Day 1: A Whole Can!
Why must every trip report start with everyone’s second least favorite part? Bested in ickiness only by departure day, arrival day is a necessary evil to get one’s family to Disney. I’ll try to move through it quickly.
If you didn’t read my TR, then you don’t know how bonkers we were about cost saving during this trip. Wild levels of spending were forced through Southwest credit cards so that two of our kids fly free as companions for 2022 and 2023. Calling the piano teacher and asking her to please pre-bill me for six months of lessons was probably the low point, but who can say? Excessive spending complete, we had two companions just in time for Southwest to all but eliminate direct flight from Philly to Orlando! Rather than dealing with a connection and the risk that entails, we opted to drive the two hours to fly out of BWI, which has a plethora of direction options to chose from. Philly’s long term parking scene has also gotten out of hand, with the discount lots charging $17-19 a night, so BWI’s $7 a day parking was a better deal, even with having to pay gas and tolls.
The other important background for travel day is that my girls have… less than sturdy stomachs. If they cough too much, they make themselves sick. Major crying fit because you’re eight and big emotions are hard? Head over the toilet. Air travel in particular has set all three of them off at one time or another, but this trip we were using every tool at our disposal. Of course, driving to a flight to a bus is relatively high risk for their particular brand of motion sickness, but sometimes you have to do your best and hope it’s enough.
For our 12:10pm flight, I wanted to be at the parking garage by 10:00am, just in case getting a shuttle and getting checked in took longer for Baltimore than I was used to in Philly. Plus, when taking 95 South on a weekday, one should build in at least 30 minutes of construction/congestion/accident traffic time. I wanted to be on the road at 7:30 and we were only 10 minutes late getting out the door. I decided to Dramamine the girls before we left, so that the car ride didn’t prime them for trouble on the flights. They also wore Sea Bands and herbal motion sickness patches and we only did music in the car, no visual stimuli. When I tell you we were using every tool, I mean it!!
There were a few slowed down spots, but traffic was mostly fine, so we arrived at Parking Spot North at 9:54am. The lot seemed very full, but the attendant sent us to a specific area and sent a shuttle just a couple minutes behind us. Luggage and kids were loaded and moving in less than ten minutes, and a good part of that delay was me trying to make sure that any food waste made it out of the car. I didn’t want to find grapes or cheese sticks had been baking in the August sun, stinking things up.
We were dropped right at the Southwest counters with clear instructions as to where the return shuttle would be, both given verbally and written with our spot number. We checked our bags quickly, happily used our TSA precheck benefits, and were through security by 10:30am, an hour before boarding. Our terminal had both a Starbucks and a Dunkin, so I grabbed coffee while the kids got situated and Hubby got everyone bagels and breakfast sandwiches for late breakfast / early lunch. I don’t even know what we’re calling an 11am meal: the kids had some breakfast stuff that they were supposed to have eaten in the car, but they saved most of it. The adults had eaten our cinnamon swirl bread en route and were still famished.
In support of our prohibition on visual stimulation on the flight, I had put an audiobook on each of the girls’ Kidizoom Cameras/Music Players, which they started in on as soon as they sat down. (Pro trip- libraries have tons of books on CD that you can then rip to your computer and transfer to a device. Free entertainment without needing connectivity for the win!) They were fed and entertained enough that I actually got to mess around on my own phone while we waited to board. We used Hubby’s EBCI benefit from his SW card for this leg of the flight. He gets two free EBCI a year, and companions are automatically checked in with their primary traveler, so four of us were in A boarding and Aurora was by her lonesome in B group. I asked the attendant if I could send my responsible adult husband to board alone instead of the eight-year-old and she said it was fine. As long as we didn’t try to board more than our fair share in A group, no one would care if Hubby and Aurora scanned in on each other’s tickets.
I boarded easily with the girls, took my seat next to C, and had A and B sit window/aisle leaving their center seat open. Unsurprisingly, no one wanted to sit between my kids and Hubby was able to easily grab the seat when he boarded a few minutes later. Come to think of it, if someone really did want that exact seat, we’d have let them know where the girls’ emergency puke bags were and Hubby would have happily taken a spot outside of the potential splash zone!
The flight was uneventful and on time. All of the girls said they felt fine, so it seemed that our prevention measures were working.
After catching the fake-o-rail, I had my first opportunity to truly lament the loss of Magical Express, not for its financial impact but for logistics. Come on, Disney, I’ll pay if you just transfer my bags and let me hop right onto a bus! Instead, we had to go down to baggage claim A, collect our bags, take the elevator back up, cross over, and head down to ground transport in B to find our bus. It took 25 minutes that could have been 10 if I didn’t have eight-year-olds dragging bags like their arms were about to fall off. I gave them the lightest, smallest rollers, but you’d think I was having them carry each other uphill!
We were taking advantage of the Sunshine Flyer kids ride free deal, which was by far the cheapest way to get five people onto property. We had considered them at normal prices, but three free kids absolutely sealed the deal. We checked in at 3:04 to see a bus already waiting for us; it got moving at 3:10 with stops at Pop, Boardwalk, Swolphin, and Coronado. The bus was clean and spacious, playing old, non-Disney cartoons. We were at Pop at 3:37 to drop off the first family and then Boardwalk at 3:47pm. Our flight had landed at 2:30pm, so 75 minutes to the resort is right in the old ME sweet spot; we would absolutely use Sunshine again if we were doing a shared airport transfer.
On the bus, in addition to refreshing Facebook for new classmates, I was seeing if our room had been assigned yet and double checking our grocery order. Just before our trip, several Chase credit cards had received a free Instacart + trial and statement credits for using the service. That meant we’d have no delivery fee, reduced transaction fees, and $10 back on our credit card, which would seemingly make Instacart a no-brainer. Except, oh my goodness, the pricing on Publix was comically expensive. We weren’t buying much, but over $5 each for bagels or English muffins was going to wipe out that $10 statement credit fast. After some back and forth on Dis about how marked up items seemed, someone mentioned they used it for Aldi, so I switched stores. Unlike Publix, the Aldi pricing was much more in line with what I’d expect from my groceries ($2 for bagels, $1.50 for English muffins) and I was happy to buy only their store-exclusive brands to keep the cost down. In the meantime, the internet was listening and I received a targeted Paypal offer for $20 off an Instacart purchase: woohoo! I packed a lot of dry goods in the luggage, so our order was things we didn’t want smashed (chips, bakery), fresh fruit, and dairy items. Between packed snacks and the grocery order, we would be stocked up for breakfasts in the room, snacks in the park bag, and snacks at the pool. Our shopper was able to get everything we wanted, so our order was ready and waiting for us at Boardwalk. Our room was not yet assigned, though, so we gave nearly all of our bags to the valet and kept only our pool essentials carryon with us.
I didn’t want to deal with poolside changing rooms, and our check in time was fast approaching, so I hopped in line to see if the front desk could give me any guesses as to when we’d have a room. While I was waiting, a refresh of
MDE showed me a room number- huzzah! I walked over to Bell Services to get our luggage and groceries and the cast member told me to head straight to my room as someone would be up right away. We all went up and got changed for the pool. When everyone was ready to go but luggage hadn’t arrived, I sent Hubby and the kids down to swim while I waited for the bags.
The kids were living their best Disney pool life while I unpacked the rest of the bag I had, opened out all of the beds, and waited… and waited. At 4:25, I called down to see where my bags were. Apparently, they had marked them as going to room 4005 instead of 4085, so they hadn’t made it to me. Why they didn’t call me after the misdelivery, I don’t know, but bags were once again on their way.
Our standard view balcony looked out over the driveway into the resort. My request had been “upper floor near elevators” as the Boardwalk hallways can get long. We were about 10 rooms from the elevators, so not the closest, but certainly not far, and we had an upper floor. We were also right next to the ice machine room and across from stairs that lead directly to the pool, so I was happy with the room assignment overall. The luggage arrived at 4:40pm and I got to work putting away groceries and unpacking suitcases. Under different circumstances, I am very much a live-out-of-the-suitcase traveler. But, with a family of five and eleven days in the room, unpacking was a necessity. Without kids underfoot, I was able to situate everything in about thirty minutes. Just as I was wrapping up, Hubby texted to ask me to bring down food as the kids hadn’t eaten anything since bagels 6 hours earlier. Ooops! Armed with potato chips and leftover fruit from the carry on bags, I got down to the pool at 5:15pm to really start our vacation.
After the kids chowed down, we bopped between the pool, slide, and hot tub. We stayed to play as long as we could, but a very exciting ADR was calling. There wasn’t time for showers, but we ran up to the room to get changed and the girls found their first Tinkerbell gift. I took a page out of
@StarWarsMomofGirls! ‘s book and Tink brought them a set of PJs, which they adored. Prior Tink gifts had been small tokens, like figures and pins, so they were psyched to see she was branching out. We checked into Beaches and Cream at 6:23 and were seated at 6:40pm. The kids knew that dinner would include a fun surprise, but I hadn’t provided any more details. The girls got grilled chicken and burgers, while Hubby and I split the Rueben and a side of tots. All of that was fine, but we weren’t really there for the main courses. The first time the lights flashed and a Kitchen Sink was presented, they looked at me like I had three heads and asked, “Are we getting that?”
The photos do not do justice to how enormous this is or how excited the girls were that we ordered it. We barely even scratched the surface, but their joy was worth every penny.
On the way back, we caught some jump ropers on the Boardwalk. We didn’t hang around too long, though, because we all needed showers and an early bedtime before our first rope drop in the morning.
The kids were in bed by 9:00pm and we could just make out a hint of fireworks from our balcony. After a long travel day, the adults didn’t stay up much later before we crashed as well.
All in all, we had a great travel day. Flights that don’t include upset stomachs are the gold standard here: the fact that everything else went smoothly was a bonus.
Food Budget:
Instacart order: $81.67 minus $30 in credits
Front desk grocery fee: $6
Airport coffee and breakfast: $22.51
Beaches and Cream: $102
Day 1 Total: $182.18