I wanted to give a mini trip report of our visit yesterday on Wed. July 19. Hopefully, it will help some people as how other people's trip reports helped us.
It's just me and my two girls (7 and 6 years old) this trip, July 15-23. We are staying at Cabana Bay in the Americana building. Highly recommend it!!! Close to the bus stop and food court. There's a parking garage right outside. And Volcano Bay is literally five minutes away! Besides, all the walkways are indoors, great for avoiding Florida's afternoon showers. One night we went to Mama Della's for dinner during evening torrential downpours. We walked to the lobby, hopped on the dining shuttle, and got to Portofino without getting wet.
We left the room at 7.10am and got to VB at 7.15am. We were the third family in line. Looked like the hotel/off-site guest busses already arrived too. The gate opened at 7.50am. As soon as we got in, we left our things at the Waturi Beach and started hitting the rides. Everything was "Ride Now" with no lines whatsoever. We did all, except the two body slides (with trap doors) and Ohno, by 9.30am. We wanted to do Krakatau again then. It was still "Ride Now" but the line came out to the entrance of the ride. It had to be at least 30-minute wait. The team member said the line would go down once it started to have wait time around 10am. So we went to the Fearless River instead. I thought my girls would absolutely love this but they didn't. They enjoyed the strong currents but they didn't like that they had to stay on the tubes the whole time. We did only one round. We went to tap at Krakatau and wait time was 60 minutes. My girls tapped. I realized I lost my Tapu Tapu in the Fearless River so I had to go to the concierge hut to get it replaced. They looked up my account online but they couldn't find my Volcano Bay ticket. We are Preferred AP holders with July blocked out for VB. I bought the tickets separately but didn't know why the tickets wouldn't be on the account. They needed to see my ticket. And of course, my ticket was with my things toward the front of the park. I didn't want to bother to walk all the way up there. My daughters wanted to do lazy river and it was very close by so we went to the lazy river first. We did a few rounds and they enjoyed it much better. They could get off the tubes/floats and swam around some. We had lunch at Kohola around 11 and there was already a line there. The food was great but I didn't like how they had food in different stations. My kids wanted pizza. We had to line up for the pizza station. I wanted a pulled pork sandwich and we had to line up again for that too. After we ate, I finally went to get my ticket and got the Tapu Tapu replaced. The team member was able to add Krakatau for me to match up with my girls. And it was time to ride. The line was much shorter than at 9.30am. It took us about 10-15 minutes to get to the front. After that we went to tap at Honu. It was 165 minutes which didn't bother us since we did all the rides already. We went to Runamokka kids' play area. My little one is exactly 48" tall and she could do all the slides but this would be the last time she got to do it. Once you're over 48", you can't ride the slides anymore. Then, we went to the lazy river again and stayed there for hours!! They closed all the pools and rides at 6pm due to lightning and storm and opened everything back up at 6.45pm. We did Krakatau one last time at 8.10pm. It was "Ride Now" but we had to wait 20-25 minutes. We closed out the park at 9pm.