over to France to get some breakfast at Les Halles.
This was a great idea in theory. In practice the Les Halles line apparently builds up pretty quickly! It ended up taking almost an hour, in fact this was the longest line of our whole trip! We whiled away the time wandering the gift shops and running around in the streets of Paris, though, and eventually made it up to the front where we ordered a bunch of food and had a delightful cast member interaction – B asked if she was really from France and I tried to explain to him that they used to have people from France here but right now, because of COVID, blah blah. However the cast member, whose badge identified her as being from Orlando, immediately switched into French for him (he’s in French immersion) and we did the rest of our interaction in French. Also notable – this was the first time today (but not the last) that we were asked if the boys are twins, something that happens with a surprising frequency given that they’re two years apart. I was also pretty proud of myself that I remembered the French word for twins. 
With our bounty of French pastries assembled we grabbed a spot on a planter outside and got down to business. Actually first I ducked into the wine store next door to acquire the grownups a flight of champagne to go with our breakfast, figuring that any time you’re eating a raspberry macaron and a baguette in Paris you should also be drinking champagne! This seems like a “my diamond shoes are too tight” problem but they literally filled all three glasses to the brim – we were testing the limits of surface tension with good champagne – and then had no tray or anything to carry them, which made life a bit difficult. I was forced to take sips from all three and then try to juggle them out to the bench – things got a bit sticky.
This is the point at which I learned that while I can tell the difference between cheap champagne and expensive champagne, I can’t really tell the difference between expensive champagnes – they were all delicious but I quickly forgot which was which.
After stuffing our faces with an assortment of things (the full baguette might be the best value for money in Disney world - $3.50???) we decided our plan for the morning would be to wander the world showcase, assuming that we’d get to all the rides in the evening during the extended hours (DUN DUN DUNNNNN foreshadowing!!!) so we headed off on the loop. A main priority was finishing the Spike scavenger hunt, so we set our sights to that and set about wandering casually through the various countries, stopping whenever something caught our eye.
I bought a hat in Italy, we spent a long time watching the lizards menace the small village in Germany and finally tried the caramel popcorn at Karamel Kuche, and B bought a wooden sword in China that would go on to cause us a number of problems (MORE foreshadowing!).
This is when the kids also discovered, completely randomly, pressed pennies, a hobby which would go on to bankrupt us. Those dollars really add up!
By about 1pm it was pretty hot and getting pretty crowded so we decided to head over to the Poly. It was about this point that I got our room ready text, but we had requested a third floor room (we’d booked a water view and were hoping to be able to watch the fireworks) and the assigned room was on the first floor, so I called and asked if we could switch and they said they could, but that room wasn’t ready yet.
We made our way to the front of the park, briefly stopping in Club Cool and then deciding it was too busy and we didn’t want to wait (something that I’ve had on my to-do list every visit and never gotten to do!) and hopped on the monorail. We’re not at all familiar with the monorail and quickly realized that the train we were on only went to the TTC and then we’d have to switch, but then realized that the Poly was very walkable from the TTC. So we hopped off, we went down the ramp, we were about to head over, and then Jay said “B, where’s your sword?” and B looked confused for a minute and then sighed “On the monorail.” So Jay headed back up to talk to somebody and see if we could track that down, and the kids and I spent a few minutes standing around before deciding we’d just head over to the Poly and he could catch up.So we did! I had not realized exactly how close it was, in about a minute flat we were entering the beautiful grounds of the Polynesian! And wow, was it ever lovely.
We’d been to the main building before to go to Ohana but never really wandered around, so we walked through the grounds and along the beach, making our way to the Great Ceremonial House. I was thinking, given that we’d been dragging bathing suits around all day, that we could change in the bathroom and go for a swim but B again was not having it so we decided to get some Dole whip. Jay caught up with us shortly after, bearing the sword (huge sigh of relief!), we finished up our ice cream, and went to browse the gift shops and do some pin trading – great pin trading at the Poly, and the first time we’d encountered the mystery box, which was a lot of fun. B also found a shoulder-Groot in the gift shop which he decided he very much needed to own. A warning for those of you with teeny kids who fall in love with these shoulder-creatures – they don’t really stay on little shoulders. Neither boy had the shoulder to hold these guys up, but they didn’t care that much. At that point our new room was ready, so we headed over there.
And boy, was it worth the wait. It was so big and so beautiful, I was absolutely not prepared for the two bathrooms or for the extremely cool way the bed pulls down from the wall and, like, flattens the couch. Also the view! We face-timed my parents to show off and say hi to Lucy, our 7 month old labradoodle, called down to get our luggage brought up, and got the room organized in preparation for our late night (DUN DUNNNN!) before heading back to the monorail to head back to Epcot.
We went straight to Mexico, because we had a 6:10 reservation at San Angel Inn, which I was excited for, both because I really like Mexican food and because on our first trip, 5 year old B was learning about Ancient Egypt in kindergarten and was convinced that this was an actual pyramid and his little mind was completely blown to get to enter a real pyramid. Also I wanted to get the chocolate volcano dessert. We checked in and spent a bit of time browsing, and B bought ANOTHER shoulder-toy, this one a – dragon? Lizard? – and then our table was ready.
We were very excited to be placed right along the water, and a little surprised by how extremely dark it was in there, but our eyes adjusted, and it did look really cool. We ordered a quesadilla for the boys to share and Jay and I had guacamole and the rib eye tacos. The boys ate almost none of the quesadillas and almost all of the bowl of chips that we got and once again, we failed to leave room for dessert. So far zero for two in terms of the “event” desserts that we’d planned!
After dinner we hopped in “line” for the Caballeros, a ride that I find totally delightful, and then headed out to find the last two Spike gardens. We were getting organized and it started to rain a little, but that’s ok because we had our rain jackets on. Then it started to rain more. Then it started to rain QUITE A LOT so we made a break for the Port of Entry gift shop, crowding in laughing with all the other people. It kept raining, and it kept raining, and we thought “Ok, you can turn in your scavenger hunts here, we’ll just make educated guesses on the last two”, which is the point we realized our scavenger hunt was gone! So no idea what happened there – I can’t imagine that anybody would steal it but I don’t know what else could have happened because it was definitely in the stroller when we parked it for dinner.
The kids were pretty disappointed but I’d been warning them all along that the prize was pretty lame (this was before the snack boxes came in so it was going to be a little Frozen plate) and luckily I had bought some Mickey mouse lollipops earlier in the trip so I gave them each one of those as a consolation prize and they were happy.
At this point the rain didn’t seem to be letting up. We’d been in Port of Entry for about 20 minutes and the weather app said the rain was going to continue for another 40, and we figured we were already wet, we might as well be wet on a ride.
This is probably a good point to mention that that morning we hadn’t brought the rain cover for the stroller, for…reasons. Reasons known only to my husband.
So W perched as far back in the stroller as he could. B decided he was just going to get wet. And we wriggled through the crowd, who looked at us with varying levels of horror and “Don’t do it!”, and stepped outside.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it rain this hard in my life. We were soaked within 30 seconds. We were running through puddles that came over the tops of my shoes. We got halfway to Figment and realized there was no way we could go into an air conditioned building this wet, both because we’d be freezing and because somebody would have to follow us around with a mop, so we slowed to a walk because it wasn’t like we could get wetter and decided to get the monorail back to the hotel, get dried off, and come back if the rain let up.
It was raining too hard for the monorail, though, so we sat there for quite a while, and by the time we got back to the Poly the rain had basically stopped. “This is great!” we thought. It was just after 8, we figured we could regroup, dry off, try to soak up as much water out of the stroller as possible, turn right back around, and be rolling in just in time for extended hours.
However when I texted my friend, who was also there, with our plan she advised against it – she said that the water was, by that point, shin-deep and everything was a mess. So reluctantly, we said goodbye to our late-night Epcot plans. I was actually really bummed – I’d really been looking forward to the deluxe hours and this was the only day we were going to get to take advantage of them, since the Disney ones were 11pm-1am which was way too late for me, never mind the kids. Plus we’d been putting off all the rides until the night – I’d really wanted another ride on Living with the Land, we hadn’t gotten on Figment, W had been asking all day to ride what he called Star Wars Earth and we’d been saying “Tonight, we’ll do it tonight, we promise!” (when I explained to him that actually it had nothing to do with Star Wars and was basically about the history of communications and honestly kind of boring he got over his disappointment fast, though), and I’d heard so many great things about Harmonious and now we weren’t going to get to see it! So I was pretty bummed.
The kids were also upset that they weren’t going to get their late night, so we decided to head over to the Grand Ceremonial house for some Dole whip. However we got about a building away when it started to drizzle, and W got afraid of the dark so he and I decided to head back and watch the fireworks, which had just started, from the balcony. Then B decided if I wasn’t going he wasn’t going, and then the drizzle picked up and we all dashed back into Moorea just as the pouring rain resumed. Another bummer, but it did mean that we got to watch the fireworks, which for some reason were 90 minutes late, from our balcony, which was a pretty cool way to end the evening.
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That last pic is awesome!
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