Day 1: Guess whose back, back again… slim shady would be cooler, but in fact it’s just us the Barbosa family. Here to leave our trip musings in the land of the touring plans forum. Feel free to scroll on by, but this has truly become a part of the catharsis for my Disney blues that allows me to move on to planning the next trip. I also save these in my records to read for memories and for planning the next trip. If you’re along for the ride, thanks for joining.
This year we traveled in a group of 6. As always, there’s my core family-my husband Josias (46), me (36), my stepdaughter Ingrid (21), Katie (7), and Emma (4). My mom 67 also joined us this trip. All of my girls have the Disney bug (wonder where they got that from) so everyone was excited.
We went Tuesday to Tuesday second week of August. We usually like to be in Disney on the 13th for our anniversary but had to go a little earlier because of Ingrid’s college move-in date. We know that next year we aren’t planning to bring her to give her a few months to hopefully settle into a big girl job, but we’re already talking about her maybe joining us for the weekend then. We were bummed the Halloween party was starting later this year, but got over it when we realized we’d get to see Starlight.
Anyway… our flight was at 7am. No matter how early I went to bed or tried to sleep it was useless. I probably clocked 3 hours before it was time to get up (3:30am) and hit the road. Providence is always a breeze to fly and while I’ve heard people say that parking has gone up I think I’ve paid the same by pre-ordering online. 100 dollars for a week feels like a deal to me still. My husband and I are both nervous fliers. I am from having grown up in 9/11 days and a few bad flights during storms into FL. My husband just watches the news too much. But I’m happy to say that after this trip I can almost say flying feels more normal again. Maybe we’ve just had a few good, no crazy turbulence flights, and maybe I’m chilling out a little more as I get older, but I almost enjoyed the flight, despite still hating take off. Airport was smooth, my mom met us there and family boarding got us decent seats mid plane. The girls were good about quietly playing and snacking and overall, I was as content as can be. I always bring a Frieda McFadden book because the fast pace makes it easy to get distracted. I’m still ancient in the sense that I don’t trust using a phone on a plane, so I turn mine off completely. Our flight was full, but we noticed on both flights that there were less kids than usual.
So we touch down and headed towards the first magical ride—the mini monorail. My girls imitate my love of palm trees so we had to hug some in the airport. Then when heading to pick up bags, our stroller was missing. They told us to get it in oversized but it never came through. After an hour of waiting in the office it finally showed up. We realized it was definitely a mistake not to bring it all the way to the plane. So now everyone is hungry and tired and we head down to MEARs and the lines are massive. This could have been okay if they had regular busses. Apparently it was a day where a bus would show up every hour. We couldn’t get over how badly they messed things up, we’ve always walked on or had short waits in the past. This felt like they way oversold what they had the ability to do. Not a good look. We almost called an uber but we had too many people and bags. Next trip we’ll finally pick something else to use. Even once we were on the bus it took us 40 minutes to leave. I didn’t let this stop me from leading the cheering and yelling as we went under the Disney World sign. But I think the clapping was louder when we got to Pop. We stayed at Carib Beach last year because it was just 5 of us, but this year we did 2 rooms at Pop. We love both and they feel like home, so once we arrived things got better. Front desk helped link our magic bands and with our room not being ready we dropped off our bags. I was impressed when they said they would deliver both bags and groceries as soon as our room was assigned. Garden grocer was supposed to deliver alcohol but they won’t drop it off anymore and couldn’t come when we were at the hotel so we canceled the alcohol. Not sure what happened with them but we were not impressed this year.
Once we freed ourselves from the bags we walked to the Skyliner to go over to the Riviera for lunch. We didn’t grab our resort mugs because we were headed to the water park after and didn’t want to carry the cups around. We love the Skyliner and did a mobile order. Chicken sandwich was still good, love the garlic. Ingrid’s croque was excellent and generally their QS is just yummy. Then we walked over to the busses to go to Typhoon Lagoon.
I’ve only been to Typhoon once in 2014 but the free entry meant it was worth trying. The girls were excited for it. We had to change at the park, which is kind of icky but oh well. Lockers were small but not ghastly expensive. Our only plan for here, knowing we had limited time and definitely lost 2 hours between missed stroller and MEARs was Miss Adventure Falls, lazy River and anything else being bonus. I love the tropical vibe here but I get a little germaphobic about water parks. Being outside in Florida sun makes it easier, unlike places like GWL. We headed to Miss Adventure falls. I was nervous that the girls would not get on it. I should preface by saying that Katie gets DAS and really struggles with thinking she’s in danger when she’s not—since she was little it was harder to get her to do things at the playground, etc. We’ve come a long way and she does therapy that really helps, but I still get a pit in my stomach trying something new or even something she’s done, wondering will she last minute freak out and try to run. Amazingly neither of the girls did. Emma cried a little at the top of the hill, but loved it. Katie also loved it. Our first big success with getting her to try something new! So naturally we had to go back and do it two more times. Then we headed to the lazy river and I remember really liking this—and it holds up. I laughed and smiled through the water fall sections and loved seeing the dreamy tropical plants and palm trees. We did the whole circle and I could’ve just stayed there, but I could tell it was not my mom’s thing. Balancing everyone’s needs this trip was tricky, but I can pull off anything in Florida sunshine. So we got off and I told J (Josias I call him J all the time) that I was good and anything else was bonus and we could leave any time. The girls wanted to go to the other family raft ride so we walked the length of the park to get there. It was fun, but I was kind of over it, just based on being tired. We would’ve liked walking around the park more but it’s hard to summon energy on a low sleep travel day (we had already clocked 20k steps). It definitely would be better on a break day. So off we headed to do the awkward wet/sticky change back into clothes and hop a bus to Disney springs. As we left we saw people coming in for the night event, which I think would be dreamy without the hot sun and the tropical feel.
We hopped the bus to Dis Springs as we had a 6pm dinner reservation at T-Rex. This was one I was going to pay out of pocket for and the rest were covered by the dining plan. Emma requested it and I have a soft spot for my kids whims. We’re also lifetime fans of Rainforest Cafe so we like the vibes. I will say we went to a RC in Niagara Falls last Oct and it was awful. It was like post apocalypse temu RC. But we’ve done T Rex once before and it was pretty great, so we were happy to go back. We breezed through a few stores, but were generally tired so headed to the restaurant. We were early by like an hour, but I was hoping they could move us a little earlier. They didn’t lol. So we stood tired in the gift store entrance for an hour avoiding the downpours. Once we finally sat, it was a great time. We ate our weight in chips and queso. I walked around with the girls to see all the Dinos. Our server was fantastic, she must have brought us 3 refills of chips. J had great fish and chips, my ceasar salad was a let down, and the kids meals were good. This taught me to generally avoid ceasar salad in Disney, they just don’t get it right. We headed out and the rain wasn’t too bad and grabbed a bus back to Pop which was fairly quick. Leaving was awesome as there were full lightning bolts above the RC volcano which looked cool and I loved the sparkling palm trees. The girls and I threw coins in the fountain to make wishes and I wished I had time to come back later for nighttime vibes.
I had called Pop earlier and got us moved from 80s to 50s—big win! We stopped at luggage and they let us know our bags were already up in our room and then came with our groceries. We grabbed resort mugs and went to get the kids showered and unpack. I love using the shoe caddy to organize toiletries and the room was fine. Ingrid bunked with my mom in the adjoining room. They started the nightly/daily ritual of asking me ten thousand times what time they had to get up, where we were going etc etc. I realized I really don’t like telling adults what to do on top of my little kids and that next time I’m managing this many adults I’m printing out an itinerary for them to check. The kids discovered the story time cartoons that they watched all trip especially the Cars one, before passing out. Overall a successful yet tiring first day. Back in the best place ever.
Katie was Maurice and Emma was silverware. It was great fun despite the complaints from my feet. Then we lucked out that Under the Sea reopened—except nothing worked. Multiple frozen Ariel’s and ride stoppages, it was in eek shape. Then we hopped on a quick Dumbo ride and J took the girls on Barnstormer-also a first. I chose to sit by the train and listen to its spiel which I enjoy.
