In this post, I’m going to start with a brief discussion of the Disney Dining plan and then provide a day-by-day overview.  I apologize that photos are a bit sparse in this report.  I’ve never really gotten into the habit of taking a lot of photos at restaurants, other than family photos at character meals or other themed locations.  In fact, even the pretty general photos (without my family) of the Sci-Fi Dine-In below are ones that I actually took several years ago.  If I had thought ahead of time of focusing my main trip report on the meals, I probably would have made more of an effort to get at least exterior photos of more of the restaurants.  I’ll try to think of this on my next trip.

Disney Dining Plan

During the last few trips, we have taken part in the Disney Dining Plan, which allows us to pre-pay a fixed per-day amount to cover the majority of our meals.  The plan provides credits for 1 counter service meal, 1 table service meal, and 1 snack item per person for each day of the trip.  The credits are pooled over the length of the trip (expiring at 11:59pm on the departure day), which does provide some flexibility for how they are used.

The dining plan has been somewhat controversial among Disney fans for some reasons that I do think have merit, particularly related to the increased difficulties getting into table service restaurants (at many locations, it is now pretty much mandatory to make reservations 6 months in advance) and it does also seem that some of the menus have been simplified somewhat since the dining plan began.  Overall, the program does work very well for our family and it does save us a considerable amount of money as we tend to order meals that would cost quite a bit more if we were paying directly.

While we still find the plan to be worthwhile, it is unfortunate that some changes were made that reduced the value a bit since it first began.  Originally, the table service meals included appetizer, entree, dessert, non-alcoholic beverage, and gratuity.  A couple years ago, the appetizer and gratuity were removed.  Including both the appetizer and dessert did make for a bit more food than we probably really wanted at some meals.  I do think it would be much better, though, if they would change the plan to offer a choice between the appetizer or a dessert instead of only providing the dessert.  There were a number of occasions where an appetizer (particularly soup or a salad) would definitely have been my preference over getting a dessert.

I’m definitely more torn on the elimination of the gratuity.  On the one hand, I admit that I did notice that service was sometimes a bit lackluster back when the tip was included and, thus, guaranteed.  On this trip, we didn’t really have any experiences where the service was less than good.  On the other hand, though, having to pay the gratuity separately for each table-service meal definitely takes away from the “pay it and forget it” aspect of the dining plan.  Since you calculate the tip based on the original menu prices, it does re-introduce a little bit of a tendency to want to look at the cost of each item ordered and a brings back a little bit of motivation for ordering the less expensive items.

I was also less than thrilled that an 18% gratuity was automatically added to our check at every location.  I’m not sure if that was because of the dining plan or because we had 6 people in our party, but it isn’t a policy that I like very much in either case.  At a few locations, the server did ask me first if I wanted to charge the gratuity to my room charge, but in most cases he/she just brought the charge slip without asking first or commenting.

My main reason for not really liking the automatic gratuity is that I prefer to be able to increase or decrease it a bit based on how the service was.  I also tend to think that 18% is a bit high for buffet meals, but the amount was not lowered at those locations.  I will note that, since the gratuity was charged automatically, I never added anything to it and I’m pretty sure I would have tipped a bit higher at a few locations had it been left up to me.

Day 1: New Year’s Day

We flew in to Orlando fairly late in the evening on New Year’s Eve and had dinner at my parents’ house that night.  Our first full day in the Orlando area was New Year’s Day and we opted to stay near my parent’s place in Clermont, heading over to Disney World on the second day.

During those first two nights, we stayed at the Fairfield Inn & Suites in Clermont, which includes a complimentary breakfast with the room.  The breakfast was served buffet-style in a lounge area next to the hotel’s lobby.  It was ok, but nothing particularly fancy.  It mainly included a selection of pastries, hot and cold cereal, bread for toast, a few kinds of fruit, and other typical continental breakfast choices.  They did have some microwavable, pre-wrapped breakfast sandwiches as well, but I didn’t try them.  I didn’t think the quality was up to what you find at a Holiday Inn Express, which typically have the best breakfasts of this kind, but it was certainly adequate.

Steak ‘n Shake

Lunch was at my parents’ house, but we decided to go out to a Steak ‘n Shake restaurant for dinner.  This is a great chain of diner-style burger restaurants that hasn’t yet made it out here to the western states.  These restaurants have always had a bit of a special meaning to my family.  The original one was located in Normal, Illinois, which is where I was born, and it is an often told story within our family that my parents’ first date was at a Steak ‘n Shake.  Since I’ve been old enough to remember, I’ve never actually lived in a town with a Steak ‘n Shake, so visits there are a kind of special treat when the opportunity arises.

The menu is a pretty straightforward burgers and fries selection, but the food quality tends to be extremely high.  The “steak” in the name of the restaurant refers to the generally high-grade of ground beef that they use to make their burgers and I do think that is reflected in how they taste.  As the name suggests, they also offer a good selection of flavors of real ice cream milkshakes as well.  I was a little disappointed when they had run out of the peppermint milkshakes that they were advertising on the placemats, but I was able to get a mint chocolate chip one that was a pretty darned good substitute.

While the food was great, we were disappointed by the service.  While the waitress was friendly enough, our orders were all exceptionally slow in coming.  We were particularly surprised at how long it took for the shakes to arrive, with them coming after the food.  My sister had a bit of a sore throat from a cold and had asked the waitress to expedite her shake, so she was more than a bit irritated when her shake not only took a while, but actually came about 5 minutes or so after the rest of our shakes were brought!  My parents mentioned that, unfortunately, this slow service is a bit typical of the Clermont location.

Day 2:  First day at WDW!

Chef Mickey’s

We headed over to Walt Disney World fairly early on the 2nd to check into Bay Lake Tower for the rest of our visit.  We have generally found that a character meal or some highly-themed restaurant usually is a great way for us to get into the right mood at the start of our visit, so I had made a reservation for noon at Chef Mickey’s in the Contemporary.

When I made the reservation, I actually thought I was scheduling lunch.  I later learned that Chef Mickey actually doesn’t serve lunch at all and that they simply were scheduling breakfast reservations up until 1pm that day.   We typically like breakfast buffets anyway and have never been all that picky about what time we eat that kind of food.  In fact, we probably have traditional breakfast food (such as pancakes or bacon & eggs) for dinner more often than we do in the morning.

By the time we got to the hotel and finished getting checked in, it was still only a little before 11.  I decided to try asking at the podium to see if they could seat us earlier than our reservation and learned that they actually weren’t that busy and could take us right away.  This would work out well and let us get to the park a bit earlier.  We were also hungry, so we didn’t really want to wait longer anyway.

Before we were seated, we were all guided over to a photography station for a family photo.  This has become a standard part of all the character meals at Disney World (and at Disneyland as well) now.  The photo isn’t on their Photopass system, though.  Instead, someone comes around to your table during your meal trying to sell you a package of printed photos for $30.  One thing we found strange at Chef Mickey’s was that the photo was with a plywood cut-out of Mickey Mouse rather than with the costumed character.

We didn’t purchase any of the photo packages on the trip, even though a couple of the photos were kind of cute.  The price just seemed overly high for what you got, particularly since it didn’t include any digital copy of the photo.  The last couple times we did character meals at Disneyland, I remember that the attendants made a point to specifically offer to also take pictures using our own cameras during these photo sessions.  No such offer was made at any of the Disney World meals and I really didn’t get a vibe that such a request would be welcome.

The meal at Chef Mickey’s was a pretty typical breakfast buffet with the usual selection of eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, pancakes, waffles, French toast, fruit, pastries, etc.  The food was generally good, although nothing overly special.  One odd thing we noticed at this meal as well as the other breakfasts we attended on this trip was that their bacon seemed to be oddly kind of lacking in flavor.  I think my favorite item on this buffet was a potato dish that was mixed with cheese and bacon. The pancakes and French toast were prepared fresh at a grill station, which was nice.  Unlike at Disneyland, the breakfast buffets in Florida usually don’t have omelet stations (I think the ones at the Grand Floridian and the Beach Club are the exceptions), so I’m typically not fond of the eggs available since most people seem to like them more runny than I do.

The primary reason that we go to a restaurant like Chef Mickey’s is the character interaction and that was generally good.  Over the course of the meal, we had visits from Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto.  Besides that the restaurant was located in the resort where we were staying, the fact that it features the core group of Disney characters made it a very appealing first activity.  The characters visits were spaced pretty reasonably and we overall had a really good time.

Liberty Inn

We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at Epcot.  For dinner, we decided to eat at Liberty Inn, the counter service location located in the American Adventure building in World Showcase.  It is mostly a burger and fries type fast food restaurant, although we were pleased to find that they did have a couple of slightly more upscale offerings including a roast beef & cheddar sandwich and a barbecue pork sandwich.  In fact, I ended up having the roast beef and my wife had the pork. The food was generally good, something that isn’t always true at Disney’s counter service restaurants.

My only real complaint was that the service was very slow, particularly if you had any kind of special order.  The roast beef and cheddar sandwich normally featured a couple toppings that I don’t generally like, so I asked for it plain.  That wasn’t a problem, but it ended up taking them 10 minutes or so to get it ready.  They held our entire order until that was ready and we had to stand at the counter waiting for it while other customers maneuvered around us to pick up their own orders.  I definitely would have preferred for them to at least give us the rest of the order right away (particularly our son’s), even if they didn’t have the staff available to bring the special order out to us.  We also weren’t warned that the special order would take so long.  I might have opted with something that didn’t need customization, if I had known about that.

Day 3: Disney’s Hollywood Studios

ABC Commissary

On Sunday, we had plans to meet up with some friends who live in the Orlando area and spend the day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.  Having stayed out late the night before, we ended up sleeping in a bit and arriving at the park right around noon.  Our friends were already having lunch at ABC Commissary, a large counter-service fast food restaurant themed to Disney’s TV network.  The main decor of the restaurant primarily features posters from current ABC series and video monitors showing promos and behind-the-scenes clips.

Even though Disney’s burgers generally don’t tend to be very good, we all ended up deciding that cheeseburgers sounded the best to us of the restaurant’s menu choices.  To my surprise, the burger was actually pretty decent.  It wasn’t nearly as dry and overcooked as I’ve generally found Disney’s burgers to be in the past, even at that same restaurant.  I don’t know if they have improved the quality or if we just were there on a good day, but it wasn’t a bad lunch at all.

Sci-Fi Dine-In

For dinner, we had reservations at Sci-Fi Dine-In.  This table-service restaurant is themed like an old drive-in movie theater.  The tables are shaped like cars and a large screen in the front of restaurant shows clips of cheesy old science fiction and monster movies, interspersed with the occasional theater refreshment stand promos.

This is probably the best themed restaurant at Disney World and we re-visit it pretty often for that reason, but my experience has always been that the food is kind of mediocre, unfortunately.  On this visit, I ordered the St. Louis-style BBQ ribs.  They were generally pretty tasty and the sauce was pretty good, but I found them to be much more fatty than I would have liked.  My wife had the ribs as well and also noted the same thing.  A couple other members of our party had the Reuben sandwich (something I don’t really like) and seemed happier with the quality.  The hot fudge sundae that I had for dessert was large and really good.

Day 4: Steak, cheese soup, and cake!

Le Cellier

A few years ago, during our first visit to Walt Disney World with our son, we scheduled a date night where we left him with my parents while we went out to a nice dinner.  Having heard very good things about it, the restaurant we chose for that dinner was Le Cellier, the steakhouse located in the Canada pavilion at Epcot.  We enjoyed the restaurant so much that it has now become a tradition to plan a meal there during every visit.

For this trip, we decided to get a lunch reservation for early Monday afternoon.  In recent years, Le Cellier has become one of the most difficult reservations to get at Walt Disney World, particularly since it is among the highest-end restaurants that still only requires a single table-service credit on the dining plan.  We thought it would  be a bit easier to get our choice of day and time if we went with lunch and I did, in fact, have no problem with it, although I did call the reservation line soon after it opened on the first day we could make reservations.

My wife and I definitely tend to be fairly traditional meat & potatoes fans and we both really enjoy a good steak.  The steaks at Le Cellier have been very good and they do offer a pretty decent selection of cuts.  There are plenty of other good places to get steak at Disney World, though, and we generally do end up having it at least a couple times during our visits.  Our experience with the steaks has actually been a little bit hit and miss, in fact.  I recall one previous visit where I had to send it back because it wasn’t cooked right and on this visit I found that the meat was a bit cold, although it wasn’t so much so that I felt the need to get it corrected.

The bigger appeal at Le Cellier that keeps us coming back really are a few of the non-entree selections. In particular, I am a huge fan of their Canadian Cheddar Cheese Soup while my wife absolutely adores the Chocolate on Chocolate Whiskey Cake that they offer for dessert.  These actually are individual preferences on our part, though, as my wife doesn’t really like the soup at all while I find the chocolate cake to be a bit too rich after such a big meal.

Another major favorite of ours is the bread.  At the start of the meal, they bring out a basket with several varieties of warm, soft breadsticks including sourdough, multi-grain, and pretzel bread.  The server recommends sampling all three and offers to bring out more of any type.  We now know that the pretzel bread is our absolute favorite and always immediately ask the server to bring us more of it.

I find the decor at Le Cellier to be generally appealing as well.  The layout is organized into sections themed to the Canadian provinces.  Right after you are seated at your table, the greeter gives a short overview of the province for that section.  The overall look has a generally casual elegance to it that I find to be very pleasant.  The only slight negative is that the tables are pretty tightly packed into the restaurant, so it can feel a bit cramped and can occasionally be a bit noisy.  For the most part, this has never been a big problem for us, though.  Our experiences at the restaurant have also always been enhanced by consistently very good and friendly service.

Contempo Cafe

The meal at Le Cellier tends to be quite filling, so we weren’t really hungry again until later than usual.  After lunch, we went over to the Magic Kingdom for the afternoon and stayed for the 8pm fireworks show.  After the fireworks, we walked back over to the Contemporary and had dinner at Contempo Cafe, the hotel’s quick service location.  We had done the same on our previous trip and had found that it worked really well.  Since we were actually staying at the Contemporary Resort this time, it worked even better for us.  It was only about 25 minutes from the time that the fireworks ended until we were seated at the restaurant.

The Contempo Cafe is one of a few newer quick service locations at Disney World that has gone to a touch-screen ordering system.  When you arrive at the restaurant, you go to one of the kiosks to order any entrees/meals.  It then prints out a receipt that you take to a cashier along with any grab-and-go items that you are adding to the order.  The system works okay, although it does feel a bit impersonal and I couldn’t help but wonder if it really saves all that much time and labor cost over simply having the cashier take your order, particularly since they still need to keep an employee near the kiosks to answer any questions or help out customers who aren’t really comfortable with that kind of system.

For dinner, my wife and I both ordered the pepperoni flatbread.  We got a kick out of the fact that the receipt actually said “pepperoni pizza” instead, since that is obviously what it really was.  We were happy that the pizza had a really thin crust, since that is the way we both tend to like it best.  As was typical of Disney’s pizza (and theme park pizza in general), the crust and sauce was pretty bland, but it overall wasn’t too bad a meal.  The portion sizes were generous and made for a pretty filling dinner.

Day 5: A Cold Day at Universal

Mythos

We ventured away from Disney property on Tuesday for a visit to Universal Studios Orlando.  Thanks to a relative that works there, we had complimentary tickets that allowed us to visit both theme parks on that same day.  We also had purchased tickets to see the Blue Man Group show at Universal Citywalk that evening.

During our entire visit to Florida, they were having an unusually extreme cold spell, with temperatures frequently in the 30s or 40s.  The day we were at Universal was especially cold, with a very frigid wind blowing.  Because of this, we decided that a fairly leisurely, table-service lunch at an indoor restaurant sounded good.  We opted to eat at Mythos in Islands of Adventure, which has pretty often been rated towards the top of the quality ratings for theme park restaurants.

While I’m sure that a lot of people were looking for indoor dining choices that day, Universal has a lot of options and the parks were not overly crowded.  Probably because of that, we only had to wait about 15 minutes or so for a table.  Our table was fairly far inside the restaurant, fairly close to large windows that provided a pretty nice view across the park’s central waterway over towards the Super Hero Island section.  The overall decor of the restaurant is bright and cheerful.  There are fountains providing a pretty continuous sound of running water, so it is probably a good thing there are restrooms inside.

After several hours out in the cold, soup sounded particularly good.  I tend to really like tomato soup and saw that was listed on the menu.  When I ordered it, the waiter warned that it contained Italian sausage, which prompted my reply of “good!”  It is definitely wise that they warn about that, though, as people might expect that to be a vegetarian option.  The soup was very good, with a flavor that kind of resembled a rich spaghetti sauce.  A couple thick, oversized croutons were included to help add a little additional bulk to it.  The hot soup was a big help in getting warmed up and one of the highlights of the meal.

While the menu included several entrees that sounded pretty good, I really didn’t have too much trouble choosing once I saw that one of the choices was Blueberry and Pistachio Crusted Pork served in port wine sauce.  Grilled pork is something I particularly like, but don’t get very often and I also really love port wine sauce.  The sauce also had crumbled blue cheese, which is another favorite of mine and a flavor that I think goes especially well with the port wine sauce.  The pork was as good as it sounded.  The blueberry and pistachio crust provided a particularly good mixture of slightly tangy sweet and nutty flavor that really complimented the sharper flavor of the port wine sauce.

Instead of serving the pork with something fairly traditional like mashed potatoes, the included side dish was macaroni and cheese.  The cheese sauce was made with smoky cheddar, a type that I particularly like and which provided quite a bit more flavor than a more typical macaroni and cheese.  While this was a somewhat unusual side dish, I thought it was really good and this was a fairly rare case where I completed finished the side dish with an entree.

While Mythos is a high-end, fairly expensive restaurant, their menu isn’t overly exotic and worked well even for the fairly picky eaters in our group.  My wife had a bacon cheeseburger, which she said was very good and was clearly made with very high quality ingredients.  Several other members of our party had the grilled chicken club sandwich, which they were very happy with as well.

Our excessive drinking straw collection 

One strange part of the meal was that we ended up with an unusually large accumulation of drinking straws.  I had ordered Mr. Pibb to drink and a couple other people in our party ordered Diet Coke.  I guess in order to help the servers identify the drinks, they put 3 straws in the Mr. Pibb and 2 in the Diet Coke.  This was not only the case with the first ones, but with each subsequent refill.  The refills were always brought in new glasses and they didn’t very frequently take away the old one.  Over time, we ended up with a huge quantity of straws and generally amused ourselves by putting them all into one glass.  While it was pretty funny, it also strikes me as being rather wasteful and I think the restaurant really needs to come up with a better system for keeping track of the drink types.

Our only real complaint about Mythos was that the service was a bit slow.  The waiter was certainly friendly enough and they were pretty good about keeping up with drink refills, but it took quite a while before he took our orders and then the time between courses and the time to get the check delivered and processed all seemed longer than they should have been.  While we weren’t in an extremely big hurry, it definitely did seem like the pace should have been faster, particularly in a theme park setting.

Burger King Whopper Bar

After having had a pretty large and elegant lunch, we went to kind of the opposite extreme and just got fast food from the food court at CityWalk.  The food court area is pretty small, with only four restaurants and fairly limited indoor seating.  With a little persistence, we were able to eventually grab a table, so we did at least avoid having to eat outdoors in the cold.  My wife, son, and I all got food from the Burger King “Whopper Bar” while my parents and sister split a large order of nachos from Moe’s Southwest Grill.

The “Whopper Bar” concept emphasized the choices of toppings on the burgers, but really seemed more like an excuse for a Burger King with a drastically reduced menu.  While the name kind of seems to suggest a do-it-yourself topping bar, it really is just a stand where a large menu board lists the choices of toppings and you specify what you want when ordering.  The only available entrees choices were the Whoppers or chicken strips, with none of the other Burger King entrees available.  They didn’t even have kids’ meals available, so our the only burger available for our son was a Whopper, which is a bit big for him.  My wife and I both got chicken strips, since she had a cheeseburger for lunch and I don’t really like Burger King’s burgers very much.  The food was typical Burger King food, although more expensive than usual.

Day 6: Magic Kingdom plus Loud and Raucous Barbecue

Columbia Harbour House

Wednesday was another fairly late start day after the very full day at Universal.  We had made plans to meet up with some friends at the Magic Kingdom shortly after noon and arrived there pretty much exactly the scheduled time.  For lunch, we all decided to go to Columbia Harbour House, a seafood fast-food location in the Liberty Square section of the park.

This is often one of the busiest locations in the park, but it wasn’t an especially busy day which means there were very short lines at the cash registers and we didn’t have any major difficulty finding a table.  I had the fried shrimp for lunch, which was fine for basically fast food shrimp, but nothing to get too excited about.  My wife doesn’t like seafood at all, so she had chicken nuggets.

Whispering Canyon

For dinner that evening, we had reservations at another of our favorite Disney World restaurants, Whispering Canyon at the Wilderness Lodge.  This was a restaurant that I first discovered during a one night stay at the hotel, just a year or so after it had first opened.  At the time, the restaurant was fairly unknown and we got lunch there without any real idea what to expect.  It now one of the best known restaurants at Disney World, but it still remains one of our favorites.

Even the time while waiting for a table at this restaurant is more kid friendly than most.  In the lobby area, they have a big table with a large collection of Lincoln Logs for kids (and grown-up kids) to play with while waiting.  This is something our son finds particularly fun, since he has lots of Lincoln Logs at home as well and plays with them pretty regularly.  He especially enjoyed getting some help from his Aunt, who seemed to have fun playing with them too.

Whispering Canyon is essentially an old western show at a restaurant.  The servers and other staff all stay in western character and  maintain a very fun, extremely rowdy (and sometimes rather loud) atmosphere.  The menu is mainly barbecue with the featured meal the all-you-can-eat Canyon Skillet, which includes BBQ ribs, pulled pork, beef brisket, BBQ chicken, and traditional side dishes including mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, beans, corn bread, and salad.  This is all served family style and you can request more of anything.  While they do have various ala-carte selections on the menu as well, we all ordered the skillet as we usually do.

While there are a couple items included that I’m not entirely crazy about, there is so much food offered that it doesn’t matter much.  In particular, I don’t really like the way they spice the chicken very much and I’m also not that fond of the apple vinaigrette dressing used on the salad (I generally don’t like sweet dressings), but there are other items that provide more than enough to fill me up.  I especially really like the pulled pork and the beef brisket.

Another favorite feature at Whispering Canyon is that it is, I think, the only restaurant that I have ever been to that offers free refills on milkshakes.  They use fairly small glasses for them, so the refills are needed, but it is nice being able to basically pick how much you want.  They also have a pretty good selection of flavors and you can switch to different ones on the refills, if you wish.  I particularly like the orange shakes, which I find especially refreshing and go rather well with the barbecue.

One of the regular activities at the restaurant is broomstick horse races around the restaurant for the kids.  This year was the first time our son was really into it, although last year he did kind of half-heartedly participate.  This year, he was pretty much looking forward to it the whole time and took part with a huge amount of enthusiasm.  Of course, one of the funnier parts of the whole thing is all the parents (or grandparents) chasing the kids around the restaurant with cameras.

Day 7: Breakfast with Donald and Date Night at Downtown Disney

Donald’s Safari Breakfast at Tusker House

Our second character meal of the trip was on Thursday morning at Tusker House in Disney’s Animal Kingdom. This restaurant was converted from a counter service location to a buffet a couple years ago.  We had the lunch buffet (which isn’t a character meal) last year, but this was our first time there for breakfast.  We had also done the previous incarnation of the character meal when it used to be held in the Dinoland USA section of the park in previous years.

This breakfast actually turned out being the one mistake we had made in scheduling out our dining reservations.  Planning an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet the morning after a heavy all-you-can-eat barbecue dinner simply wasn’t a very good idea.  I ended up not eating all that much at this meal and overall can only give a very limited perspective on the food.

Our reservation was right at park opening, which meant that we were actually allowed into the park a bit early.  One of the entry turnstiles was labeled with a sign inviting those with Tusker House reservations and they had a castmember there to check names off the reservation list before letting guests into the park.  More castmembers were stationed along the path to the restaurant to help guide guests to the restaurant.  It was really kind of cool walking through the nearly empty park before it opened.

As with our breakfast at Chef Mickey, they guided us over to do a family photo before taking us to our table.  The featured character at the Tusker House breakfast is Donald Duck and this time the photo was actually with the costumed character instead of with a plywood cutout like it was at the other restaurant.  As before, I didn’t really feel all that comfortable with asking them to take a photo with my own camera as well, but I really wish I had in retrospect.  I didn’t realize that this pre-meal photo was the only opportunity to visit with Donald at the breakfast named for him.

During the meal, we had visits from Mickey Mouse, Daisy Duck, and Goofy (all dressed in safari outfits), but Donald did not circulate through the restaurant.  The character interaction was generally fine, but nothing particularly memorable.  I did kind of wish that I had given a bit more thought to which characters appeared at which character meals as the ones we ended up scheduling generally featured the same ones.

As I mentioned, I didn’t eat very much at this meal, but the choices seemed to be pretty standard breakfast buffet options, very similar to what was offered at Chef Mickey.  One highlight of the meal was the “jungle juice” that is served with the meal.  This is a mixture of lemonade and orange, pineapple, and mango juice and was extremely tasty.  I had several glasses of it and my son absolutely loved it as well.

I did have one big complaint about the food.  One egg dish that they offered was labeled simply as a “ham & cheese scramble” and definitely looked like something to my taste.  I took a good sized helping and didn’t discover that it also contained onions until after I had taken a big bite of it.  I have a pretty high sensitivity to onions where even a fairly small quantity can give me some pretty severe indigestion.  I realize that this probably isn’t an extremely common food allergy/sensitivity, but I also don’t see why it would hurt for them to add the words “with onions” to the sign that they had in front of the dish.

Pizzafari

For lunch, we wanted something very light, particularly since we had a pretty big dinner planned for that evening.  We ended up going to Pizzafari, where we realized that we could get away with using our dining credits to get enough food for all of us to share, including my parents and sister who weren’t on the plan.  We ordered two pepperoni pizza meals, which was enough for each of us to have 1-2 slices.  The meals also came with a couple salads and desserts, giving us a bit more food.  We did still get a full child’s meal for my son.  This proved to be plenty of food for all of us.   The pizza was typically bland Disney theme park pizza, but edible.

Fulton’s Crab House

Ever since we started doing trips with our son, my wife and I have always tried to schedule one date night dinner together while my parents babysit.  With Animal Kingdom typically closing fairly early (5pm in the off season), I realized that night would be a good time to schedule this.  With the trip taking place just a week after Christmas, I clandestinely made the babysitting arrangements with my parents (their response when I asked was “We thought you’d never ask!”) and the dining reservation.  I printed out a copy of reservation confirmation, put  it in a box, and then wrapped it and placed it under the tree for her to open on Christmas morning.

After doing some research and exploring a number of options, I ended up making a reservation at Fulton’s Crab House in Downtown Disney.  At first, it might seem like a bit of an odd choice since my wife won’t eat any kind of seafood, but she actually has something of a fondness for seafood restaurants as they pretty much always offer really good steaks, which she absolutely loves.  The restaurant had the added advantages that it was somewhere we hadn’t been before and it is also one of the few Disney World restaurants left that do not take the dining plan making it a fairly easy reservation to get.  I already knew we weren’t going to use a dining credit for this meal, as this gave us one more table service reservation than we had credits.

One challenge to this choice of restaurant was the fact that Animal Kingdom and Downtown Disney are at opposite ends of the Walt Disney World property, meaning that it can take a while to get from one to the other.  This is compounded by the fact that Disney does not run any direct buses between the theme parks and Downtown Disney (probably to discourage people from abusing the free parking at Downtown), meaning that you have to first take a bus to one of the resort hotels and then transfer.

We underestimated the time a bit and ended up about 20 minutes late for our reservation.  Fortunately, I suspect they were pretty used to that, as they didn’t indicate it was a problem at all and we were still seated immediately.  Part of our mistake was choosing Saratoga Springs as the transfer resort.  We picked it because there was a bus already loading when we walked up to the bus stop and because it seemed to make sense, knowing it was the closest resort to Downtown Disney.  What we hadn’t thought about (but should have since we stayed there last time), was that there are quite a few bus stops within Saratoga Springs, which adds a fair amount to the travel time.  It also didn’t help that we needed a restroom stop when we got to Saratoga Springs and it took a little longer to find one than we had expected.  In retrospect, we definitely should have transferred at one of the single bus stop resorts instead.

Fulton’s is located in the riverboat-shaped building in Downtown Disney.  This was originally known as The Empress Lilly  (names for Walt Disney’s wife) and contained a couple restaurants operated by Disney until the mid-90s.  The building was then leased to another restaurant company (Levy Restaurants) that refurbished the structure and re-opened it as Fulton’s.  It definitely makes for one of the most appealingly unusual decors at Downtown Disney.  Our table was on the second level and had a great view across the lake.

As I mentioned, my wife doesn’t like seafood at all and, thus, was very happy to order the New York Steak.  She was very happy with that selection, saying it was one of the best steaks she’d had in a while.  She gave me a little taste of it and it definitely was very good and tender with lots of flavor.

While I don’t like most kinds of regular fish, I really like shellfish a lot.  At a restaurant that had the words “Crab House” in its name, it wasn’t hard at all to decide to order the Alaska King Crab Legs for dinner.  The crab legs were absolutely terrific, with a good flavor that wasn’t too strong.  Other than one time several years ago at a high-end wharf-side restaurant in Seattle, the crab legs that I had at Fulton’s were the best I remember having.

The only minor complaint that I had was that the melted butter came in a container so shallow that it had all spilled by the time the plate was served to me.  The server was quick to replace it while indicating that this happened pretty often.  It wasn’t a big deal to me since I like to use butter with crab legs, but I know some people who don’t and probably wouldn’t have been happy to have it spilled all over the plate.  They should replace the containers with ones that don’t spill as easily.

At the beginning of the meal, they bring out a plate of crackers with a crab and creamed cheese based spread.  This spread was absolutely wonderful.  When they brought it out, they also gave us a card with the recipe on it, so I would imagine that they had received lots and lots of requests for that in the past.  Since it contained crab, my wife wasn’t interested in it at all, but I had no problem finishing it all myself.  They also brought out some fresh bread with butter, so my wife was very happy with that.

Ghirardelli Soda Fountain

While Fulton’s did offer a few desserts that sounded pretty good, we decided to instead go across the way to the Ghirardelli Soda Fountain to get ice cream sundaes.  This turned out to be a great choice.  We were both able to get really good (and fairly large) sundaes customized to our taste and the price was actually a bit less than we probably would have paid to split a dessert at Fulton’s.  The only small down side was that we were only able to find a table outdoors, but fortunately this was the one day of our trip where the weather had warmed up a little bit, making that tolerable.

Day 8: Dinner with the Fishes

Contempo Cafe

For our last full day at Walt Disney World, our main plans were to generally take it easy, but try and catch up with a few attractions that we hadn’t managed to see previously.  We were up and ready to go by mid-morning, so we decided to go over to the Contempo Cafe to get breakfast before heading out to the parks.

Just like at dinner time, the order for the main entree was placed using the touch-screen kiosks and then drinks or other items are gathered and taken to the cash register to pay.  My wife and I both ordered the French Toast while our son got the kid’s meal with Mickey Mouse shaped waffles.  The food was ready pretty quickly and tasted fine, although we found that the bacon was relatively flavor-less, just like at the previous breakfasts we had attended.

One kind of strange thing with breakfast purchased using dining plan counter service credits is that it comes with two drinks instead of a drink and dessert like you get at other meals.  I guess that does make sense for some, since many people might want both juice and coffee with breakfast.  Since none of us are coffee drinkers, though, it would have been much nicer if there had been an option of getting a pastry or something like that instead of the second drink.  What we ended up doing was each getting a bottle of water as our extra drink and then saving them for use later.

Sunshine Seasons (at The Land)

Since we had a somewhat late and larger than usual breakfast and had reasonably early (6pm) dinner reservations, we decided to use up some of our snack credits for a very light lunch.  After a short visit to Disney Hollywood Studios to see the “Lights, Motors, Action!” stunt show, we had arrived at Epcot around 2pm.  We then headed over to The Land pavilion, since we knew the Sunshine Seasons food court there had a pretty broad selection and we could likely come up with good choices for snacks.

My wife and I both ended up getting pastries from the bakery while our son had a pre-packaged fruit plate.  My wife and I also got soft drinks while our son had a bottled Poweraid.  We were able to get all of these items using snack credits and it worked out to a pretty reasonable light meal.  It was probably the best single use of snack credits that we had on the trip.

Coral Reef

Dinner on Friday was at Coral Reef, the restaurant adjacent to the Living Seas pavilion at Epcot.  This was one of our son’s two special requests for restaurants and, unfortunately, the only one we were actually able to do since Crystal Palace (his other choice) was closed for refurbishment.  He had especially enjoyed watching the fish and other sea creatures at Coral Reef during a previous visit there, so he was excited to go again.

Of all the dinners that we had with the entire family on this trip, I think this was the best overall experience.  The atmosphere was as much fun as we remembered and the food and service were both excellent.  While we had enjoyed our previous visit, this one really made a pretty strong impression and I suspect this will move much higher on our list for repeat visits.

While still nominally a seafood restaurant, Coral Reef has shifted its menu in recent years to have a little more broad variety.  I’d guess that only about half the entrees are now seafood and I seem to recall that those were all items like tuna or salmon, without any shellfish options.  All of the adults in our party ended up opting for the New York Strip Steak.  Even my wife, who had ordered steak at Fulton’s the night before, decided that she didn’t want to watch everyone else eating steak without having one herself.  She decided it was hardly a hardship to have steak two nights in a row.

The steak was very tender and flavorful and was cooked exactly to my liking.  The side dishes with the steak were roasted potatoes and a watercress salad, both of which I found very enjoyable and actually finished completely.  The salad was served with a light vinaigrette dressing that gave it some extra flavor without overwhelming it.

Since it is no longer included with the dining plan, I decided to skip an appetizer at this meal, both to save some room for dessert at well as to save the extra cost.  During my previous visit, I had the lobster bisque, which I enjoyed and a couple members of our party ordered it this time as well.  One of those that ordered it was our 6-year-old (appetizer was included on the kid’s menu), who I don’t think has ever found a soup that he doesn’t like.  While lobster bisque is not an item that most would think of as kid-friendly, he pretty much gobbled it right down and seemed to enjoy it immensely.

The Chocolate Wave 

For dessert, I opted for The Chocolate Wave, which is one of the restaurant’s signature desserts.  It is a dark chocolate cake served warm with a Grand Marnier based filling.  It was absolutely wonderful and a great ending to an excellent meal.  Others in our party had ice cream sundaes or the Cremé Brulée and everyone seemed quite happy with their selection.

Of course, the setting is one of the big attractions of this restaurant and we were fortunate to be seated at a table on the first level of the restaurant, fairly close to the aquarium glass.  We were in the second row of tables rather than directly up against the glass, but still had an excellent view of the marine life.  Our only minor complaint was that the large curved booth was a bit cramped for our party of six, but it was definitely tolerable.

The service was very good, with a server that was both attentive and courteous.  We did have a minor issue where the soft drinks didn’t taste right when they first came out.  It tasted like the carbonation had run out or the mixture was off.  The server told us that she would get us replacements from “upstairs” and those were fine.  There was one other occasion where she indicated that something else needed to be retrieved from “upstairs” and it became a bit of a running joke in our meal.  I don’t think we ever did figure out exactly what “upstairs” meant in this context.

Day 9: Hawaiian Breakfast and Returning Home

Lilo & Stitch Best Friends Character Breakfast at ‘Ohana

On our trips, it has become a tradition to schedule one last table-service or buffet breakfast for the morning of the day that we travel home.  We have always scheduled flights for late in the day (departing in the 5-7pm range), which has made this possible.

Since we stayed at the Contemporary this time, we decided to go to the character breakfast at ‘Ohana, a short monorail ride over at the Polynesian Resort.  This is an all-you-can-eat breakfast, where the food is served family-style.  The meal includes standard breakfast items like scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, fried potatoes, waffles, and various fruits and breads.  During the meal, you can ask for more of any items as needed.  They also served what they called “aloha juice”, which I think was pretty much the same thing as the “jungle juice” that had been served at Tusker House.

One advantage of this type of meal over a typical buffet is that there is a little more room for special requests.  Specifically, I and a couple other members of our party prefer eggs to be cooked very well done (not runny at all).  They were very willing to accommodate that request and actually brought out some that were less well-done as well, for the one member of our party that preferred them that way.

Fitting with the Hawaiian theme of the hotel and restaurant, the featured characters at the meal were Lilo and Stitch.  Both visited our table, as did Mickey Mouse and Pluto.  Once during the meal, the characters invited the kids to join in a conga line while “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” (from the movie Lilo and Stitch) played on the sound system.  I think our son was pretty worn out by this point in the trip, though, and he declined to take part in that. 

As with the other character meals, they did have us take a family photo before we were shown to our table.  Strangely, the photo at this restaurant was taken against a fairly generic tropical backdrop and did not involve any characters at all, either costumed or a cut-out.  Because of the generic nature of the pictures, the package was even less tempting than at the other locations.

Captain Cook’s Snack Company

Usually we make one last visit to a theme park (typically The Magic Kingdom) after our breakfast on the last day of the trip.  We had originally planned to do that on this trip as well, but I think we had simply had enough of the cold weather.  The temperature had taken another nosedive on that last day and there had even been some hail and sleet in the early morning.  We finally decided to just stay indoors wandering around the monorail resorts until time to leave for the airport.

We didn’t need to catch the bus to the airport until around 4pm and we still had one counter service credit each left to use for our lunch.  Our first thought was to have one more meal at the Contempo Cafe, but we decided against that due to the temperature.  The 4th floor of the Contemporary (where the restaurant is located) is pretty much open to the elements due to the monorail track and it was rather cold there.  We finally decided to take the monorail back over to the Polynesian and have lunch at Captain Cook’s Snack Company, the quick service restaurant there.  We picked The Polynesian mainly because we knew you had to go outside to get from the monorail station to the quick service restaurant at the Grand Floridian.

Captain Cook’s has a similar set up to the Contempo Cafe, including the use of the touch screen ordering system.  The restaurant is a lot smaller and more cramped, though, and finding a table was a bit of a challenge.  The menu included burgers and pizzas (again referred to as flatbread) as well as some stir-fry choices.  My wife and I both ended up going with the pizzas again and they were basically identical to what we had at the Contempo Cafe earlier in the week.  The restaurant has a bakery case as well and we both had cupcakes for dessert, which were pretty good.

The meal at Captain Cook’s was adequate for our purposes, even if it wasn’t the most exciting final meal for our visit to Disney World.  I did get a sense that this was a restaurant in need of some remodeling, as it definitely seemed pretty outdated and cramped compared to Contempo Cafe or even Roaring Fork, the quick service restaurant at the Wilderness Lodge, where we have eaten a number of times on previous trips.

The Return Home and Conclusions

When reviewing the dining plan status printed on our lunch receipt, I found that we still had six snack credits remaining.  During the last hour before our bus to the airport arrived, I went back up to the Contempo Cafe and used those snack credits to buy three brownies and three Mickey Mouse shaped Rice Crispy Treats.  Actually, the latter were labeled as “crisped rice treats”, so I suppose Disney hadn’t licensed the Kellogg’s trademark.  The brownies ended up working as a snack during the flight home and we ended up eating the Rice Crispy Treats a couple days later.

For the last few years we have flown Delta Airlines to and from Florida, mainly because they have a pretty convenient schedule for direct flights.  Like all the airlines, they have cut way back on the complimentary food services on most of their flights.  On at least one previous trip, this had been pretty rough as we had really not had anything more than small bags of peanuts or pretzels during our flights and we had been really starving once we arrived.  Fortunately, they now offer pretty decent $5 snack boxes that include some cheese, crackers, salami, and cookies.  These aren’t anything too fancy, but they at least helped to make it through the flight. I suppose our last meal of the vacation was a fairly late night dinner purchased at a Wendy’s drive-thru on the way home from the airport. 

Overall, I think we ate really well on this vacation and enjoyed a good mix of re-visits to old favorites as well as a couple new choices.  The dining plan continued to work for us, once again helping to facilitate a trip full of nice meals.  As our son gets older and starts enjoying a broader range of attractions, I suppose that dining could become less of a focal point of our vacation.  For now, this kind of trip report seems to provide the best way to provide a good overview of our trip.

During our visit to Walt Disney World the first week of January, we stayed at the newest hotel on property, Bay Lake Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Resort.  Bay Lake Tower is the recently-opened 15-story Disney Vacation Club tower located adjacent to the Contemporary on the site where the north garden wing used to be located.  The Contemporary, of course, was one of the two original Disney World hotels (along with The Polynesian) and is the closest to the Magic Kingdom.

We have been Disney’s Vacation Club members for a few years, having previously purchased points with Disney’s Saratoga Springs as our home resort.  We had always been a bit reticent about that resort due to its size and location and didn’t actually stay there for any length of time until 2008.  For most of that trip, all of the alternative DVC resorts had sold out by the time the home resort exclusivity window was over.  We really weren’t very happy with it, since it was so far away from all the parks while also being so large and spread out that we found it difficult to navigate around or to use many of the resort’s amenities.  After that experience, we sold off our interest in the early part of 2009 and then re-purchased with Bay Lake Tower as our home resort.

While we were taking a little bit of a risk by re-purchasing at a brand new DVC resort, we felt it was a very small risk.  We had actually stayed at the Contemporary once before during our last trip before we bought into DVC.  On that trip, we had stayed in a room in the old north garden wing, which was since demolished to make way for Bay Lake Tower.  We knew from that experience that we liked both the location and the overall amenities of the Contemporary and that the specific location of the new DVC tower worked really well for us as well.

Bay Lake Tower is considered to be a part of the Contemporary Resort and generally shares amenities.  Check-in and other guests services are done at the main desks in the Contemporary lobby.  Access to the tower is available via a couple ground floor entrances or by way of a skybridge that connects the 4th floor of the Contemporary with the 5th floor of Bay Lake Tower.  The bridge is not fully enclosed and, therefore, exposed to the elements.  If the weather indicates, it is definitely important to remember to grab coats or rain gear when crossing between the two buildings.

View from the skybridge

They do maintain a certain amount of exclusivity by always requiring the use of a room key to access any of the Bay Lake Tower entrances.  This isn’t strictly enforced as it is extremely easy to simply follow other guests into the building, but I do think this is a generally good policy to discourage non guests from wandering the building.  There are some pretty impressive views from the elevator lobbies and hall windows in the tower and I could easily see crowding and noise levels becoming a problem without the more restrictive access.

The 4th floor of the Contemporary (where the skybridge is located) is the hotel’s famous “Grand Canyon Concourse” which includes the monorail station as well as various gift shops, restaurants, and a video arcade.  The gift shops include two general Disney merchandise stores, Bayview Gifts which was mostly clothing and the Fantasia Shop, which featured a lot of Disney-branded toys, trinkets, and a pin shop.  Near the skybridge is an additional shop called Concourse Sundries and Spirits, which has some grocery items.  This store had a small selection of DVC-branded clothing and other items, including one Bay Lake Tower t-shirt, but I didn’t much like the design on it.  We were disappointed that none of the shops had anything else in the way of merchandise specific to the Contemporary or Bay Lake Tower.

The two restaurants on the 4th floor included Chef Mickey’s, which is a character buffet, and the quick service Contempo Cafe.  We had a nice breakfast at Chef Mickey’s on our day of arrival and had a couple quick service meals at Contempo Cafe at various times during our trip.  Both were nice locations and we particularly appreciated having the quick service location that was so conveniently located.  The Contempo Cafe is fairly new (it is in the former location of the old Concourse Steakhouse) and has a very modern feel to it, including a touchscreen ordering system.  The Contemporary has two more restaurants that we didn’t visit, which are The Wave down on the first floor (in the location of the old fast food location) and the high-end California Grill on the top floor.

The top floor of Bay Lake Tower features a lounge that is exclusively available to DVC members staying at the resort on points.  In order to access it, you have to present your key card at a check-in desk on the first floor and an attendant then escorts you to the elevator and unlocks access to that floor.  The lounge includes a good-sized observation deck with an excellent view of the Magic Kingdom (obviously an excellent location for fireworks viewing) and an indoor area with a full bar, several tables, and a television.  My wife and I visited up there to get a couple drinks after a dinner out together while my parents babysat our son.  We didn’t get up there in time to see the fireworks, but did enjoy taking a few minutes to stand on the patio and look at the Magic Kingdom.  I unfortunately didn’t get pictures of the lounge (other than the photos of us with our drinks) since we had planned to make a later return visit, but never got around to it, mainly because we hadn’t realized that it didn’t open until 5pm.

Bay Lake Tower Pool Viewed from 10th Floor

The Contemporary has a couple swimming pools and a variety of outdoor recreation activities, including various boat rentals.  There is also a pretty nice looking swimming pool (with a waterslide) that is specifically for the Bay Lake Tower guests.  Unfortunately, we never made use of any of them because our trip was during a record-setting cold spell for that part of Florida.  During pretty much the entire length of our stay, the temperatures were generally in the 30s or 40s, meaning that these features are saved for a future visit.

The location of the Contemporary Resort is definitely one of its strongest features, with especially easy access to the Magic Kingdom and Epcot.  The Magic Kingdom is so close that it is a pretty quick walk to get there.  On evening, we watched the fireworks show from the bridge between Main Street and Tomorrowland and were able to walk back to the hotel and get seated at a table in the Contempo Cafe within about 20 minutes after the show ended!  While you can also take the monorail to and from the Magic Kingdom, that will generally take longer than walking and probably isn’t worth the trouble in most cases.

Epcot is a pretty easy monorail ride from the Contemporary.  You first take the resort monorail one stop up to the Transportation & Ticket Center and then transfer to the Epcot monorail.  The whole trip typically takes about 1/2 hour or so, but it is a very pleasant and generally easy one.  Bus transportation is provided to the other two parks and to Downtown Disney and the trips can be a bit time consuming.  In most cases those buses also stop at either the Polynesian, The Grand Floridian, or both on the way to the parks, although the Contemporary always seems to be the first stop coming back.  Finally, boat transportation is available to the Wilderness Lodge and Fort Wilderness.

As a family of 3, we book 1-bedroom villas at a DVC resort.  This gives us plenty of room and allows my wife and I to sleep in a separate room from our 6-year-old son, an arrangement which generally results in all of us sleeping better than we do at hotels where we all share a single room.  The 1-bedroom villas all have a pull-out sofabed, which gives our son a comfortable place to sleep.  We noticed that the living room chair also converted into a bed, which would probably be very nice for families with more than one child.

Our room was on the 10th floor of the building and featured a Bay Lake view.  Lake view rooms are a bit less expensive than those with a Magic Kingdom view, but we came to the conclusion that we probably had the better view.  The tower is positioned in such a way that rooms that look over the Magic Kingdom will generally have a whole bunch of parking lot in the foreground.  At least from our room, though, the lake view was a beautiful, pretty much unspoiled scenic view.

View from our room

We could, of course, see the lake and the various watercraft from the room.  We also had good views of the main Contemporary tower and the south garden wing and the main pool and marina areas.  A little further off, we had good views of both the Grand Floridian Resort and the Wilderness Lodge.  Finally, off in the distance, we could see the tallest landmarks at Epcot (Spaceship Earth), Disney’s Hollywood Studios (Tower of Terror), and Disney’s Animal Kingdom (Expedition Everest and the Tree of Life).  We thought it was interesting that we didn’t have a Magic Kingdom view, but could actually see all three of the other parks.

More of the view

One obvious advantage of the Magic Kingdom view rooms would be that you could likely watch their fireworks show from your room.  While this wasn’t available to us from our room, we did discover early on that we had a couple opportunities to watch the Electric Water Pageant (a long-running water show that was a precursor to the Main Street Electrical Parade) from our room every night.  I didn’t see it first hand, but my parents mentioned watching Epcot’s Illuminations from the room on an evening when they were babysitting our son while my wife and I had a dinner out on our own.

The room had the typical amenities that we have come to expect at a DVC resort.  We especially appreciate the in-room washer and dryer, which allows us to do laundry every couple days and, thus, pack lighter than we typically would.  We can easily do one or two loads of laundry after we get back from the parks in an evening, letting the dryer run overnight.  This prevents laundry from taking any time away from our vacation activities like it typically would if we needed to use coin-operated machines.

The DVC rooms also have full-sized kitchens, which is nice, although we honestly don’t use it all that much since we tend to prefer to eat most of our meals out during our vacations.  We do usually pick up some breakfast foods, though, so it is nice having readily available dishes and silverware for that.  The full-sized refrigerator is also very nice to have.  I don’t think we have ever actually used the oven or stove during one of our DVC stays, though.

The 1-bedroom villas at the older DVC resorts always had enormous bathrooms, split into multiple rooms for the whirlpool bathtub, sink and shower, and toilet.  The bathrooms at Bay Lake Tower are a more normal size, but for an extremely good reason.  Unlike the older DVC resorts, the 1-bedroom villas have two full bathrooms instead of just one.  The smaller bathroom is accessed from the main living room area (in our room, the door was right next to the main entrance) and has a toilet, sink, and a shower/tub combination.  The larger bathroom is accessed from the bedroom and includes a whirlpool tub and sink in an outer room and the toilet and good-sized walk-in shower in a secondary room.  The extra bathroom was extremely nice to have and could be a major factor for us in choosing between Bay Lake Tower and other resorts on future visits.  As usual, the whirlpool tub was once again one of our favorite features of the DVC rooms.  It can be extremely relaxing after a long day of walking through the theme parks.

One mixed aspect to our experience at Bay Lake Tower was with the housekeeping staff.  When we first checked in at around 10am, we were pretty surprised when the desk clerk told us that the room was available immediately.  We headed up there (rather excitedly, I will admit) but were quickly disappointed when we entered the room and found it to look like something of a disaster area.  The room clearly hadn’t been cleaned at all and the previous guests had left it in pretty poor condition.

I called the housekeeping department and was told that they were going to put a “rush” order in for the room to be cleaned.  I mentioned that we had breakfast reservations at Chef Mickey’s and the person on the phone told me to check back after we finished eating and the room should be clean.  When we returned, we found the room to be unchanged from before.  I called again and told the story and was told that a manager would either call or come up.  We then waited about 20 minutes before we heard from someone who simply reminded us that the check-in time was 4pm and that the room would be cleaned by then.  We didn’t get back again until around 10pm and the room was clean at that point.

To be clear, I knew from the beginning that the check-in time was 4pm and we arrived with the expectation that we would need to store our luggage with Bell Services and retrieve it after we got back from the parks in the evening.  I also recognize that mistakes happen and wouldn’t have been bothered if my first phone call to housekeeping had resulted in a simple apology and promise that the room would be clean by 4.  What I objected to was being promised a “rush” cleaning before we got back from breakfast (something I hadn’t even asked for) and then having them fail to follow through on it.  We lost at least 1/2 hour of park time that afternoon because of our extra return visit to the room and the extended wait for a manager, which I felt was necessary since I needed some authoritative assurance that the room wouldn’t still be a mess when we got back fairly late in the evening.

Our experience with the housekeeping continued to be a bit mixed even after that.  While the room was definitely cleaned, we did find it to be a bit less thorough than it should have been.  In particular, I found the dining table and some of the other kitchen surfaces to still be a bit sticky feeling and ended up running a wet sponge over them a bit more myself.  Another oddity was that we actually found the room to have been cleaned a few times when it wasn’t supposed to be.  When DVC members are staying on points, the policy is that the room is cleaned on arrival and then every 8th day after that.  We were only staying for 7 nights, so there shouldn’t have been any cleanings during our visit.  Instead, we came back and found that the room had clearly been cleaned (beds were made, towels replaced, etc.) several times during the trip.  We weren’t charged for the extra cleanings and I guess I can’t complain too much about getting more than we were entitled, but it still seemed to suggest some lack of organization and communication within the housekeeping department.

My opinion about the overall decor of the room was a bit mixed. The room was nice, but I found the fairly modernistic design to be a bit cold.  Our favorite Walt Disney World resort (and DVC villas) has long been the Wilderness Lodge and I can definitely say that the more rustic decor there is much more to my liking.  While I do think the Bay Lake Tower has some pretty large advantages when it comes to location and amenities, I also suspect we will still continue to book occasional stays at Wilderness Lodge for its decor.  We made one visit over there for dinner at Whispering Canyon and my wife and I both commented as we walked into the lobby that it kind of felt like we were going home.

My reaction to the aquarium is conflicted.  I was quite impressed by its theme and decor and I felt that the overall child-friendly design of the exhibits was absolutely outstanding.  If the aquarium was presented as an included attraction at Legoland, or for a very low extra charge, I would be praising it very highly as an excellent addition.  Unfortunately, they have instead decided to position it as a stand-alone attraction with pricing to match.  In my view, it just doesn’t offer enough to justify that approach.

The full priced admission to the aquarium is currently listed as $18.95 for each adult and $11.95 for children.  At least at present, they are offering admission to Sea-Life as a $10/person/day add on with Legoland admission, but even that feels a bit high.  We spent about 90 minutes going through the entire attraction twice and it felt like we were stretching it out quite a bit.   We were able to take advantage of an $8/person price currently being offered to Legoland annual passholders (with a coupon) until the end of March and even that felt a bit high for our family of three for that amount of time, although I suppose that price/time combo is pretty comparable to a movie.

I was surprised that the aquarium has a linear design that pretty much forces guests to tour the exhibits in a specific order.  I had expected a more traditional museum-type design where a central lobby would provide access to the various exhibits that could be visited at leisure in any order.  I think the one-way, linear design of Sea-Life played very heavily into the fairly fast speed at which we finished with the whole attraction.  The design didn’t really seem to encourage lingering anywhere overly long and certainly didn’t make it easy to go back and re-visit specific parts.

The first indication of the attraction’s linear design was a sign out front warning that the only restrooms in the facility are at the very end of the tour.  The sign also advised visiting the restrooms next to the entrance to Legoland before entering the aquarium.  The failure to include a set of restrooms about mid-way through the facility definitely seems like an oversight in an attraction of this type, particularly since families with children are the main target audience.

The main entrance to the aquarium is on the front, right-side of the building with just a couple turnstiles and ticket scanning machines providing access.  There is also a second entrance from inside of Legoland, but we didn’t use it and I’m not entirely certain where it actually entered.  My guess is that it probably just provides access to a pathway that goes to the same small waiting area outside the main doors.  After going through the turnstiles, we had a short wait before the doors opened and we were directed into a small pre-show room.  A day ticket to the aquarium does allow for unlimited readmission, but you do have to repeat the pre-show each time.

In the pre-show room, there is a single flat-screen monitor where they show a short introductory video.  This video provides a brief overview of the various exhibits in the aquarium and also quickly goes over a couple very basic rules, specifically asking guests not to tap/knock on the tanks and asking for flash photography to be minimized (although it isn’t prohibited).  The video features an actor who is supposed to be Poseidon, but is laughably bad.  The actor was clearly in his early to mid 20s at the most and was obviously way too young for the part.  Even worse, he is wearing one of the worst fake beards I’ve ever seen.  During portions of the video, it kept shifting so it wasn’t even over his mouth.  It was pretty funny, but not in an intentional way.

After the pre-show, the first room you is a Lake Tahoe themed area that contains a few fish tanks, but is mainly dominated by a fairly typical playground-type slide.  My son had fun going down the slide several times (and other kids were having fun there as well), but the placement definitely struck me as rather strange.  Perhaps the theory was that it would help kids to get a little energy out before touring the rest of the aquarium, but it seemed to me that it worked more as a bit of a distraction right at the start.  During the first time through, our son went down the slide a couple times, but was then pretty anxious to move on to the marine exhibits.  He did end up spending about 10-15 minutes there when we went back through the attraction a second time.

The biggest strength of the aquarium is the very kid-accessible designs to the exhibits.  The majority of the tanks have viewing windows at low heights making it very easy for kids to see without having to be lifted.  These viewing windows are also typically large enough in size or quantity to accommodate multiple children without a lot of waiting.  One feature that was especially popular with our son was the inclusion in a few tanks of glass domes that kids could climb into and be basically surrounded by the fish.  Of course, these also provide a great photo opportunity for parents as well.

The aquarium also provides a number of interactive elements for kids. Upon first entry, kids are given a quiz card to fill out during the visit. The card has the answers to a number of multiple-choice questions, with scratch-off spaces to reveal if each is right or wrong. The actual questions are on wall signs throughout the attraction and the correct answe can always be found from the informational signs in the same room. At the exit, kids can exchange the completed card (regardless of the accuracy) at the gift shop for a sticker.

The idea here is great, but I thought the execution was a bit off. The sticker given is a very cheap prize, so I don’t really get why they insist that the kids surrender the completed card to receive it. In many cases, I actually think the card is the better souvenir. I also thought they needed different, age-targeted versions. My son was really too young for it and I think a picture-based version for non-readers would be a great addition.

There are two "touch pools" where kids are given the opportunity to put their hands in the water and actually touch harmless sea animals such as starfish.  The first is located about half way through the attraction (in a small outdoor section) while the other is at the end of the tour, right before the exit.  Both locations are fairly nondescript open-top tanks and they are staffed with employees who stand behind and make sure that the kids don’t cause problems.  I did think these locations could both stand to be larger as they don’t accommodate very many kids at once and, at least on the day we were there, the employees didn’t appear to be enforcing any time limits.  By both touch pools, they have paper towel dispensers and hand sanitizer so that the kids can clean up a bit, although I really think they should have installed actual sinks with running water.  Despite these caveats, my son (and other kids in the area) did seem to really enjoy these close-up encounters with sea animals.

Near the first of the touch pool, there was a craft table set up where kids can do a small art project.  Since the day that we visited was Valentine’s Day, the project was to make a fish out of heart-shaped pieces of construction paper.  They also had googly eyes and crayons available for additional decoration.  This wasn’t anything fancy, but my son enjoyed it and I thought the staff members that they had working this location were very good at interacting with the children.  The woman that helped my son was particularly quick to adapt when he decided that he wanted to draw the eyes on his fish instead of use the glue-on eyes.

While the Sea-Life chain is technically separate from Legoland, the design of this location does wisely acknowledge that it is part of the overall Legoland complex by including Lego theming in a number of the exhibits.  Several of the aquarium tanks included fairly-elaborate, and generally quite amusing, Lego structures.  Two particularly fantasy-oriented sections, areas themed to Atlantis and to a shipwreck, are the primary location for the Legos.  Continuing the interactive nature much of the attraction, a couple of these include buttons that kids (or adults…) can press to activate animation and/or sound effects.

The shipwreck area is one of two main areas where a fairly substantial amount of seating is provided to allow guests to sit for a while to just watch the fish and other sea creatures.  In the shipwreck area, there is a set of of theater-style benches providing viewing of the main window to the tank.  To be honest, I found this particular viewing area a bit puzzling, though, as there really isn’t anything exceptionally impressive to view here.  The tank really is primarily dominated by the Lego structures, which are fun to see but not really something to watch at length.  We noticed that the benches were largely going unused here.

The other main location where guests are encouraged to sit and watch for a bit is the “Shoaling Ring”, a room that comes fairly early in the tour.  This is a large circular room with benches in the middle and large windows providing a 360 degree view into a tropical fish tank.  It is a pretty view, although I thought it would have been even better had they continued the tank overhead with a transparent ceiling in order to completely surround the viewer.  The Atlantis area later on does include a hallway where you are surrounded by viewing windows to a tank on all sides (including above) and I actually thought that was the more impressive view.

The exit to the aquarium is through Ocean View Cafe, a fast food restaurant that is also accessible through a front entrance that is accessible without purchasing admission.  We actually had lunch there before going into the aquarium and found it to have pretty good food, although a very limited selection.  While the decor in the restaurant is fairly typical for a cafeteria, there were at least a few bits of decoration that tied it in to its location.  There were a few Lego figures in the restaurant as well as a fish tank on one side of the dining room.

The restaurant is set up food-court style, with four different serving stations and a centralized set of cash registers.  The featured items at the serving stations are macaroni and cheese (cooked to order), Sandwiches (including cooked-to-order grilled cheese), salad, and a juice bar.  The mac & cheese station is probably the most novel offering at the restaurant, with the pasta cooked fresh in sauce pans and then mixed with the melted cheese.  A variety of meats and vegetables were also available to mix-in.

My wife and I each got a grilled cheese sandwich.  She went with the standard version with American cheese on white bread while I went with a deluxe, 3-cheese sandwich that was served on sourdough.  We both enjoyed our sandwiches.  Our son had the macaroni and cheese which he liked, although it was too big a portion for him to finish and they didn’t offer a child’s portion.  The juice bar was a particularly good example of the very limited selection as the only item they were offering was a strawberry-banana smoothie.  My wife and I each got one and I liked it ok (although it was a bit sour), but my wife felt that the banana was too pronounced and would have vastly preferred one with just the strawberry.  Since these weren’t pre-packaged or anything, I had a hard time understanding why they couldn’t be set up to at least offer plain strawberry.

As I said at the top of this post, I’m very conflicted about the Sea Life Aquarium.  I thought it was overall a nice facility and it should be a very positive addition to the Legoland complex, but it is severely overpriced for what it offers.  At its full price, it even starts to approach the kind of discounted pricing you might be able to find for Sea World, which certainly offers a marine life experience of a dramatically larger scope.  While the aquarium is a nice facility, I can’t really recommend it unless you are able to get in at a very substantial discount.

Even on a direct flight, the travel time from Los Angeles to Orlando is nearly 5 hours.  When you add on the three hour time change (as well as the travel time to and from the airport), most of the arrival date is used up.  On our trips, we have typically arrived at Walt Disney World by around 8pm or so Florida time.  After a long day, this is usually a bit late to head into a theme park, so we instead usually look for a fun place for dinner somewhere that isn’t overly far from the resort where we are staying.

This year, our arrival night dinner was at T-Rex Cafe, the newly-opened dinosaur-themed restaurant at Downtown Disney.  Saratoga Springs is just a short bus ride from there, so trying out this new restaurant seemed like an ideal choice for the first night of our trip.  It did turn out to be a good choice and really helped us to transition from the high-stress of travel into the fun of themed entertainment.  Giving credit where credit is due, I should mention here that I was so hungry and hurried to get to dinner that I forgot to take my camera along to the restaurant.  All the pictures in this post were taken instead by my father (most during a previous visit to the restaurant) and I thank him for sharing them with me.

At the time of our visit, the restaurant was still officially in "soft opening" meaning that it hadn’t yet had its official grand opening and would still be operating with a few limitations.  The main result of this was that they were not yet taking any reservations, which did at least increase the potential for fairly long lines.  Even though it was a Saturday night, it was fairly late (around 9pm) by the time we got checked into our hotel room and then found our way over to the restaurant for dinner.  In addition, my sister just met us there instead of coming over to the hotel, so she was able to monitor the wait time and jump into the line as soon as we called and let her know we were on the way over.  This resulted in us getting a table almost immediately after we got there.

One other effect of the restaurant being in soft opening (and so new) was that we actually had a little bit of trouble finding it.  Even though the building is rather distinctive and rather hard to miss, Downtown Disney is pretty tightly packed which means that individual buildings aren’t visible from everywhere.  With the restaurant not yet having "officially" opened, it wasn’t yet on the maps or most of the directional signs.  We even asked a couple employees for directions, but the ones we asked didn’t really seem to know the answer.  We finally found it by simply starting to walk across the complex until we spotted it in the distance.

The restaurant is owned by Landry’s Restaurants, owner of a number of specialty chains.  In fact, the Downtown Disney location is actually their second T-Rex Cafe, with the first one having opened in Kansas City almost a year earlier.  The largest and best known of their chains is Rainforest Cafe and T-Rex is actually somewhat similar both in its menu and the overall atmosphere.  Having dined at the Rainforest Cafe location at the Disneyland Resort on several occasions (we’ve actually never been to either of their locations at Walt Disney World), we did have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

As with Rainforest Cafe, the elaborate theme and decoration is the main reason for a visit.  As the name suggests, the restaurant is decorated with a variety of prehistoric tableaus, including quite a few animatronic dinosaurs.  It is pretty hard to do the restaurant justice in text, so I’m going to let the photos do the majority of the talking here.   The restaurant really is rather impressive in person and I definitely think that they have taken the theme a few notches beyond Rainforest Cafe.

The animatronic dinosaurs are pretty impressive looking.  The range of motion on them is somewhat limited compared to what you would find in the World of Energy attraction at Epcot or the Jurassic Park ride at Universal, but they certainly are pretty impressive for a restaurant.  We were seated at a fairly large booth that was located right in front of a stegosaurus

Every once in a while, the lights dim and various lighting and sound effects are used to simulate a meteor shower taking place (this is similar to the occasional thunderstorms at Rainforest Cafe).  The animatronics are all programmed to become very agitated and go into lots of motion while this happens.  It is kind of silly, but also a bit amusing.  I did think they did this perhaps a bit too often, though.  It happened several times during our dinner and it got kind of old after the first couple. 

The main dining area includes a couple different themed areas, including one room with a sea theme (including a large fish tank, somewhat similar to the ones found at most Rainforest Cafes) and another area that is designed to look like a large ice cave.  In the sea themed area, I particularly liked the lights that were designed to look like jellyfish.

The food is generally adequate, if a bit overpriced, but it definitely isn’t a fine dining location.  The majority of the menu items are essentially fairly typical family-targeted diner items such as burgers and other sandwiches as well as a few pasta dishes and lower-end seafood and meat entrees.  As a starter, the waiter recommended the "Colosso Nachos", which we went ahead and ordered.  This is an absolutely huge appetizer that was pretty reasonably sized for our very hungry party of six, but probably would have been a bit too much for many people.

I had the "Tar Pit Fried Shrimp", which was pretty good although perhaps a bit bland.  The shrimp normally came with fries, but I saw that they had fresh-made potato chips offered with some entrees and I had them substitute those for me instead.  I was pretty happy with that choice.  My wife had the "Bronto Burger" with cheese and bacon and seemed happy with it.  She actually asked for the chips as well, but they ended up bringing her fries instead and she didn’t care enough to go to the trouble to ask them to correct it.  Our son ordered "Cosmos Cheesy Macaroni" off the children’s menu.  I don’t recall for sure, but I think the others in our party all went with either the shrimp or the burger as well.

My wife, son, and I all ordered specialty drinks in unusual souvenir containers that we could take home with us.  The drink I ordered was basically a blue raspberry flavored Icee served in a tall plastic bone-shaped cup.  It was pretty good, although the oddly shaped container actually made it a bit hard to get at the bottom part of the drink.  My wife and son both ordered strawberry smoothies that were served in orange plastic glasses with lights in the bottom.

Of course, there is also a gift shop area where you can purchase all the expected T-Rex Cafe branded merchandise, including t-shirts, hats, plush dinosaurs, and other similar items.  Right next to the gift shop area they also have a fossil dig area for kids to play in. This is a good-sized sandbox with various fake dinosaur bones hidden under the sand.  It is much smaller than the similar area in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, but still a fun diversion where kids could spend some time during the wait for a table or while parents are shopping.

At the back of the gift-shop is "Build-A-Dino", which is run by the Build-A-Bear Workshop chain.  Like those stores, guests select an un-stuffed plush which employees then stuff for them using a special machine.  The guest then sits down at a computer to select a name for their plush (and, of course, get on their email list…) and print out a birth certificate.  The prices weren’t really that bad (only $20 for a fairly large plush), so we let our son get one.  He seemed to have fun with it, although he was engaged in pretty serious concentration in the photos we took.

As far as themed restaurants of this type go, we thought this was a pretty good one.  As is typical of this kind of place, you pay a bit extra for the theme compared to other restaurants with a comparable food selection and quality, but the theme here is well-done and the place is a lot of fun.  I think it is pretty likely that we will visit again on future trips to Walt Disney World.

The Candlelight Processional is a long running holiday tradition at Disneyland.  It is a concert program that they typically run around the first week of December, which is a musical celebration of the religious aspect of the Christmas holiday, featuring a professional orchestra and a large massed choir formed from numerous church and school choirs as well as some Disney employees.  The show also features a celebrity narrator, who tells the Biblical Christmas story in between the songs.  This show has been a favorite Christmas season tradition for me for as long as I have lived out here in Southern California.  It is something I really look forward to every year.

Traditionally, this concert is performed on a stage set up in the Town Square area of Main Street, with the Railroad Station used as the backdrop.  In most years, there are just 4 evening performances of the show, two each on Saturday and Sunday.  The majority of the Town Square area is blocked off for the stage as well as for a large seating area.  Tickets for viewing the show in the seating area are mainly distributed to Disney’s corporate partners and other VIPs while regular park guests start staking out seats early to the sides and further back in order to get even an obstructed view of the show.

This can result in a lot of logistics problems and major bottlenecks in that part of the park on those days.  Because of this, Disney a fairly short-lived (5 years) experiment starting in 1998 of moving the show to the Fantasyland Theater, an outdoor performance venue located across from "It’s a Small World".  Walt Disney World had moved their version of the show from Town Square in the Magic Kingdom to a similar theater in Epcot a few years earlier and had eventually managed to expand it multiple shows a night throughout the holiday season, with reserved seating tickets being sold through popular dining packages.  There was a lot of speculation that this experiment with a change of venue at Disneyland was also hoped to eventually lead to a similar expansion of the program, although that never materialized and the show was finally moved back to Main Street starting in 2003.

Since the vast majority of the tickets to the show were still distributed to VIPs, the move to the Fantasyland Theater had an effect of pretty substantially reducing the availability of the show to the general public.  Unlike the Main Street location, guests that were outside of the theater would not really be able to see or hear much, if any, of the show.  The only options were really to either figure out a way to obtain tickets or to wait in a stand-by line outside the theater and hope to get the opportunity to fill-in leftover space (mostly due to no-shows) available right before the show started.

A few days ahead of time, Disney publicly announced that there would be a very limited number of tickets available to the general public the morning of each of the two show days.  The announcement stated that the tickets would be available on a first-come, first-served basis at the entrance to the theater immediately after park opening and that each guest arriving would be able to request a maximum of 6 tickets.  With the expected very limited availability, it quickly became evident that they would all be distributed very quickly and that it would be necessary to rush to the theater as quickly as possible after park opening to get a chance at them. 

Back in 1998, I was a very active participant on the old alt.disney.disneyland Usenet discussion group.  The local participants on that board had established a weekly meet at the park every Sunday at noon, which I attended just about every week.  Quite a few of the regulars there were interested in seeing the show, although a lot of people didn’t have the ability to easily get down to the park right at opening on a Sunday morning.  Since I was still fairly young and unattached at the time, I decided that I did want to try for tickets and I volunteered to pick up the full 6 ticket maximum so that I could share with some of the other members of the group.

The Saturday morning ticket distribution went pretty much as everyone (except, apparently, those at Disney that came up with this plan) would probably expect.  Locals that wanted tickets arrived as early as possible and got into position as far in as possible during the pre-opening period where only Main Street is usually available.  There was a mad, not particularly safe dash from the "rope drop" location at the end of Main Street to the theater right after park opening and the available tickets were all distributed within about 10 minutes or so.  This was widely reported in the online forums available at the time (mostly the newsgroups) and the story even got picked up by the Orange County Register newspaper.  I think Disney was between a rock and a hard place for Sunday, as Saturday’s distribution had shown them the problems but they couldn’t really change the announced procedures at the last moment.

On Sunday morning, I headed down to the park as early as I could and arrived a little over an hour before the announced park opening time.  After parking and taking the tram over to the entrance area, I quickly ran into another friend from the newsgroup and joined him in line at the turnstiles.  Once the park opened, we quickly made our way to the end of Main Street and positioned ourselves right by the rope.  It was pretty obvious that just about everyone waiting right by the rope was there for Candlelight tickets. 

While we were waiting at the rope, my friend recognized the sister of one of the other regulars from the newsgroup.  I hadn’t met her before, but knew her brother fairly well.  He had even mentioned to me a few weeks before that his sister was going to be moving down from Northern California and would probably start showing up at some of the park meets.  She was there for the Candlelight tickets as well, hoping to get tickets for her and her brother.  The three of us spent some time chatting while waiting for rope drop at the park’s official opening time.

For those of us trying for tickets, rope drop was much like the start of a marathon.  As soon as the park was opened, everyone headed to the Fantasyland Theater in as fast a sprint as they could manage.  Disney did post some employees along the route to the theater who made a few futile attempts to call for people to slow down, but who were clearly really there mainly to keep the pathway open and to be ready to attend to anyone that fell or otherwise became injured.  I really hated running through the park like that, but I knew it was the only possible way to get tickets.

My friend and I managed to pretty much stick together during the run and ended up in roughly the same position in line.  There were a fair number of people that made it into line ahead of us, but we were close enough to the front to get tickets.  Unfortunately, the girl had fallen behind by quite a bit and was considerably further back in line.  They did run out before she got to the front of the line, so my friend and I each quickly gave her one of our extra tickets for her and and her brother to use. 

In order to get to the entrance faster, my friend had parked at the Millie’s Restaurant on Harbor Blvd. and walked over instead of dealing with the extra time involved with the toll booths and trams for the Disneyland parking lot.  He needed to go back over to move his car and suggested the three of us all go over and get breakfast at Millie’s.  We all agreed that was a good idea and enjoyed sitting down for a leisurely table service meal after the morning’s excitement.  It was also a nice opportunity to get to know the newcomer to our group a bit.

After breakfast, my friend headed off to move his car to the Disneyland lot while the girl and I walked back to the park.  By the time we got back, it was still an hour and a half or so until the noon meet.  While it probably would have been logical for the two of us to have spent that time riding rides together or something like that, we both were pretty introverted and shy and instead just went off our separate ways.

At this point, I’m sure that anyone that knows me and my family at all well knows where this is going, regardless of having heard this story before or not.  Over the next few weeks, I did get to know the girl, her name is Ilene, better and started spending more time hanging out with her at the Sunday meets as well as a few other group gatherings that were scheduled that month.  I even had Christmas dinner with her and her brother (as well as the other friend from the Candlelight stampede) at one of the Disney hotel restaurants.  We hung around together quite a bit on New Years Eve at the park as well.

We finally got around to exchanging email addresses and IM screennames in early January and finally went on our first official date towards the end of that month.  Ilene and I were married a little under 2 years later and recently celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary.  While that Sunday morning in early December 1998 is probably one that Disneyland would generally rather be forgotten, it is definitely one that worked out extremely well for us.  Although the logistics still sometimes can be very difficult, although not as bad as in 1998, we still look forward to seeing the show every year (sometimes in Florida, including this year) as it holds very special meaning for us.

Our home resort for DVC is Disney’s Saratoga Springs Resort, a large, very spread-out resort complex located near the Downtown Disney shopping and dining area.  At the time that we bought in, this was the only home resort that was available without going through the extra difficulties (and risks) involved with purchasing an interest on the third-party market instead of directly from Disney.  The DVC contract allows members to book accommodations at their home resort 11 months in advance and at any of the other DVC resorts, if available, at 7 months.

Based on what we knew about the location and decor of Saratoga Springs, it hasn’t been our first choice of where to stay.  Our standard procedure has been to go ahead and book our target dates there at the 11 month mark, but then switch the reservation to another resort that is more to our taste once the 7 month booking window opens.  Prior to this year’s trip, we had only stayed at Saratoga Springs for one night, which was last year’s arrival night before heading to port to take the Cruise the next morning.  Our longer Walt Disney World stays as DVC members had included two stays at The Villas at the Wilderness Lodge (our favorite resort) and one stay at the Boardwalk Villas.

This year, we apparently picked some pretty high-demand dates for our trip as there was no other availability for the first 6 nights once we hit the 7-month booking window.  We were able to book Villas at Wilderness Lodge for the last 3 nights only.  We did get on the waiting list for the first 6 nights at Wilderness and also checked back a few times to see about other options.  Nothing opened up, though, and we did end up spending those 6 nights at Saratoga on this trip.

Getting right to the point, we were not especially happy with Saratoga Springs.  The room was very typical of the single-bedroom villas that we have stayed in at other resorts and was still a good fit for our needs.  The size and layout of the complex was our problem.  Saratoga Springs is huge and extremely spread out, making it very difficult to navigate.  Our room was in the Carousel building, which is one of the most remote.  This put us very far away from most of the resort’s amenities, particularly the food services and the Downtown Disney boat transportation.  These major amenities are generally clustered pretty close to one another, but are a pretty long walk from the remote buildings, such as the one where we were staying.

In general, Saratoga Springs is enormous, but simply does not have the infrastructure or design in place to make its size manageable.  The resort is so spread out that there are 5 bus stops.  All of the theme park and Downtown Disney buses stop at each of them, but there is no internal transportation provided.  It definitely seemed like there should be some busses (or even trams or some other smaller vehicle) that just continuously made the loop around the resort in order to provide easy internal transportation.  While you could theoretically get on any of the park buses for one-way transportation to any of the later stops in the loop, there wouldn’t be any readily available transportation back.

Finding your way around the resort can be pretty difficult, particularly at night.  The buildings are named, although each name generally was applied to a cluster of two buildings rather that each having a separate one.  The names are on large signs on upper walls of the buildings, but they are only visible if you are looking from the correct angle and the signs are unlit and nearly invisible at night.  They do have maps posted at various places around the resort, but we found that it could be very difficult to determine the right route from them.  Signs that indicated the directions to specific buildings or facilities are non-existent on the walking paths.

During our one-night stay at Saratoga Springs last year, our visit got off on the wrong foot as we became seriously lost trying to find our room.  After checking in, the desk clerk told us that it was a "pretty easy walk" to our room and didn’t make any recommendation that we get any help from Bell Services with finding our room.  We then ended up walking around for over a half hour trying to find the right room.  This was while lugging our carry-on bags (fortunately our larger luggage was being delivered by Disney’s Magical Express service) around and was after a long and very exhausting day of travel.  We finally did manage to flag down a bellman who drove us to our room (which was pretty much in the opposite direction from where we had gone) on a golf-cart type vehicle. 

This year, we had hoped to avoid repeating that experience by insisting on getting assistance up-front from Bell Services to get to our room.  This worked out ok, although they seemed very understaffed and we had to wait about 20 minutes or so.  With this help, we did get to our room without too much trouble and were able to fairly quickly get settled in before heading to Downtown Disney for dinner.  There was a bus stop not too far from our room (although still a bit further than the walk from the Villas at Wilderness Lodge to the bus stop there) and we were able to find it pretty easily to get a bus to go get dinner.

Our mistake came on our return after dinner.  We decided that we wanted to pick up a few grocery items at the Saratoga Springs snack bar/gift shop  before heading back to our room.  We knew that the dock was right by that building, so we took the boat back from Downtown Disney instead of a bus.  For some reason, we deluded ourselves into thinking that we would then be able to figure out the correct route to walk back to the building where our room was.  Instead, we managed to once again get completely turned around and walk quite some distance in the wrong direction, eventually having to backtrack pretty much all the way back to the main check-in/lobby building.  We eventually ended up having to follow the vehicle roadway (which didn’t have adjacent sidewalks) to find our room, since this was the only place where they seemed to have directional signs that were any help in finding our building.

The resort is easier to navigate during daylight hours and we did walk over to the quick service restaurant for breakfast on one morning.  That was only a one-way trip, though, as our plans were to go visit my parents’ house (they live in the Orlando area) afterward and we just had my father pick us up in his car outside the main lobby.  Other than that, for the rest of the trip we never really went any where at our resort other than the building where we were staying and the nearest bus stop.  We had actually picked up a couple of the refillable soft drink mugs on our first night at the resort, but didn’t use them until we got to the Wilderness Lodge since the quick service restaurant at Saratoga Springs was just too far away.

While I know that I sound very negative about Saratoga Springs, I will also acknowledge that it has some definite merits and could be an excellent choice for some visitors.  One friend suggested to me that it is a resort that is really much better suited for guests that have rental cars (or have driven to the resort) and I can easily see where that would be true.  There appeared to be ample parking throughout the resort and I can easily see where the majority of its shortcomings would be much less relevant to someone with ready access to a car.  As I noted earlier, we even found that we were somewhat able to overcome our difficulties navigating around the resort when we used the roadways intended for cars.

I will also emphasize again that the room itself was very nice, with all the usual features that we have come to greatly appreciate in a 1-bedroom DVC villa.  This included the spacious layout, the full kitchen, the enormous bathroom with a whirlpool tub, the in-unit washer & dryer, and the comfortable, high-quality furnishings.  Despite our misgivings about the resort, I can pretty definitively say that we would definitely choose another stay there over a non-DVC room, even at a resort that we like better in other ways.  I do plan to pursue options for changing our DVC home resort (most likely to the new Bay Lake Tower that is being built near the Contemporary), but if that doesn’t work out I hope that the lessons learned on this past visit can make any future stays at Saratoga Springs less problematic for us.

As I mentioned towards the beginning of this post, we were able to book a room at the Villas at Wilderness Lodge, our favorite resort, for the last 3 nights of our visit.  This was my fifth stay at the Wilderness Lodge, third in the Villas.  Prior to becoming a DVC member, I had stayed there for one night years ago, before I even met my wife, and then my wife and I also stayed there for our honeymoon.  In many ways, arriving back there towards the end of our trip felt a lot like we were coming home.  We find the overall decor and the very compact layout of that resort to be extremely welcoming and even downright comforting. 

When we bought into DVC, the most easy choice for a home resort was definitely Saratoga Springs since any other home resort would have likely required a secondary market purchase.  In retrospect, I do kind of wish that we had gone to the trouble to try and purchase points at Wilderness Lodge back then.  As I mentioned,  I see Bay Lake Tower as our likely best option for changing our home resort now.  The Contemporary was our second favorite of the resorts where we had stayed and it also has certain advantages logistically, particularly with its walking-distance proximity to the Magic Kingdom and its location on the monorail line.  Still, I haven’t ruled out at least investigating what possibility might exist for at least shifting a portion of our points to Wilderness Lodge as our home resort.

We left for the park around 11am and I was pretty surprised at how heavy the traffic on the south 5 freeway was.  In the past, I’ve usually found that traffic is pretty light on Thanksgiving, but the drive this time turned out to be pretty slow-going.  We didn’t see indications of any accidents or other problems, so I suspect that our timing was such that there were just a lot of people heading down to Orange County or San Diego for holiday gatherings.  The drive wasn’t particularly unpleasant, though, and we enjoyed listening to the Christmas music station on XM satellite radio during the drive.  Thanksgiving is the first day that I’m generally willing to start listening to Christmas music, even though it seems like some stations start playing it earlier every year.

We occasionally switched over to the traffic reports on XM, but didn’t get any information from that either.  We found it weird when they were reporting one major incident on “southbound I-10”, considering that the 10 is an east-west freeway.  Eventually, we figured out that the traffic reporter was misreading the first digit of “110” as an “I”.  We often find the traffic reports on there a bit amusing since the reporters are clearly not in Southern California and often seriously butcher pronunciations.  It is particularly fun listening to some of them trying to pronounce “Cahuenga” or “Sepulveda”.

By the time we actually got into the park, it was close to 1pm.  During a previous Thanksgiving visit, we had eaten at Carnation Restaurant on Main Street and had found that to be an especially good choice.  It is a table-service restaurant, which is preferable to cafeteria style for Thanksgiving dinner, and the Americana setting of Main Street just seems exceptionally suited to the holiday.  We were briefly concerned that the weather was a bit drizzly and overcast and the restaurant has all outdoor seating, but the weather was already clearing by the time we got there and we noted that they had large umbrella coverings over all the tables, so we decided to go ahead with it.  Even though we didn’t have reservations, we were seated with only about a 15 minute or so wait.

When they brought the menus and explained to us about the special Thanksgiving dinner, we immediately ran into a very large irritation, although it was one that wasn’t entirely unexpected based on a previous experience.  Despite the fact that it was Thanksgiving and the fact that Disneyland is obviously well-known for attracting families with small children, they were not offering a children’s portion of the turkey dinner.  Basically, children had to either order the adult portion (at the full price) or settle for a choice of chicken strips, macaroni & cheese, or PB&J.  Our 5-year-old most certainly was not going to willingly accept anything other than a turkey dinner, which is one of his favorite meals even when it isn’t Thanksgiving.

When this came up 2-years ago (and our son was only 3), we ended up escalating the issue to a manager and eventually the chef actually came out and offered to prepare a half-portion for our son.  He also instructed the servers to make that option available to any other families and we saw several other families order the same while we were at the restaurant.  I had hoped that after that experience they would start simply placing it on the menu, but I guess that didn’t happen.

Our son’s appetite has grown quite a bit and, quite honestly, we just weren’t in the mood to go through the big hassle of escalating the issue again this year.  Therefore, we just went ahead and ordered 3 adult meals.  We figured my wife and I can also augment our own meals a bit, if it proved to be too much food.  The portions were really quite large, though, and he did end up leaving some of the turkey (and most of the stuffing) on the plate, even after we did both take some of his food as our own second helpings.  We did see other children in the restaurant also struggling through the large portions and I suspect they ended up with a bunch of waste.  In retrospect, I do kind of wish that we had made more of an issue out of it again.

The food was generally pretty good, although we did agree on one complaint.  The gravy used on the potatoes and turkey was quite a bit more salty than it should have been.  It certainly didn’t help that it didn’t occur to me to test it before adding a little additional salt.  It still wasn’t bad enough to warrant sending the food back, but I did find myself scraping off much of the gravy.  Other than that, the turkey was served hot and wasn’t overly dry and the potatoes and stuffing were good as well.  The meal also came with some cooked vegetables which aren’t to my taste (I really don’t like any cooked veggies other than corn) and some fresh cranberry sauce and a dinner roll.  With the obvious caveats above, it was a pretty decent Thanksgiving meal for about $15/person and the location certainly was top-notch for it.

While pumpkin pie was available as a special Thanksgiving-only dessert option, none of us really care for that and decided to opt out from it.  Instead, we got ice cream sundaes from the Gibson Girl Ice Cream Parlor as our dessert and enjoyed them while listening to the piano player at Refreshment Corner.  One of Disneyland’s long-standing traditions for the holiday season is to offer special seasonal food choices at some locations and one of my absolute favorite is peppermint stick ice cream.  That was a key motivation for me wanting to get ice cream for dessert and it was as good as ever.

During the remainder of the afternoon, we took the opportunity to enjoy some of the park’s special offerings for the holidays.  This included two rides (one during the day and one after dark) on It’s a Small World, which they have been extensively decorating for the holidays for a number of years now.  That is something we look forward to every year and we were particularly excited to see this time, since the attraction had been down for a major refurbishment since the beginning of the year.  We only noticed a few minor changes (most notable being all new boats), but everything looked to be in excellent condition.  This is a very popular attraction during the holidays, but the lines were very short (10 minutes or so) each time.  Thanksgiving just isn’t a very busy day at the park.

Other than the two rides on Small World and one ride on King Arthur’s Carrousel, we didn’t actually do any other rides that day.  Instead, we spent some time looking at the various decorations as well as paying a visit to the "Reindeer Roundup" area on Big Thunder Trail to see the pardoned national turkeys (who usually end up at Disneyland after the ceremony with the president) and pay a visit to Santa Goofy.  We also enjoyed a walk through the newly re-opened and updated Sleeping Beauty dioramas in the castle.  This had been closed for about 7 years and it was nice to see it return.  After dark, while my wife went off to do some shopping, my son and I enjoyed sitting for a while at the hub waiting for and watching the lighting ceremony where they turn on the elaborate Christmas lights on the castle.

We left the park for home around 7:30pm or so and found traffic to be fairly light for the drive home.  We made a couple attempts to see if we could find any fast food restaurants opened for a small and quick dinner, but found that everything we checked was closed.  I guess there just isn’t much demand for McDonalds or Burger King on Thanksgiving. While we were getting a bit hungry by the time we made it home (and fixed some hot dogs), I did think it was nice that those places let their employees spend the holiday evening wieh their families.

This was a nice Thanksgiving and, despite some complaints about the meal, I felt we made a good choice as to how to spend the day.

Most people will likely remember that an unusually large number of strong hurricanes hit the southwestern USA, including Florida, during the Summer and early Fall of 2005.  This, of course, included Hurricane Katrina, which so severely devastated New Orleans and other communities in that part of the country.  Orlando was in the direct path of a few of these hurricanes and at least suffered some severe weather from most of them.  Having family in the Orlando area, we had followed these events very closely, but we generally weren’t giving too much thought to any potential impact on our late-October vacation plans, since major hurricanes that late in the season were previously exceptionally unusual.

It did start to grow into a concern during the last week or so prior to our trip as Tropical Storm Wilma formed and eventually was upgraded into a very strong hurricane.  It pretty quickly became apparent that Florida was within its most likely path.  Out travel plans had us arriving in Orlando on the evening of Saturday, October 22. Initially, Wilma looked pretty likely to pass through before our trip, but the storm slowed down somewhat and it ended up making landfall on the southern part of Florida very early in the morning of Monday, October 24.

As the timing of the hurricane became more obvious, we did give some consideration about whether to change our travel plans. While we had heard that Disney and the airlines were generally being pretty generous about waving penalties for late changes to reservations due to the hurricanes, we had also heard numerous reports (including first-hand accounts from family) on how WDW had generally fared well during the previous storms of the season.  The combination of my work schedule and the typically long lead time needed for most WDW reservations led us to realize that our only likely alternatives to going as planned would be to either cut the trip short by a couple days or cancel it altogether.  We ended up deciding to take our chances.

I admit that we did come awfully close to canceling on Friday, though, as our son (just under 2-years-old at the time) woke up that morning with a bad case of pink eye.  We did get him in to see his doctor that day, who very helpfully prescribed a liquid antibiotic that required refrigeration, not exactly the best thing when we had a full day of air travel coming up the next day.  That problem was solved by a quick trip to the store to buy a soft-side cooler and some Blue Ice, but it still was yet another concern.  Late that afternoon when my wife started complaining of a sore throat (typically the first sign of a cold for her), I couldn’t help but wonder if we were seriously tempting fate by planning to continue the trip.  Fortunately, neither of their ailments actually turned out to be overly long-lasting or severe (they were both pretty much fine by Sunday), but we didn’t know that at the time and I admit to being something of a nervous wreck by Friday evening.

The flight from Los Angeles to Orlando on Saturday ended up being pretty non-eventful, fortunately.  We were a bit worried about whether the bad weather would start to hit Florida early enough to have any impact on our flight, but fortunately it pretty much held off until Sunday evening.  This was our first trip using our Disney Vacation Club (DVC) points and we checked into our 1-bedroom villa at the Wilderness Lodge around 7pm or so Florida time.  We had a nice dinner with my Orlando-area family at one of the hotel restaurants (Whispering Canyon) that evening, but otherwise turned in fairly early after being exhausted from the travel day and the loss of sleep due to being so nervous about the trip the night before.

For our trips to Walt Disney World, we tend to do quite a bit of pre-planning as to where we are going to be on any given day.  This is mainly to accommodate the need for reservations at table-service restaurants, but we also find it helpful for general time budgeting.  On Sunday, our plans called for us to spend the day at Disney/MGM Studios (now known as Disney’s Hollywood Studios) with lunch reservations at one of the park’s sit-down restaurants (Sci-Fi Dine-In, I think).  Since the weather was clear in the morning and the storm wasn’t really expected to hit until late in the day, we went forward with that plan, meeting up with my family at the park not too long before our lunch reservations.

The weather that day really did feel like pretty much the definition of the cliched “calm before the storm”.  For most of the day, it was extremely hot and humid, with air that felt almost eerily still.   While the park wasn’t deserted that day, it wasn’t overly crowded either and everyone there did seem pretty wary of the situation and pretty focused on the weather.  Around 6pm, the weather started taking a definite turn for the worse.  In a fairly short time, it shifted from a pretty major stillness to a noticeable (but still not very strong) wind.  The dark cloud patterns in the sky did have a look about them that definitely seemed to suggest that something was coming.  The humidity was continuing to increase such that it definitely felt like rain would be arriving fairly soon.  This started around the time that we were headed over to ride “The Great Movie Ride” and we ended up stopping at a gift shop first to purchase several rain ponchos, one of which we used to cover up our stroller before parking (we also parked under as much cover as we could manage).  It wasn’t raining when we got off the ride, but we still wanted to be safe instead of sorry.

One of the main reasons why we had chosen Disney/MGM Studios for that first day was that the park was scheduled to stay open later for hotel guests as part of the “Extra Magic Hours” program.  We initially held on to the idea of sticking around  later and started looking around for somewhere to get dinner.  We found that there wasn’t really all that much opened, though, despite the fact that it was the typical dinner hour.  I was never really sure if that was fairly normal for that park or if they were starting to close things down early for the weather, although I had a hunch it was fairly normal.  For one thing, they were still distributing the Extra Magic Hours wristbands (required to stay in the park) and also were still indicating that the night-time “Fantasmic!” shows were still expected to run.  Even under the best conditions, we aren’t that fond of the counter-service options at that park and finally decided that maybe it would be wise to get back to our hotel before the weather got worse anyway.  Therefore, we decided to leave the park around 7:30pm to head back to the Wilderness Lodge for dinner at Roaring Fork, the hotel’s fast food place.  It actually started pouring rain while we were on the bus back to the hotel.

After a fairly quick dinner with my parents at Roaring Fork, they headed out so that they could get home before the storm really hit.  Our original plans for Monday were to spend the early part of the day at Disney’s Animal Kingdom and then head over to the Magic Kingdom for dinner at Tony’s Town Square Cafe and to see the nighttime parade and fireworks.  We were pretty uncertain about how long it would take for the storm to move through and when/if the parks would re-open, though, so we left open any plans for meeting up the next day, instead planning to connect via phone/email in the morning.  We then stopped at the hotel shop to stock up on some pre-packaged food (at seriously inflated prices…) from the hotel shop, just to be safe.   The DVC villa had a full kitchen, so that eating a meal or two in our room on Monday was an easy option if needed.  We actually didn’t end up using the food we purchased and, instead, gave it to my parents before we left town, but at least we had it if we needed it.

We then headed back to our room to ride out the storm.  By this time, it was fairly late in the evening (around 9pm) so our first order of business was getting our son off to bed after the fairly long day.  The separate bedroom in the DVC villa was particularly nice in this case as it allowed us to put our son to bed in the living room, but still watch storm coverage on the bedroom TV without disturbing him.  He is a really sound sleeper and never seemed bothered at all by the storm, even as the wind really picked up and the thunder and lightening became more intense.  My wife and I did end up staying up pretty late, monitoring the situation.  In addition to watching the news coverage on the TV, we also had our laptop computer with us, which allowed us to get information via the Internet.  I also periodically posted “on the scene” reports to a couple of Disney-related discussion boards.  My posts from that night to the MousePad discussion boards on Mouseplanet.com can be found in this thread (my handle there is “JeffG”).

The DVC villa was really a rather nice place to wait out this kind of storm.  Despite the intense weather outside, the room remained warm and comfortable.  We never had any power outage (at least that we knew of), which certainly helped in this respect as well.  The villa (like all the 1-bedroom DVC villas) had a big whirlpool bathtub that also provided some very welcome relaxation during the rather tension-generating situation.  If I remember right, exhaustion did finally overwhelm the tension around 1am or so and we finally went to sleep.  It was still very windy and rainy when we woke up around 10am or so on Monday morning, but it ended up being a generally fast moving storm and finally cleared the area by around noon or so.  That morning, we mostly hung around the room using the laptop or watching Disney movies that they were showing on the in-room TV system.

Orlando was largely on the northern edge of the storm’s path, and it had also weakened some before it got that far in-land, so damage was very minimal.   We saw some downed foliage and a few knocked over signs here and there, but nothing serious.  The parks and all the other entertainment areas remained closed until around 1pm, when they finally opened The Magic Kingdom and Epcot.  Animal Kingdom and Disney/MGM Studios remained closed the entire day and I believe many of the other secondary areas (such as water parks and golf courses) also remained closed, although I don’t remember for certain.  Officially, I believe the parks were supposed to be only opened to hotel guests, but I don’t think they really enforced that.  I think that was more of an announced policy intended to discourage people from driving over to the area unnecessarily.

Once the storm had passed, we ventured over to  Roaring Fork for lunch before heading to the Magic Kingdom around 3pm or so. The park was the most uncrowded that I’ve ever seen for any WDW park.  My parents did drive in to meet us at the park and were particularly marveling at the empty parking lot and Ticket and Transportation Center.  He couldn’t resist taking the below picture of the usually very busy road and pedestrian walkway completely deserted.

Every attraction was pretty much a walk-on  that day.  We could have probably used the opportunity to hit all the major headliner rides over and over with little to no wait, but we were instead largely pacing our day around our son’s interests.  That meant that we mostly focused on the Fantasyland rides and on other kid-friendly attractions like the Tomorrowland Speedway and the Tomorrowland Transit Authority (Peoplemover).  He seemed to really have a lot of fun visiting the Magic Kingdom rides with little to no wait.

We did make it to our reservation at Tony’s for dinner that evening, although it was slow enough that we probably could have gotten in to any of the table-service restaurants as walk-ups without much of a wait.  Even better, that evening we were able to walk right up and find uncrowded spots in the hub for both “Spectromagic” (the parade) and “Wishes” (the fireworks show) pretty much right before their scheduled start-times.  For the fireworks, it felt especially strange standing in pretty much the most in-demand viewing location with only a few other people around us.  That was definitely a rare experience.

The rest of the week, the parks continued to be fairly uncrowded, although more crowded than on Monday.  A visit to the Universal Orlando parks later that week found those parks to be especially empty, although I understand that is actually fairly common there that time of year.  The weather also remained very nice for the rest of the week and, in fact, the hurricane largely seemed to have an effect of blowing away a lot of the heat and humidity.  As is typical after any big event like that, there was a bit of a “shared experience” atmosphere and we found ourselves pretty regularly drawn into chats with other guests about the hurricane experiences.  One thing we noted was that quite a few people at the parks later in the week were actually from South Florida, having headed up for impromptu Orlando visits while hurricane damage was being repaired back home.

Overall, I wouldn’t really say that our experience vacationing during a hurricane was anywhere near the negative one that we thought it might be.  I can even say that the hurricane ended up having certain advantages for us when it came to crowd sizes and weather once the storm had passed.  I do think we were fortunate that the storm was fast moving and didn’t hit Orlando as directly as some of the others have.  There was definitely the potential that the storm could have resulted in a much more significant disruption to our vacation.   We did learn that Walt Disney World seemed to be extremely well-equipped to handle this kind of storm, though, so I also would probably not be too quick to cancel a trip on the threat of a hurricane.

During this visit, we let our son largely set the pace and do a lot of the choosing when it came to the rides and shows that we visited, but we also gave him a lot of encouragement to work some new experiences into the visit as well. He visited his favorite attractions (King Arthur’s and King Triton’s Carousels, Mad Tea Party, Tuck and Roll Drive ‘em Buggies, Goofy’s Playhouse, Playhouse Disney Live, Enchanted Tiki Room) while also talking him into visiting several that weren’t on his previous "approved" list (such as MuppetVision 3D, the Aladdin stage show, Toy Story Midway Mania, and the Mark Twain Riverboat). We still didn’t do any of the major thrill rides, even though he is now tall enough for many, but he definitely is making progress.

One thing to note is that we did almost entirely stick to visiting attractions that our whole family could do together. I really was the only one in our party that could have done most of the major thrill rides, since our son isn’t really up to them yet and everyone else in our group has restrictions due to medical conditions. I’m certain I could have gone off to do some of the coasters had I wanted to, but I really was far more interested in family time. I do look forward to the time when my son is ready to do some of those bigger rides with me, but I’m also in no rush about it. The experience of seeing the attractions with my child is so rewarding that I don’t miss the thrill rides.

In the rest of this post, I’m going to write up specific notes on a few key attractions. Our visits to the Disneyland Resort have become less frequent than they used to be and these trips ended up being the first opportunity to see a few new attractions and shows. I’ll also include a few notes about some of the other attractions and shows that included some memorable element.

Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage

The re-themed and re-opened version of Disneyland’s classic Submarine Voyage was the major new attraction for summer of 2007. Due to the extremely long lines (often over 2 hours or more) combined with our son’s skittishness, we hadn’t yet visited it before this trip. We were pretty determined to finally see the ride on this visit, with my father (who is a major Disney-enthusiast) being particularly excited to have the opportunity to ride the subs again.

During our first full day at the parks (Monday 6/23) the ride was having a lot of technical difficulties, resulting in it being closed for much of the day. I’m not really sure if it ever actually opened that day as it was listed as "temporarily closed’ every time we checked in. We did leave the resort for dinner at Knott’s that evening, though, so it may very well have opened later in the day. Seeing it closed so much on Monday did make us (my father in particular) pretty nervous about whether or not we would actually get an opportunity to ride it. On Tuesday, though, the ride was opened and we found that it had a posted wait time of around an hour shortly after we had finished our lunch at the Blue Bayou.

One really nice feature of the ride is that they offer a special, alternative experience for disabled guests who are unable to board the submarines. Off to the side of the dock where guests board the regular ride, there is a building containing a small theater (it seats about 30 guests) where they show a high-definition video presentation of the full ride experience. My mother suffers from severe arthritis in her legs (she has to use a motorized scooter much of the time) and couldn’t possibly have managed the narrow ladder to get onto the ride. My wife has a back condition and also had doubts about whether or not she could board, thus she decided to join my mother and attend the alternate version. They took our son along as well, since we were pretty doubtful that he would be willing to board the rather claustrophobic submarine.

Guests using the alternate experience enter through an entrance near the monorail entrance. With the fairly high-capacity and fairly low-demand for it, they found that they only had to wait for the next available showing. After helping them to get situated in the line for the alternate experience and arranging where to meet later, my father and I were prepared to head around to get into the hour-long queue for the regular ride. Much to our surprise, the ride attendants instead escorted us to a nearby waiting area and told us that we would be put onto the next submarine. That means that we boarded the regular ride about the same time that the others entered the theater, thus minimizing the amount of time our family was separated.

Having read plenty of threads regarding disabled policies at the parks on various discussion boards, I admit that I hesitated a bit to even post about our experience, considering the fact that it essentially meant we were able to reduce a 60 minute wait down to around 10. I want to state clearly that we did not ask for that accommodation and were fully prepared to wait in the line. We did really appreciate it, though, as that essentially gave us back about an hour of family together time in the park that we hadn’t expected to have. Certainly the various health issues do have an impact on the amount that we were able to do in any given day and I have to say that I think Disney’s decision to help out a bit in this way is a good one.

The ride itself is a lot of fun and I really think they have done an excellent job with it. It definitely is a very different experience from the old Submarine Voyage (there is a great nod to the original ride at the end), but I do think the more fantasy-oriented approach works well, although I kind of wish they had found a way to shift the ride entrance over to the Fantasyland side instead of keeping it in Tomorrowland. The various projection techniques are reminiscent of the Finding Nemo ride-through that was added to The Living Seas in Epcot a couple years ago, although the scope of the Disneyland ride is much larger.

The vehicles do continue to be a bit of a hindrance to the experience. Besides the slow-loading nature (which results in the ultra long lines), they have also made the seating a bit more cramped than it used to be, probably in an attempt to up the capacity a bit. I don’t know if it is a result of the projection effects requiring a more precise viewing angle or if I’ve just gotten older since the old ride closed, but I also found that I had to lean forward a lot more than I remembered from the old ride, leaving me with a bit of a sore back at the end. For this reason, I actually think my wife would have a really hard time with the ride and probably should stick with the theater version. I’m at least glad that the alternate experience is available in order to provide something for the guests that can’t ride the subs themselves.

Toy Story Midway Mania

We didn’t wait as long to ride the big new ride for this summer. We have now been on Toy Story Midway Mania at California Adventure three times, once during the 4-day stay, once on the morning of July 5, and then one more time this past weekend before joining some friends for dinner at Downtown Disney. The ride has very quickly become a family favorite. The wait times were all in the 45-60 minute range and the line moves pretty continuously, so we have found it to be a pretty easy wait.

Considering our son’s typical reactions recently, we really didn’t have particularly high expectations that we would be able to get him to go on this one. When we went on the ride for the first time, we decided to all get in line and see if we could arrange a parent swap at the front of the line if he didn’t go on it. We figured that, worst case, one of us would sit the ride out and then get back in line while others babysat.

While he was pretty fussy and quick to give his "I don’t want to ride" arguments when we got into the queue, he did finally end up deciding to ride. I think the nearly an hour wait worked quite a bit to our advantage as it gave us some time to talk with him and try to reassure him. We talked quite a bit about how the ride was based on Toy Story (he hadn’t seen the movies at that time, but he knew the characters) and also spent a fair amount of time emphasizing the other kids in the line, including ones younger than him. It also helped that my father had already ridden the Walt Disney World version and was able to help describe parts of it.

It also turned out to be helpful that we had already taken him to see MuppetVision 3D, so there was an immediate sense of familiarity when we got to the part of the queue where the 3D glasses were distributed. The final deciding factor came, though, from a bit of cleverly-themed phrasing in the safety spiel that was heard in the last part of the queue right before boarding. In that spiel, they referred to the ride vehicle as a"game tram". When we heard that, we immediately emphasized with our son how he regularly rode on the parking lot trams without being afraid. He accepted that and even now sometimes calls the ride the "indoor trams".

One part that was really funny was that, even though we had been emphasizing the theme of the ride throughout the wait, as soon as the ride started and we went past the first pictures of Woody and Buzz he exclaimed "Oooh! It’s a Toy Story ride!" The first time through, he did tend to grip the lapbar pretty tightly the whole time (the ride does have some fast turns) and did seem a bit nervous even though he was obviously having fun. He didn’t really try to actually work the interactive element of the ride during the first two times and I basically scored all the points that he got (on the second ride, I typically switched to using his gun when they started the count-down to the end of a game). By the third time, he was taking more interest in the controls and actually scored most of his points for himself. He took a pretty strong interest in his score and often brought up how many points he got even quite a while after riding. It is a shame that they didn’t use the "email-a-photo" technology that is on Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters, but it did occur to me on the 2nd and 3rd rides to use my cell phone camera to snap a photo of our scores.

There have already been a lot of articles written about the ride itself, so I won’t go into much details there. I really think that the mix of the 3D ride-through technology with the interactive "shooting gallery" concept works extremely well. Unlike previous interactive rides, the cause and effect is very clear and obvious. As for the 3D, I was impressed by the technology involved with the Spider-man ride at Islands of Adventure in Florida, but felt that the ride itself was kind of lacking in storytelling and particularly heart. I am pleased to now see Disney using similar technology and applying their superior storytelling skills.

One of the highlights of the ride is actually outside in the queue area. They have an animatronic figure of Mr. Potato Head that serves as an old-fashioned midway barker, giving various speeches intended to attract riders. It does use the voice of Don Rickles (who voiced the character in the movies), but is programmed with a very wide variety of phrases. An operator is stationed somewhere within site of the queue, which allows phrase selection that simulates a limited amount of interaction with the crowd (i.e. referencing the color of someone’s outfit or acknowledging when a joke gets no reaction from the crowd). It is a lot of fun to watch. During our first visit to the ride, our son was so focused on his indecision about the ride itself, that he didn’t really notice the animatronic. By our second visit, it definitely did catch his attention and he was watching it with a big grin on his face. Of course, he then spent the rest of the queue periodically asking us "why was there a talking potato?"

My only real complaint about the ride is that, even as good as it is, it really does seem a tad redundant. From the very first time that I started to hear details about what this ride was going to be, I found myself really wondering about whether adding a Toy Story based interactive dark ride really was the best idea they could come up with, considering that they already had Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters in Disneyland (as well as similar rides at some of the other Magic Kingdom parks). Both are really good rides and, in each case, the theme really does work very well with the concept. Still, I can’t help but think that this suggests that the vision of the current Imagineers is a a bit more narrow than it should be.

Innoventions Dream House

Pretty much since it opened, I have always felt like Innoventions was perhaps the biggest missed opportunity in the park.  The basic idea of a large exhibit in Tomorrowland that is used as a showplace for new or future technologies is a solid one.  It fits the land’s theme well (in fact, better than some of the other attractions there) and could certainly provide fun and interesting experiences for guests. Unfortunately, the attraction has pretty consistently fallen down badly in execution.  With a few exceptions (must notably, Honda’s Asimo robot demonstration), the sponsors have generally used Innoventions for exceptionally mundane presentations.  The result has been an attraction that should be pretty well suited to frequent visits has instead been one that we avoid.

Recently, Microsoft joined existing sponsor HP to fully re-work the lower level of Innoventions into a new high-tech house of the future exhibit, both an enhancement to the existing Innoventions complex as well as a bit of a throw-back to the House of the Future exhibit that was part of the original Tomorrowland when the park first opened.  This takes up the entire first floor of the complex and is a pretty highly-themed exhibit representing the interior of a house equipped with lots of high-tech equipment, although mostly current or soon to be available items from HP and Microsoft.

The Dream House exhibit had just been showed to the press the week before our visit and was expected to be opened that week.  We stopped by on Monday of the 4-day visit, but found that the exhibit was still closed off with guests instead entering Innoventions through the exit ramp up to the second level.  We talked with the attendant at the entrance, who told us that it wasn’t expected to open for at least another week.  We never thought to check back again during the rest of the 4-night visit, although I later heard that it actually opened on Tuesday.  We finally did visit the attraction on the 4th of July.

I have to say that I was generally rather impressed by the exhibit, a lot more than I had expected to be.  For starters, the entire exhibit is considerably more elaborately themed than anything I had previously seen in Innoventions.  The different sections are all made up to look like different parts of a real house (living room, dining room, girl’s and boy’s bedrooms, etc.) with pretty extensive decoration.  It all has a rather cozy feeling to it that I found quite appealing.  The storytelling aspect to the exhibit is further strengthened by having the attendants all playing the part of various members of the fictional Elias family (the name comes from Walt Disney’s middle name), staying in characters as they gave various demonstrations.

The technology in the exhibit isn’t extremely futuristic and I do think it could have used a bit more variety, but it still is interesting to see.  The most dominant technologies are Microsoft’s Windows Media Center (the audio/video/photo management software that is a standard part of Windows Vista) and Microsoft Surface, which is the table-top sized touch screen interface that they have recently been showing at trade shows and other similar venues.  Media Center is shown on the big-screen TV in a media room as well as on various smaller screens throughout the various rooms of the exhibit.  The idea is that it is all connected to a centralized media server and you can call up various media from pretty much any part of the house.

Microsoft Surface was used in various table-tops throughout the attraction, providing access to a variety of entertainment or informational function.  Some of the demonstrations involved using the touchscreen to manipulate photographs in various ways, including organization, sizing, cropping, etc.  Another really cool example was the use of a Surface table as a big electronic book where you could actually turn the pages by simply moving your hand across the book.  The dining room had a demo that was guided by one of the "family-member" performers who showed how various specially designed objects could be placed on the table to trigger specific programs.  One example that I recall included a figurine of a fish that triggered an interactive "fish tank" program.  Not very practical, but interesting.  One thing that I thought was particularly notable was that our 4-year-old very quickly took to interacting with the Microsoft Surface tables and was easily able to figure out the user interfaces.

My favorite part of the exhibit was the boy’s bedroom.  When you go into this room, one of the family members reads the story of Peter Pan as various clips from the movie are displayed on big video screens mounted to the walls of the bedroom.  There is even a cannon toy in the room which a kid from the crowd gets to use during the battle scene of the story, with the shots actually registering on the screens.  The whole thing is very charming and also rather effective.  The girl’s bedroom featured an interactive mirror where a touch-screen interface could be used to electronically try on various outfits or different hair styles.  I wasn’t as impressed by that, although admittedly that might be because I’m male…

We actually spent about an hour or so fully exploring the Dream House exhibit and would like to go back and spend some more time there on a future visit (for one thing, a few elements weren’t working).  I do think they could stand to upgrade the technology a bit with a bit more variety, but I overall think this is a huge improvement for Innoventions.

Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Stone Tiger

As a tie-in to this summer’s release of Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Crystal Skull, Disneyland replaced the long-running Aladdin storytelling show in Adventureland with this new kid-oriented Indiana Jones show.  Everyone in our group pretty much agreed that the show was a misfire on several levels and hoped that perhaps the vastly superior previous occupant of the theater would return once the value of tying in to the movie is pretty well past.

Pretty much everything about the show points to it being a pretty obvious rush job to quickly take advantage of the renewed interest in the character (which is, of course, already featured in a major E-ticket attraction in Adventureland).  All of the hosts and hostesses at the theater were still wearing the middle-eastern style costumes that were designed for the Aladdin show.  The set on the stage is still largely the same, even including the large walk-through tiger’s head designed after Aladdin’s Cave-of-Wonders.   The globe-trotting nature of the Indiana Jones character does make it pretty easy to adapt a show to just about any setting, but it still is a pretty obvious indication that not too much effort or expense went into this show.

The new show maintains the basic storytelling format as the previous Aladdin show, even though Indiana Jones really isn’t as kid-friendly a basis for such a show.  The seating is still set up with a large section of ground-seating in the front for children and then a number of rows of chairs behind for adults (and kids that, like our son, are still timid about sitting by themselves).  The storyteller this time is introduced as a female colleague of Indy that enlists the help of the kids in the audience to work out a series of clues that were left behind before Indy disappeared in his quest for a legendary object of great power.  Of course, Indy himself eventually shows up at the end after a few kid volunteers have helped out with the various tasks indicated by the clues.

The basic idea isn’t that bad, I suppose, but it really doesn’t amount to all that much other than some nice photo opportunities for the kids that are chosen to help out.  The old Aladdin storytelling had a lot of humor and a fairly substantial story (the plot of the movie) to hold the attention of the rest of the audience.  This show really gets rather tedious during some long segments where most of the audience is basically just watching other people’s kids going through some fairly uninteresting motions.

There is also a major story problem with the way the show has been structured, but I can’t really go over that without spoilers.  If you want to see the show and don’t want to know details about what happens, please skip ahead to the next paragraph.  BEGIN SPOILERS: The big twist of the show is that the storyteller ends up to be a villain who was trying to obtain the powerful artifact for herself.  The climax of the show is a fight sequence between Indy and the storyteller, who eventually is defeated.  The problem is that Indiana Jones isn’t really a character that instantly generates any kind of audience connection when he isn’t played by Harrison Ford.  That results in an ending where you are basically expected to be rooting against the character you have followed for the first 3/4 of the show and rooting for a stranger that just showed up.  That really doesn’t work.  The Indiana Jones show in Florida gets around this problem by making the whole presentation a behind-the-scenes demo and identifying the person playing Indy as a stuntman.  Trying to make a more literal Indiana Jones show really was a pretty bad idea at its root.  END SPOILERS

In addition to the show in the Oasis, they also added "Indiana Jones Moments" at various points around Adventureland.  These are just short (about 5 minutes or so) little stunt fights between Indiana Jones and some random villain.  The specific one we saw was on the upper level of the Jungle Cruise queue.  While I suppose these can be a bit of a disruption of crowd control in the already confined area of Adventureland, they also are kind of fun.  I think this was really a better choice of tie-in than the fairly lame longer show.

The Enchanted Tiki Room

The other attractions that I’ve discussed in this post so far have been new ones, but I did want to make note of our visit to this one classic attraction.  June 23rd (the second day of our visit) was the 45th anniversary of the opening day of The Enchanted Tiki Room.  When we visited the attraction that afternoon, we were pleased to find a completely packed theater and some very appropriate attention being paid to the anniversary.

Upon arrival at the waiting area for the attraction, the castmembers at the attraction all made a point of letting the visitors know of the anniversary.  Most of the castmembers were also wearing the standard Disneyland "Happy Birthday" buttons (with the number 45 printed on them) that are usually given out to guests.  A pretty large percentage of the guests at the show also seemed to be fans who were pretty aware of the significance of the day, although I did overhear one fairly clueless visitor inquiring at the nearby juice bar about whether the pre-show was the entire attraction or if there was something else to it…

The castmember that usually "wakes up" Jose to start the show first gave a short speech in recognition of the anniversary.  I wish that I had made a recording of it or could even find a transcript online as I thought it was really excellent.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Walt Disney Imagineering prepared a script for this as the speech managed the delicate balance of acknowledging the show’s significance without breaking the illusion.  The speech talked a bit about the characters and their connection to Walt Disney and then went into a brief discussion of how they led the way for such attractions as Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion.  The speech managed to convey all of this while never using words like "animatronic", "mechanical", or anything else that would even begin to suggest that the birds were not real.

I made a number of visits to the Florida park (at the time there was only one) when I was a kid and the Tiki Room was very much a family favorite.  I’m saddened that the Walt Disney World version has been replaced with a very poorly-conceived attempt to update the show, but I remain very happy that the original show is mostly still intact at Disneyland.  It is missing the old Offenbach segment, a trim that I do acknowledge was probably a correct one as its elimination has almost entirely stopped walk-outs.  I do wish they would perhaps program the show to allow that segment to be added back in on special occasions like the anniversary, though. 

While we pretty carefully avoided the pre-publicized anniversary merchandise event that was held the day before (and I heard was something of a madhouse), I’m really glad we were there and able to visit the show on the actual anniversary.  It made for a pretty special occasion.

Fireworks (including Fourth of July)

The fireworks shows at Disneyland (and the other Disney parks) usually have a lot more substance and complexity than you find in a typical fireworks show.  Disney pretty much pioneered the synchronization of fireworks to music and, particularly in recent years, they have been regularly raising the bar for the use of fireworks as a storytelling medium.  The various versions of Illuminations at Epcot and the finale for Fantasmic! at Disneyland really started this trend and then Believe…There’s Magic In the Stars, the fireworks show introduced for Disneyland’s 45th Anniversary, definitely set a new standard for the traditional over-the-castle fireworks show.  They have continued to grow this talent with the current Remember… Dreams Come True at Disneyland and Wishes at the Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom as well as special holiday shows in both California and Florida.

Our main reason for braving the crowds and working out all the complex logistics to visit Disneyland on the 4th of July is because we consider it to be the best place in this area to see a great fireworks show.  For the past several years, Disneyland would show the regular fireworks show followed by a special patriotic addition that was usually both  highly moving and viscerally spectacular.  Those special performances shot off an amazing number of fireworks in a very short time, while still managing to continue Disney’s recent mix of expert synchronization and storytelling.

This year, we were pretty excited to find out that Disney was producing a full-length, original patriotic show for the 4th of July instead of running the regular fireworks show followed by a tag as in previous years.  The new show had the somewhat awkward title Celebrate America: A Fourth of July Concert in the Sky and versions were being produced for both Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World.  The Disneyland version was scheduled to be shown only on the 4th of July itself, although the Walt Disney World version did run for a couple different nights around the 4th of July.  Unfortunately, through no fault of Disney, the evening ended up being marked by a fair amount of disappointment.

From experience, we have found a favorite place for viewing the 4th of July fireworks that still affords a good view, but isn’t as crowded or logistically difficult as most of the more popular locations in the park.  We do still generally have to stake out our spot about 2-3 hours before the scheduled start time, though.  Fortunately, other good friends also view the show from the same location, which allows for some good socializing during the wait for the show to begin.

The first sign of trouble came about an hour before the show when a castmember came over to where we were sitting and let us know that there was a small chance that we would be required to move.  She indicated that wind conditions were such that there was a little bit of concern that we could end up in an area that would have to be evacuated out of concern that ash and other debris from the show could fall there.  She said that they would likely make the final decision around 30 minutes before show time.  Fortunately, we never heard anything more about this and were able to stay in our seating area.

The next sign of trouble came about 15-20 minutes before the start of the show with an announcement that the show might have to be "modified" due to wind conditions at upper elevations.  This announcement was repeated a couple times before the start of the show and it never was entirely clear what the modifications might be.  Our guess was that the show probably included some low-level fireworks set off near the castle (a standard element of the regular show) and that those might need to be removed.  That was really only a guess, though.

The show did start on schedule without any additional announcement at start time about potential modifications.  It opened with some patriotic narration and then launched into a substantial and impressively choreographed display of fireworks set to various patriotic music.  While our location didn’t provide an optimal view of the castle, we could see that they were, in fact, using the low-level fireworks near the castle as well as all the other various launch points used during the regular show.  It was an impressive display and one that we were enjoying tremendously.

A little over half-way into the show, though, it abruptly came to a halt.  First, the audio cut-off and then soon afterwards all of the lights that had been dimmed for the show quickly came back on.  At that point, an announcement came over the sound system stating that the show could not continue due to wind conditions at high elevation.  The show was then over and our next possible chance to see the rest of the show, including what I’m guessing would have been a spectacular finale, will be July 2009.  The portion of the show that we saw was absolutely great and I’m glad to have seen it, but I do have to say that this ending really did cause a tremendous deflation of mood.  As we made our way out of the park and back to our hotel, I can’t say that we ever were quite able to shake the rather downbeat mood that this abrupt ending brought on.

Again, I don’t really fault Disney at all for this as they clearly can’t control the weather and also must stop the show if it becomes unsafe.  I am sure that they made every effort to keep the show going and I strongly suspect that the fireworks never would have started at all had it been any night other than the 4th of July.  I later heard that there was a long line at Guest Relations as people were asking for refunds and that Disney was pretty freely giving them out.  Asking for a refund for this kind of thing is not something I could ever see doing personally and I do tend to think it is a pretty tacky request, but I also can at least understand the mentality behind it.  I certainly can understand Disney’s reason for deciding that it was probably better to give out refunds when they didn’t necessarily have to than to deal with highly disappointed customers telling their friends (which, today, could be large numbers of people on the Internet) about their disappointment and Disney’s lack of caring.

What I saw of the show was great and there are videos of the full Walt Disney World show (which had an identical soundtrack, although the pyrotechnics were customized for each park) pretty readily available online that give an even better view of what the whole show would have been.  I do hope that they do the same or a similar show next year and that the weather cooperates so that we get a full performance.

On a happier note, we did see Remember… Dreams Come True in its entirety twice during our 4-night June visit and we still saw bits and pieces of it on the other two nights as well.  On Wednesday night, we staked out a spot in the Town Square area (near the train station) of Main Street to watch the show from inside the park.  We have found that this part of Main Street doesn’t fill up nearly as early as the areas closer to the castle, but you can still see pretty much all of the effects in their entirety from that vantage point.  It also puts you pretty close to the main gate, allowing for a pretty quick exit at the end of the show, if so desired.

The partial showings we saw were on Sunday and Monday night.  On Sunday evening, we went into California Adventure to watch the Electrical Parade and the fireworks started going off as we were walking back to the hotel.  The view isn’t very good from much of anywhere inside the park, so we just kind of glanced at them through the trees and between the buildings during our walk back.  On Monday night, the fireworks started going off just as we got off at the Disneyland Drive exit during our drive back from dinner at Knott’s.  We ended up watching most of the show from the Grand Californian parking lot before heading up to our room.  We even could faintly hear the soundtrack, which was being piped into the pool area at the Paradise Pier Hotel, which is right across from the parking lot.

Finally, our last viewing of the show was on Thursday night from the balcony of our hotel room.  During the 4-night stay, our room was located on the 4th floor of the hotel and the window faced directly towards Disneyland.  We had a pretty good view of the Matterhorn from the room and could even see the top of the castle.  This also meant that we were in a pretty good location to see pretty much all of the fireworks.  To make it even better, there is a TV station available in the rooms at the Grand Californian which plays the soundtrack during the show. 

Thanks to all of this, our last night of the initial 4-night visit ended with us getting a few desserts from the concierge lounge and then sitting on our balcony watching the fireworks show as the soundtrack played through the TV speakers in the room.  All-in-all, that made for a rather magical way to end that visit.

We have a membership in the Disney Vacation Club (DVC) timeshare and had originally planned to make a trip to Walt Disney World in late June right after our son completed his first year of pre-school.  After our October trip last year, we found that our son had become pretty skittish on rides and attractions and we decided it probably would be wise to delay our trip until December to increase the chance that he would grow out of that a bit.  Canceling that trip meant that we ended up with a number of DVC points that we had to use by August or end up forfeiting them.

My parents live in the Orlando area and they decided to come up to visit us during the same period that we had originally planned our Florida trip.  They were interested in staying down at the Disneyland Resort for a few days, so it then made sense to use up those points with a stay down there.  After researching, we discovered that we had the points available to cover the cost of a concierge-level room at Disney’s Grand Californian hotel for those 4 nights in June with enough left over for the 4th of July as well.  We had used points to stay there on July 4th for the last few years (avoiding the need to drive home after the fireworks) and it was very appealing to do that again this year while also having the chance to enjoy a longer, multi-day stay at the Grand Californian as well.

Instead of trying to test my memory with a day-to-day report on our visit, I’m going to categorize my report.  In this first part, I am going to concentrate on our dining experiences during the trip.  I’ll likely add additional parts to this over the next few days reporting on other aspects of the trip.

Character Dining

My parents arrived mid-afternoon on June 22 and we decided that a character dinner would be a good way to start the trip.  Around the 60 day mark before our trip, we made reservations at Goofy’s Kitchen (at the Disneyland Hotel) for that first-night dinner.  Our reservations were at 6pm and we were happy that they were able to seat us within about 5-10 minutes of our arrival at the restaurant.  Walk-up guests were being told that there was a 90 minute wait, so reservations are definitely a very good idea here.

Before seating, they gathered our family together for a photo with Pluto.  About halfway through the meal someone came to our table to try and sell us a pretty overpriced (around $40, if I recall) package of the photos.  They did the same thing when we did the character breakfast at PCH Grill later in the week (this time with Daisy Duck), so this must now be standard at the character meals.  In both cases, we declined as the packages were pretty costly and the photos weren’t that great.  I don’t remember encountering this there before (although it has been a while since we last did a character meal at DLR) and I don’t really care for this system.  I don’t mind the pre-meal photos, but I’d much rather they use Photopass to sell the photos.  At least at PCH, a CM did offer to also take a couple photos with our own camera, something that wasn’t offered at Goofy’s Kitchen.

The food at Goofy’s was ok, but nothing special.  This was consistent with our past experiences there.  We have always found that you definitely go there much more for the character-experience than for the food.  The food is definitely better than a low-end buffet like a Hometown Buffet, but I would also say it is closer to that than it to what you typically find at a high-end hotel buffet such as at the better Vegas hotels or at somewhere like a Hilton or a Hyatt.  Those used to the Walt Disney World character meals are also apt to be disappointed by Goofy’s based on our typical experiences.

The buffet does feature carved prime rib as a main entree and it was pretty decent.  On my first trip up there, I did get a piece that turned out to be quite a bit more rare than I generally like (and I prefer beef to be medium to medium-rare), but I can’t fault them too much for that since I didn’t specify a preference.  On a subsequent trip up there, I was easily able to get another slice that was more to my taste.  I do think they should probably ask before serving the meat that rare, but it still wasn’t that big a deal.  I did think the rest of the selection at the buffet was somewhat more limited than it should have been, which was not unexpected based on past visits.  For example, I was really surprised that they only offered one variety of roasted potatoes (which I couldn’t eat because they had onions) and didn’t even have the mashed potatoes and gravy that are usually commonplace at this kind of buffet.

I actually thought that the children’s section of the buffet was a better selection.  They had a couple different kinds of pizza, chicken strips, popcorn shrimp (I actually had quite a bit of this), macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti.  Our son actually completed finished off two pretty full plates of food, which was a larger meal than we are used to him finishing.  He especially liked the spaghetti and ate two pretty big helpings of that.

As I mentioned earlier, we also went to the character breakfast at the PCH Grill in the Paradise Pier Hotel.  This was something of a last minute decision on our part, with us making the reservations on Tuesday afternoon for breakfast on Wednesday morning.  Fortunately, this is a pretty easy character meal to get into, so we had no problems getting the reservation at pretty much our choice of time.  With 4 nights at the resort (and none of us being infrequent visitors to Disney theme parks), we were on a pretty leisurely visit and didn’t have breakfast until 10am.  The person taking our reservation actually asked several times if we really were sure that we wanted to have breakfast that late, so I got the impression that the demand for that time isn’t very high.

I was quite pleased with the food at the breakfast and would probably be inclined to recommend it over Goofy’s, at least if the food is a key consideration.  One of the best features of this buffet (which is actually standard at all the DLR breakfast buffets) is the omelette/eggs-to-order station.  I had a ham, cheese, and bacon omelette that was cooked exactly to my taste (I requested it well-done) and very good.  On a previous visit, we had found that they had pre-prepared scrambled eggs that were pretty bad, to the point where we thought they may have been made from powdered eggs.  We noticed that this time the only eggs they had on the regular buffet were a western-style scramble with all kinds of veggies and such mixed in.  For regular scrambled eggs, they cooked them to order.  My wife had some and, again, they came out exactly the way she likes them.

The rest of the buffet had most of the usual breakfast foods, including bacon, sausage, potatoes, waffles, pancakes, french toast, fruit and melon, and various pastries.  It was a good selection and the quality was generally high.  I particularly liked the bacon which was thick and had a strong smokey flavor.  A nice touch was that both the pancakes and the waffles were Mickey Mouse shaped and the waffles were offered in both larger waffles intended for adults and smaller ones intended for kids (or lighter eaters, I suppose).  Another really cool feature of the buffet was that they had a pitcher of fruit smoothies and plastic cups available.  These were a kind of citrus, banana mix which I found to be very tasty and refreshing.  I ended up going up for a couple refills on this.

I’ve talked about the food at both restaurants, but the character-interaction is obviously every bit as important at these buffets.  At Goofy’s Kitchen, we saw Goofy (of course…), Pluto, Chip & Dale, Baloo, Mulan, and Jasmine.  At PCH, we saw Daisy, Goofy, Pluto, Stitch, and Lilo.  Mickey Mouse doesn’t usually appear at any of the DLR character meals and we didn’t see Minnie at either one this time.  At Goofy’s Kitchen, Pluto did eventually circulate around to the tables, so I presume that some other character took over the arrival photos at some point.  We didn’t see Daisy circulate to the tables at PCH, even after Pluto took over the photo sessions mid-way through the meal (Pluto never circulated either).

As you might guess from those lists, the character greetings at both restaurants were pretty frequent, something that hasn’t always been the case at DLR character meals.  Both restaurants do unfortunately tend to have some stretches where no characters seem to be in the dining room at all, but fortunately they weren’t too long this time.  The overall experience at PCH is much more relaxed than at Goofy’s, where they occasionally stop to do the Macarana (using the “Tiki Room” version) or give kids a chance to pound on a bunch of plastic pots and pans.  The latter was something my son did enjoy quite a bit.  Goofy’s was also much more crowded and had a lot more occasions where all the characters were diverted for a bit for birthday parties.  The result was that the character visits tended to be shorter there.

Goofy’s Kitchen is a bit more expensive and guests are required to pre-pay before being seated, unlike at PCH where a check is brought at the end.  Goofy’s also automatically added a gratuity to the check for our group of 5, while it was left up to us at PCH.  It might seem surprising that the service was actually much more responsive and attentive at Goofy’s, but PCH really has a long-standing reputation for extremely poor service.  This was far from being our worst experience there from this standpoint, but we did tend to have to wave people down to remove used plates or get drink refills.

Table Service Dining

During our visits, we had 3 regular table service meals: lunch at the Blue Bayou, breakfast at Carnation Cafe, and dinner at the Catal Uva Bar at Downtown Disney.  All were very good and enjoyable experiences.  The only one we had a reservation for was the Blue Bayou (it is pretty much a necessity there), but we only had very short waits for our tables at any of the three.

Our breakfast at Carnation Cafe on Main Street was the morning of our first full day (Monday) and was actually the very first thing we did inside Disneyland itself.  I’ve always loved the location of this restaurant, which is an outdoor cafe right on Main Street itself.  It is a great atmosphere and extremely fun place to dine, particularly when the weather is nice.  I’ve not been too happy with their lunch or dinner menus for a while, so it was nice to have the opportunity for breakfast there.  The breakfast menu includes a nice selection of egg & meat platters, waffles, pancakes, etc.  I suspect most guests wouldn’t have much trouble finding something to their liking there.  I had the Mickey Mouse waffles, which were hot and fresh and very good.  Others in our party had the pancakes and the bacon and egg breakfast and everyone seemed happy with their choices.

Our lunch at Blue Bayou was on Tuesday afternoon.  The restaurant was refurbished a couple years ago with a new, upgraded kitchen.  At that time, it was upgraded to a higher-end “fine dining” location with quite a bit higher prices (Cafe Orleans took over as the lower-cost table service location in New Orleans Square), but also a reputation better food quality and a somewhat more upscale menu.  This was our first visit to the restaurant since this upgrade and we weren’t disappointed.  Three of the adults in our party all ordered the prime rib dinner and one ordered the pork chop.  I was happy to see that they actually offered a child’s portion of the prime rib as we have often complained about the tendency of Disney not to offer a kid’s version of adult entrees that our son would have enjoyed.  In this case, he decided he wanted the macaroni and cheese instead, but it is great to know prime rib is available to him.

We were all very happy with our selections.  The adult entrees were all served with the restaurant’s “wedge salad”, which is a wedge of iceberg lettuce topped with a light vinaigrette dressing.  I found it to be very good.  I do know that some people aren’t as fond of iceberg lettuce and I have read some concerns about whether that is really “high-end” enough for this kind of restaurant, but I prefer iceberg over other kinds of lettuce so it was very much to my own taste.

The prime rib was a good quality piece of meat and was cooked pretty much exactly right for the “medium” level that I had ordered.  The meat is served with a fairly strong wine-based sauce that I found complimented the flavor very well, although I do tend to really like beef served with that kind of sauce.  My wife was less enthusiastic about it and indicated that she would probably ask for it to be left off for future visits.  My mother was pretty happy with the pork chop as well.  I did try a small piece of it and can’t say it is something I would likely order there.  It is served with a sweet, apple-based sauce and I’m not generally a fan of most meats when served with a sweet sauce like that.  My mother does tend to like that better than I do and did really enjoy the entree.

On the last evening of our longer trip (Wednesday night), we made a somewhat spontaneous decision to have dinner at the downstairs Uva Bar at Catal in Downtown Disney.  My father had initially suggested Storyteller Cafe in the Grand Californian, but we hadn’t eaten at the Uva Bar for quite a while (and they had never eaten there) and I had heard from other friends that they had recently made a number of positive updates to their menu.  The restaurant was not overly crowded that evening and we were seated in the outdoors section almost immediately upon arrival.

When the restaurant had first opened, the downstairs location had initially specialized in tapas (smaller, appetizer-portions that are generally intended to be combined and/or shared).  They had generally moved away from this for a while, but have recently mostly returned to this format.  I typically find this to be a pretty appealing type of meal, particularly when there are a fair number of selections that are to my taste.

At this particular meal, I ordered three different items: BBQ ribs, garlic shrimp (which my father and I shared), and a “snack” type order of roasted almonds (my son ate quite a few of these as well).  Others at the table also ordered small Caesar salads and a few of us ordered strawberry smoothies to drink.

All of the items we ordered were excellent and we all left quite full.  My favorite item was the shrimp, which had a rich, garlicky flavor without allowing it to become overwhelming.  The ribs are actually served in fairly large portions for a tapas style restaurant and likely would be plenty of food for light eaters or for those not looking for an overly large meal.  The meat on the ribs was very tender (pretty much falling off the bone) and the sauce was very good and not too heavy.

Service at all three of the table service restaurants was generally attentive and friendly.  Blue Bayou has a reputation for somewhat spotty service, but that was not our experience at all on this visit.  We did find the food to come out a little bit slowly at the Uva Bar, especially for that type of restaurant.  While Catal is one of my favorite restaurants, we have often found that our one small complaint has been that the meal pacing has been a little off on many of our visits to both the upstairs and downstairs parts of the restaurant.  It wasn’t a huge flaw, but worth noting, particularly for those that are looking for a somewhat quicker meal, such as before going back into the parks.

Grand Californian Craftsman’s Club (concierge lounge)

We also had two breakfasts and a several snacks in the Craftsman’s Club, which is the special lounge that is only accessible to concierge level guests at the Grand Californian.  The Craftsman’s Club provides a number of different buffet-style food offerings, including continental breakfast in the morning, late morning/early afternoon tea time, late afternoon wine and cheese, and evening desserts.

For breakfast, they offer a variety of pre-packaged breakfast cereals as well as a buffet of fresh fruit and pastries.  The buffet also has bread and bagels and an available toaster.  Various juices, milk, and coffee are available to drink (the club also always has mini-refrigerators stocked with small bottles of water, Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite).  I particularly liked the croissants, which were very fresh and light.  In fact, on the morning we checked out after our first stay, we ended up stopping in and picking up one of these for each of us as a quick, on-the-road breakfast before our drive down to Carlsbad for a day at Legoland.

The buffet at the tea included a few different types of mini-sandwiches, chocolate-dipped strawberries (we ate a lot of these…), more fresh fruit, a couple different kinds of cookies, and freshly-baked scones that were served warm.  For the scones, some fresh berry jam was provided as well.  Obviously, various types of tea was available as well, although neither my wife nor I are tea drinkers so we didn’t try any.  One nice touch is that they also had a big container of Goldfish crackers (and small bowls to put them in) as an extra kid-friendly snack.  These were also available during the wine and cheese time later in the day.  Our 4-year-old really enjoyed those, although I admit my wife and I ate quite a few of those too.

The afternoon wine and cheese buffet includes a good selection of different types of cheese and crackers.  Most of the cheeses offered are of the somewhat more gourmet varieties, including various soft-cheeses, brie, and even blue cheese.  This is very much to my taste, although my wife expressed some disappointment that they didn’t offer more in the way of simpler cheddar or other more mainstream types of cheese.  A number of different choices of wines were available by the glass and I believe I saw that they offered beer as well.  The alcoholic drinks are served by the hosts and hostesses on request, but the drinks were all complementary and they were reasonably generous about offering refills.

The last food selection is a dessert buffet that is offered in evening.  This buffet included a nice selection of cookies, cakes, and other sweets.  We were only at the hotel early enough for this on the last night of the first visit (since we were in the parks the other evenings), but we did enjoy picking out a selection of sweets to take back to our room and enjoy while we watched the fireworks from our balcony.

The Craftsman’s Club is generally a really nice benefit available to the concierge-level guests and I do think it does somewhat help to justify the higher cost of the room.  The one criticism that I do have is that I really think they could use some adjustments to the hours and schedules.  First of all, the club closes at 10pm every night, which is especially early when you consider that one or both parks is typically open later than that a fairly large percentage of the time.  It would be very nice to be able to make some use of the club upon return to the hotel after the nighttime entertainment in the parks.  If nothing else, we would have liked very much to have had access to the complimentary sodas and water.  It doesn’t help that pretty much everything in the hotel (except the bar) closes at 10, making it pretty difficult to find drinks or snacks that late.

We also thought that they were perhaps a bit too strict with the ending times for the various buffets, particularly breakfast.  Officially, the breakfast ends at 10am.  On July 5, we made it over there around 9:55 and found that the hosts and hostesses were strongly pushing a “last call” for everyone to get any food that they wanted.  Promptly at 10, they very quickly started gathering up all of the food.  This is despite the fact that there were still quite a few people still in there eating and the tea doesn’t start until 11.  To their credit, I did see the hosts and hostesses make a few trips to the back room to get additional items for people after the food had been put away, but it did seem like a bit more flexibility would be in order here, possibly even keeping the breakfast foods out until pretty much time for the tea to start.

Other Restaurants

I don’t see much need to go into too many details about our experiences at the more casual food locations in the parks and hotels (particularly with this post approaching epic length), but there were a couple things that I did want to highlight.

One of our happiest discoveries on this trip is that they have now carved out a portion of the underutilized MuppetVision 3D queue area to build a fairly good-sized dining area for Award Wieners in the Hollywood Pictures Backlot section of California Adventure.  This location has always had a pretty good selection of different types of hot dogs and sausages, with my particular favorite being an Italian sausage that they serve covered with a meaty marinara sauce and lots of cheese.  They also have chili cheese dogs that other members of our party enjoyed as well as plain hot-dogs for those looking for something simpler.

While we had liked the food on previous visits, this was a location that we visited extremely rarely due to the seating.  Previously, they only had about a half-dozen or so tables along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.  These tables were very difficult to get and you usually ended up having to juggle the food on a bench or curbside, which was particularly difficult with the messier sandwiches.  The new dining area is pretty large and is covered and was fairly cool even on the pretty hot day that we ate there.  The Muppet-theming for the attraction also provides a kind of fun atmosphere.  This dining area is a great addition and will likely make this location a much more frequent choice for us.

The other casual dining experience that is worth mentioning was at French Market in New Orleans Square on the 4th of July.  This restaurant has just introduced a pretty heavily revamped menu that eliminated a number of the location’s previous signature items (including the fried chicken) in favor of a number of new entrees.  One of those new items is carved roast beef with a peppercorn au-jus sauce, something that is a particular favorite of my wife and me and, thus, something we really wanted to try.

The beef was quite tasty, although it did have a bit of a pre-prepared look and feel to it.  Nobody is going to mistake the beef for fresh carved, but it still was good for this kind of location.  The sauce is definitely very heavy on the pepper and other spices.  We both liked it very much, although it is perhaps a bit of a heavy item for a theme park.  The beef is served with mashed potatoes and a side of vegetables.  Since the veggies weren’t appealing to me (I generally don’t like cooked veggies), I asked them to leave them off.  Instead they gave me double potatoes.  That turned out to be pointless, though, as one bite quickly told me that they had onions mixed in with them.  Onions tend to badly upset my stomach, which meant that I was unable to eat the potatoes at all.  Note that the potatoes also had cheese mixed in with them, which isn’t a problem for me but might be for some people.  While the new menu at French Market isn’t bad and I did generally like the roast beef, I think they do need to rework the options for side dishes a bit.  At the very least, I do think they need to offer some form of plain potatoes.

Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner

During the 4-night stay at the Disneyland Resort, we did have one meal that was off of Disney property.  Nearly 8 years ago, my wife and I had our wedding rehearsal dinner at Mrs. Knotts’ Chicken Dinner Restaurant at Knott’s Berry Farm.  My mother had remembered really enjoying that dinner and really wanted to eat there again on this trip.  It had actually been a few years since my wife, son, and I had been there either, so we were definitely very open to the idea.  We ended up driving over there for dinner on Monday evening.

Since it was a weeknight and we headed over there fairly early in the evening, we only had a very short wait for a table.  For dinner, we all decided to get the fried chicken dinner, which comes with several large pieces of chicken, a big helping of mashed potatoes, a side of either corn or spinach, a cup of chicken noodle soup, a side-salad, and dessert.    The child’s version of the chicken dinner included a couple drumsticks along with mashed potatoes and corn.  A bowl of Jello was provided at the same time that the adults received our soups and salads.  For dessert, the kid’s meal came with a Snoopy-shaped ice cream bar.  Since our son is a big soup eater, we also ordered an extra cup of soup for him.  The waitress had indicated they would have to charge extra for that, but it didn’t show up on the final bill.

At the start of the meal, they bring out a basket of fresh-baked buttermilk biscuits.  The buttermilk flavor, which most of us in our family don’t like very much,  is quite strong on them.  Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that before trying them.  For most of us, it wasn’t a big deal, but unfortunately my mother said that it left a pretty bad taste in her mouth that kind of reduced her enjoyment of the rest of the meal.  My wife and I didn’t really care much for them either, but didn’t have such a strong reaction to them.  My father and my son both did seem to like them quite a bit, though.

We did find that the pacing of the meal was not the best.  After ordering, it seemed like quite a bit of time went by before they brought out the soups and salads.  After that, they were then much too quick to bring out the main course.   We were all pretty hungry upon arrival and got a bit frustrated waiting for the first course to arrive (my wife actually ended up eating several of the biscuits even though she didn’t like them very much) and then most of us didn’t have enough time to completely finish both the soup and the salad before we had to turn our attention to the main course.  I absolutely love their chicken noodle soup, so it was the salad that I ended up largely skipping over.

The restaurant specializes in various fruit pies for dessert, with the boysenberry pie being their specialty.  On the night we were there, they had a special pie available that was a mix of apple and boysenberry filling.  That is what I ended up ordering and I found it to be absolutely delicious.  The two flavors really blended very well.  My parents both ended up ordering dishes of boysenberry sherbet for their desserts and they both found that to be very refreshing.  My wife had an ice cream sundae, which she also enjoyed.

Although we had a few complaints, we still found the overall food quality to be generally quite high and the prices quite reasonable (the full meal is around $15).  The restaurant is still one of the better bargains in the area and we thought it was a worthwhile side-trip during our stay.