We just got back from a 7-day trip (5 full days, two half days) from 12/26 - 1/1, drove from NC and stayed in the Dolphin. Figured I’d throw a quick trip report here for posterity. We’ve got myself, DW, and two boys DS9 and DS8. I went to Disney World as a kid back in the late 80’s, and DW went with a high school group back in the mid 90’s, so you could say this was basically a first timers trip.
We had plans for a 5-day trip in March 2020, which I had meticulously planned out with FastPasses and everything thanks to info on this site. That trip was obviously doomed, and we figured Christmas 2022 was the time to try it again. Our reasoning was that between crowds and heat, we’d rather deal with the crowds (especially with a good plan). Our entire family caught our first cases of Covid the week after Thanksgiving – it was thankfully pretty mild (thanks to boosters!), and also kinda seemed like a stroke of decent luck to not have to worry about it in FL.
Day 1 (arrival day plus Epcot)
We left Durham, NC at about 5:15am. Our boys are pretty seasoned road trippers – we’ve driven out to Montana and back twice (taking only two days, so 15+ hour days) and this last summer drove down to south TX and back. So 10 hours or so to Orlando is no sweat. The drive was pretty straightforward, not a lot of traffic until we got to Orlando (it was the day after Christmas, so that was kind of expected).
I had an alarm set for a few minutes before 7am so I could try to get a BG for GotG in Epcot. We were somewhere in South Carolina and the reception was pretty spotty, so I kept getting errors in BG1. I switched over to the Disney app, but but the time I got everything pulled up they were already all gone. Wanted to try again at 1pm, but you need to be already in the park, so that wasn’t happening either. But we got extended evening hours by staying in the Dolphin, so I set an alarm for around 6pm to try again.
We stopped at the Buc-ee’s in Florence, SC. Not quite sure what all the fuss is about – the restrooms are nice and clean and there’s lots of gas pumps. The food was somewhat decent, but everything seemed pretty overpriced to me. We usually time our stops for about two hours so we can switch drivers, hit the restrooms, and sometimes fill up the car, and the Buc-ee’s in Daytona fit that bill, so we hit that one as well, which was a huge mistake. CRAZY amounts of people, hard to get in to, hard to leave. Just a bad vibe all around (but it got us in the spirit of CL10 Disney crowds, I suppose).
We got to the Dolphin around 4:30pm – I did online check-in and got a mobile key, so we just went straight to the hotel room. We chilled out there until around 6pm, when I snagged a BG for Guardians (worked great with a reliable internet connection).
We took the boats from the Dolphin, as there was one about to leave. Since we were arriving later and didn’t want to spend the extra money on G+, I figured we’d knock out Figment and Nemo first, which were both walk-ons. The boys love aquariums, so we hung out there longer than we maybe needed to. Then we went over to Spaceship Earth, but the wait was around 30 minutes, so we went back over to ride Living with the Land, then watched the movie in the pavilion. Soarin’ was only a 20 minute standby wait, so we did that. The wait seemed super long to the boys, but it was good practice, as things would definitely be worse over the week. The ride itself was more intense than I expected; I have a bit of a fear of heights and got a little nervous at parts, but it was lots of fun. DS9 went into turtle mode and just balled up in his seat clinging onto me while DS8 just laughed to himself, “oh no, oh no, oh no.” 
While in line, our BG was called for GotG, right around 9:00pm or so. I kinda wanted that one to be a surprise, so I didn’t do any real research on the ride, which was a little too much for the boys and myself – we left the ride pretty pale in the face. My wife loved it, but the spinning around in the dark was a bit too much for the rest of us. We figured that was a good time to call it a night (it was also getting pretty late for the boys), so we ended up punting on the rest of the evening hours and “walked” back to the hotel.
back to Fantasyland, then made our way to Tomorrowland, where we rode the Peoplemover, then used a G+ for Buzz Lightyear. I don’t remember the scores exactly, but the kids only got something like 2,000 points each while the parents were well into the hundreds of thousands. So we got to gloat about that while walking over to do Philharmagic and It’s a Small World via SB (the lines were pretty reasonable, 20 minutes posted but we were on the ride in a little over 10).
With that out of the question, we went to Everglazed donuts and got donut grilled cheese sandwiches for the boys and a donut fried chicken sandwich for me. Both were awesome. We walked over to the Lego store but saw there was a long line outside to just go in, so we scratched that and just went back to the hotel.
