This is the first year that we've taken the kids on a trip
for spring break. Last year Josh & I
went to Costa Rica & left the kids at home, but that doesn't really
count. So with us planning another
Disney trip for this year, we thought spring break would be the time to
go. I’m not going to get into every
detail of what we did every day, because we did A LOT. So I’ll just share some of the highlights –
oh, and a ton of pictures too, now that I've finally finished going through all of them.
We enjoyed starting our vacation with an evening in Downtown Disney. The hotel we stayed at (Port Orleans Riverside) is just a short boat ride from Downtown Disney. We had a yummy dinner at T-Rex, did some shopping at the Lego Store, and had some AMAZING sundaes from Ghirardelli!
We park hopped every day – we did one park in
the morning and another park in the afternoon.
This works out great for us, and we always make sure to have at least
one morning and one afternoon in each park (except Animal Kingdom – we just do
a morning there, because that’s about all we need).
There were several rides that Liam wasn't able to ride last
time, either because he wasn't tall enough, or because they were closed for
renovation – specifically, Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and
Test Track. He liked Test Track ok (his
favorite part was designing the car at the beginning). But he cried the whole time through Space
Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
At that point we decided it’s no fun for anybody if we force him to
ride. And wouldn't you know it…by our
last day there, he had come around on Space Mountain, and willingly rode it all
on his own. He’s still not 100% sold on
it – he thinks after he rides it a third time, when he’s 8, that he will like
it. That kid cracks me up.
We also rode some rides in a couple of the parks that we
hadn’t ridden before, like the Kali River Rapids in Animal Kingdom, as well as
Primeval Whirl. We wanted to do a couple
other things in Hollywood Studios, but we just ran out of time.
The Magic Bands were great!
One band you wear all the time that serves as your park ticket, room
key, you can charge on it (it’s linked to your credit card), keeps track of
meal credits if on the meal plan, and contains your FastPass+
reservations. Now, I’m not so sold on
FastPass+. I felt like this new system
of FastPass caused our family to have to stand in more lines than we ever have
before. It’s great if you don’t really
know what you are doing, or if you like to sleep in and arrive in the parks
later in the day. But we have a well
thought out plan going in, and we arrive before they open the gates. So for us, it made it worse.
We saw fireworks in some form all four nights we were at the
parks (2 nights in the Magic Kingdom, one night at Illuminations in Epcot, and
one night at Fantasmic in Hollywood Studios), plus one night on the
cruise. Whew! I’d love to see Disney’s weekly fireworks
bill!
More to come in the next post!
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