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.

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.

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.

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.