Phew I cannot believe it’s April and I’m just digging out from my February and March travel. I had wanted to try and do this report live but it didn’t happen. But we had a bunch of cool experiences that I wanted to share!
I needed to attend the HIMSS conference in Orlando from March 12-14 as part of a software demonstration for my company. So my flight was paid for and my hotel through the 15th was paid for. I have the most amazing parents ever so they offered to watch my kids so DH could come down with me. He flew down March 13 for the DHS After Hours and then worked from the hotel on Thursday and took Friday off with me.
An aside since I feel like there are a bunch of healthcare people out there, but my product was heavily impacted by the ChangeHealthcare outage at the end of February. It was bonkers and I’m still dealing with it. So I freaking earned this tiny vacation!
The conference starts on Tuesday but we have to setup and get our demo approved on Monday morning. But we were done by noon so I took a newbie coworker to WDW for the first time! I tried to suggest Magic Kingdom but he really wanted to do Epcot. Which was fine so we did a nice casual drink around the world.
For those curious about conference tickets, I bought one “after 1pm” ticket, one “2 day base” ticket and one “6 day hopper” ticket. We arrived around 2pm and I obviously only wanted to use the “after 1pm” ticket at this time. You do NOT need to go to guest services to get your tickets prioritized!
I told the CM at the tapstyles that I wanted to make sure I used the correct ticket. (She tried to literally argue that you could only have one ticket on your magic band at a time… to which I just said, ok no problem, but I have 4 including an after hours ticket.) She then puts her arm up and the CM with the ipad comes over and they knew exactly what I wanted to do and it two maybe 45 seconds. So we’re in!
We grabbed a passport and went straight for festival booths.
Believe it or not I didn’t take a ton of pictures. I had stacked a few Lightning Lanes throughout the morning which was nice and I got TT at a drop! My coworkers were duly impressed. But we backtracked from Future World to World Showcase more times than I would have liked to. And geez the new walls up were killing me with way finding!
We finished up the evening with Luminous which I really enjoyed! We rode Remy at like 8:20pm so it was nice to be able to just wander around and find a spot. We exited via IG and got a Lyft back to our conference hotel from the Boardwalk. Rested our feet a little bit while we waited.
Wednesday I also had to work again. BORING. But this was actually a really good conference.
Anyway, DH tried out Spirit airlines on the way down and I was a little nervous he was going to miss the beginning of After Hours! I told him that I was tapping in at 7pm with him or without him lol. Due to the Spirit bag prices, he flew only with a personal item and I had brought all of his clothes and things in my luggage. So worst case scenario he was going to go straight to DHS but everything went his way and he met me at the hotel around 5:30.
Monday I had taken a Lyft from the convention center area to WDW and it was pretty quick, but we didn’t realize how much traffic there was going to be at 6! So we pulled up to DHS at like 6:55. We were attending with DH’s cousin who has an AP and he had bought our AH tickets at a discount. We were worried about entering without him because we don’t have APs but it was not an issue. We were in and starving! Straight to Docking Bay 7.
I thought I was being amazing and had booked an Oga’s reservation for 7:45pm. But then DH was like, aren’t we doing Fantasmic? Which was at 8:30. Ugh. So I had to bump and run the Oga’s so we could do Fantasmic.
Are you back up?? I am covering for the maternity leave of the woman who is in charge of it’s actual operations and of course it went down 3 days before my cruise. I thought (naively) that it would come back up while I was gone but it didn’t come back up until LAST WEEK! Now I’m working on getting it off of Change.
There were MANY walls in new places so I was constantly in the wrong place. I thought I was going towards the Land and suddenly I’m almost out the door by Spaceship Earth! I think a few more may be down this week though because I saw pictures of the new building that I was wondering what it was.
We didn’t take any pictures at the After Hours But I enjoyed it! It went by quickly though.
OF COURSE freaking Rise was down at the start. DH didn’t even think they would bring it back up and I was pretty mad about it. MMRR went down around 10pm too.
We walked out of Fantasmic around 9:10, the event didn’t start until 9:30 so we did some shopping in case the stores closed (good idea because many of them did.) We did TSMM (walk on) and then MFSR which was about a 20 minute wait. Rise wasn’t back up so we came back out to check on Slinky but the line was still pretty long so we did TSMM again and then wandered back out to Sunset Blvd to look at the characters. There were no lines for any of the characters.
Then I saw people running so we found out that Rise was back up so we got on that. I would say we waited like 10-15 minutes with that mostly being the amount of time it took to slowly walk the whole queue. Went back to Slinky and also waited probably 15 minutes on that. We wandered some more and got literally the only picture of the night. It’s Rat Pizza!
MMRR also came back up and we walked on that had to be right after midnight. Got a Lyft home and there was WAY less traffic!
All in all the event was worth it for us since we were able to stay the entire time and it was a short trip so we got all of DHS done during the event! The lines were minimal and they would have been even shorter without all of the crazy downtime.
I went to the “Oracle” campus in Kansas City last year for the CommonWell summit and it was like this eerie ghost town. The summit was maybe 100 people in a 5 story building devoid of anyone else. In my experience at least their employees are nice!
Thursday mid-day I was able to pass my conference duties off to my second in command and then I was officially on vacation! We had Flying Fish reservations at 6:30pm and hit up Disney Springs afterwards.
I had never been to Flying Fish before and didn’t realize it had so many “classic” items but I went all in and had their Gin & Tonic as well as the potato wrapped red snapper. Everything was SO good. So I guess it was ok that we missed hot cookie hour because I was definitely full.
I had heard that the cookie limit at Gideon’s was raised so I asked the line attendant and he said 7 so that was great, we could get 14. Then we got inside and the sign said 8… and then the woman who actually took our order said 9! So we took home 18 for the freezer.
The big first on this trip for us was the All Star Resorts! Pre-DVC we were pretty much moderate people. Port Orleans Riverside will always have a piece of our heart as DH’s first Disney resort and CBR was mine as a kid. But for a bonus trip we wanted the cheapest we could find and this fit the bill really well for just the two of us. DH was VERY impressed with the renovated room and the layout and all the shelves in the bathroom.
The only negative really was that it felt rather far from everything. First thing being we were staying Thursday night over by the convention center and wanted to rope drop the Magic Kingdom on Friday morning. We contemplating taking a VERY early Lyft and then taking the bus but that felt too early for us with no kids! So we ended up taking the bags over on Thursday evening and dropped them off before we went to the Boardwalk. Then Friday morning we took a Lyft to the TTC and just put one backpack in a locker.
We requested any room in the Mighty Ducks section and got our request! Once a hockey family, always a hockey family! We also really loved the over the top theming.
