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.

Since Andy started Kindergarten this year, we had to arrange our travel plans around his school schedule.  While we don’t really know whether or not his school and teacher would have been open to us taking him out of school for a vacation, we felt that we really preferred to try to find a time when he wouldn’t miss any.  Looking at the schedule, we discovered that his winter break extended for the full week after New Years, which seemed like a good opportunity.  We are hopeful that we will avoid the worst of the Christmas season crowds with this plan as well as take advantage of some good travel bargains.

We came up with the idea of traveling on New Years Eve with the hope that it might not be as busy a travel day as some of the surrounding dates.  We figured today to be a day that a lot of people would be more apt to want to stay at home or go out celebrating somewhere.  While our flight did end up being relatively full, the airport turned out to be pretty easy to deal with today.

For tonight and tomorrow, we are going to be staying at a Fairfield Inn near my parents’ house in Clermont.  We didn’t really want to deal with the Disney World crowds on the first two New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.  This should give us a chance to rest a bit tomorrow after the travel day as well as to give us some pretty good quality time visiting casually with my parents at their house tomorrow.

On Saturday, we will be transferring to Bay Lake Tower, the new Disney’s Vacation Club resort that opened next to the Contemporary Resort earlier in 2009.  Early in the year, we sold off our DVC points at the Saratoga Springs Resort (which we didn’t like very much) and re-purchased at Bay Lake Tower.  We are definitely looking forward to our stay at what is now the highest-end DVC resort.  We then plan to spend lots of time at the theme parks starting Saturday and through the rest of next week, flying home on a week from Saturday.

With the recent reports of heightened security after the attempted terrorist attack last week along with our uncertainty about how crowded the airport was going to be, we decided that we needed to get a really early start this morning.  The fact that today is a Thursday and not necessarily a work holiday for many people also introduced the potential risk of some major traffic on the 405 freeway heading down to LAX.  Because of all this, we got up at 4:30am this morning and left home pretty much right at 6;30am.  I guess we are kind of having to adjust to Eastern time a day early, although we still went to sleep on Pacific Time last night, making us really tired today.

None of the concerns really ended up being a problem, although I’m still glad we maintained some peace of mind by allowing all the extra time.  Traffic on the 405 turned out to be pretty much full-speed all the way, allowing us to get to the airport parking facility (we use WallyPark) in about 20 minutes or so.   At the parking facility, we were able to very quickly get parked, unload our luggage, and get onto a shuttle bus, which we had all to ourselves. 

At the Delta Airlines terminal, there was no line at all for curbside check-in, which let us take care of our checked bags very quickly and without any major hassle.  It was really very nice being able to avoid the need for a luggage cart or having to drag our bags through the airport to the regular check-in desks.  I suppose I could have saved the tip by checking the bags inside, but I felt the small cost was well worth it.

Security was probably our biggest worry.  Over the last week, I’d been hearing all kinds of horror stories about the wait, with reports of wait times anywhere from an hour or so all the way up to 7 hours.  Of course, these were all hearsay and the airport, airlines, and TSA were really saying nothing officially, leaving us with little idea what to expect.  At least this morning, though, the wait really wasn’t much at all.  We made it through in about 20 minutes, which included a little extra time for them to do a hand-search of my backpack, mainly because I forgot to take the camcorder out. 

We ended up getting to the gate nearly 3 hours before the flight.  That gave us plenty of time to get an over-priced breakfast at the airport McDonalds and otherwise catch our breath a bit before getting on the plane.  We found seats at the gate that were right in front of a window and Andy had quite a bit of fun watching the airplanes.

Security does seem somewhat increased from what we have seen in the past.  The security checkpoint felt a bit more formal and by the book than usual, although I honestly don’t know how much of that was perception.  As I mentioned, I did get a secondary search on my bag, which seemed pretty quick.  At the gate, they had a pretty substantial TSA presence during boarding, including multiple officers both at the entrance to the jetway and at the plane’s hatch.  They announced at the start of boarding that the TSA would be doing some random searches and pat-downs during boarding, although I didn’t see them actually pull anyone out of the line for it.  Before they started boarding, they also made a point of announcing that we were waiting for the TSA to search and clear the plane as well.

I’m going to conclude this first post of the trip by mentioning that this plane offers in-flight wi-fi and I have written all of this on-board and will post this momentarily from the air!  As of right now, we are flying over Texas with another hour and a half or so to go before arrival.  So far, the flight has had a bit of turbulence, but otherwise has been pretty uneventful.

Age 6

As I mentioned when I started this series of posts, my son turned 6 last week.  After the fairly big and elaborate celebration of last year, we decided to keep everything very low key this year.  We even decided to limit the birthday celebrations to just the immediate family, although that really had more to do with logistics and scheduling than anything  else.

As our son’s main birthday treat, we decided to make a trip down to Disneyland on the Saturday before.  We have an ownership interest in the Disney’s Vacation Club timeshare and looked into the possibility of getting a reservation at the recently opened Villas at the Grand Californian, but there wasn’t any availability that night so we decided to simply make it a day trip.

We live only about an hour away from Disneyland and have passes for admission, so we do make reasonably frequent visits down there, although not nearly as often as my wife and I did when we were younger and childless.  Our last visit had been only about a month before, but was primarily for the celebration of an adult friend’s birthday.  Since that day had a bit more of a scheduled agenda, we decided to make this visit an “Andy’s choice” day, where he would pretty much get his pick of rides and activities.  For this reason, we also chose not to try and meet up with any other friends, but instead just make it a family day.

One special activity we included that day was lunch at Goofy’s Kitchen, the character dining location at the Disneyland Hotel.  Andy is still a huge fan of the Disney characters and gets a bit kick out of these meals where some of his favorites come around and visit the table.  During our meal, we had visits with Goofy, Chip & Dale, Mulan, Jasmine, Baloo (from The Jungle Book) and Brer Fox.  We also got to visit with Pluto for a couple photos before we went to our table.

The restaurant also has occasional kid participation activities and Andy had the chance to get up and do The Twist with the characters as well as to help Goofy with baking of a cake (which mostly involved kids playing noisemakers and pretending to help clean up). 

Toward the end of our visit to the restaurant, the waiter brought Andy a cupcake with a birthday candle on it and Chip plus a few of the restaurant staff members all gathered for a short birthday celebration.  It wasn’t anything overly fancy, but Andy definitely got a big kick out of it.

After lunch, we headed back into the park to visit attractions.  This included a visit to see Mickey Mouse at his house in Toontown, where everyone did give Andy a bit of extra attention for his birthday.  The birthday visit was during the first weekend that Disneyland had all of their Christmas activities up and running, so we took that opportunity to see the Christmas parade and fireworks show.  Overall, it was a fun day and Andy seemed to really enjoy himself.

For the evening of Andy’s actual birthday, he picked pork chops and mashed potatoes for his birthday dinner, a bit of a surprise since we had never really thought that pork chops was one of his favorites.  We then had the traditional ice cream cake for dessert and then let him open presents.

While he got a lot of really nice gifts, it was kind of funny that possibly the biggest hit of the bunch was the birthday card that I had picked up for him the night before.  The card is the type that has a chip in it that plays sounds when the card is opened.  It features the characters from the Disney/Pixar movie Cars and plays the song “Life is a Highway” from the movie, which has been Andy’s favorite song for quite a while.  Even though my wife had already bought another card for him, I couldn’t resist buying this one when I spotted it while shopping for a couple other items at the local Walgreens store the night before.

The main gifts this year included a couple Thomas the Tank Engine toys from my wife and me and a shirt and Mickey Mouse wristwatch from one of his sets of grandparents.  The watch was a pretty exciting gift for him as it is his first and he was pretty proud about getting a big kid’s gift like that. 

Andy’s other set of grandparents were a bit late in shipping out his gift from them (a Mr. Potato Head and full set of parts), so he had a little extra gift opening event later in the week.  That turned out to be a bit of a nice opportunity to prolong his birthday celebration a bit longer.

There was also a little celebration of his birthday in his class at school, but I don’t have any photos as neither my wife nor I were there for it.  My wife brought along a couple packages of mini-cupcakes that were distributed around to the class and the teacher gave him a small gift as well.

While this was probably a much more low key birthday than many of his past ones (particularly the year before), it still was a fun time.  Happy birthday, Andy!

Age 5

By Andy’s 5th birthday, he had completed his first full year of pre-school, as well as a couple years in a weekly Gymboree program.  Between the two, he had made a lot of friends and had also had the opportunity to attend quite a few of his friends’ birthday parties.  This led us to think that it was a good idea to celebrate his 5th birthday (something of a milestone) with his first real birthday party with other kids.

We live in a townhouse that doesn’t have a yard or an overall design that would really be suited to having a large group of kids over.  While there is a party room available for rent in our condominium complex, it isn’t really overly kid-friendly either.  We realized that we really needed to find a kid-appropriate venue for the party.

Our first thought (and Andy’s first suggestion) was Farrell’s, having spent his birthday there the two previous years.  We looked into it and found that the price wasn’t too out of line, but we had major reservations about whether or not it would really work all that well for a big group of pre-school aged kids.  Other than the little merry-go-round, Mountasia really doesn’t offer much for kids that age and we were picturing a party that was little more than the kids all sitting around a big table eating ice cream and pizza. 

Andy was still kind of pushing for having the party there, but we were able to placate him by promising a family visit there not too long after his birthday.  We ended up going up there the weekend after his birthday for dinner and ice cream, inviting a few of our adult friends to meet up with us there as well.  Of course, Andy again got in a bunch of rides on the little merry-go-round.

Having recently been to another kid’s birthday party that was held at a local play gym, we realized that it would be vastly preferable to go somewhere that the kids could run around and play.  As I mentioned, we had been taking Andy to classes at a local Gymboree Play & Music location since he was really young. 

We checked into it and found that their prices for birthday parties were within our budget and that they had availability on Andy’s actual birthday (which was on a Sunday that year).  During his weekly class, we mentioned that we were considering having his birthday party there to his teacher, who is an outstanding teacher that Andy, and we, adored.  The teacher responded by offering to host and run the party if we booked it, which pretty much instantly sealed the deal for us.

The majority of the kids from his pre-school class as well as a few of the Gymboree students attended the party, resulting in a turn-out of around 20 kids.  The Gymboree teacher and an assistant did an excellent job running the event, which had a great mix of organized play activities and free play.  The kids all seemed to have a great time and the parents seemed to enjoy watching them! 

The package we bought did not include refreshments, so we ordered a sheet cake from a local supermarket and also bought various chips and juice for the event.  We were able to get a cake that was decorated with a picture of Mickey Mouse and his friends, which was a very good fit for our son’s interests.  We also were able to find Mickey Mouse paper plates, napkins, and cups to go with it.

After the party, we went home and let him open his gifts.  He ended up with a pretty large selection of items thanks to the reasonably large turnout at the birthday party.  Fortunately, so far he doesn’t seem to be expecting that every year.  I think we did a good job of explaining to him that the 5th birthday was kind of a special one.

In addition to the big party, he had a couple smaller celebrations as well.  This was his second year at his pre-school, so he once again had the little felt cake celebration there, similar to what they did the previous year. 

His pre-school was a primarily outdoor facility and it happened to be raining on the day that they celebrated his birthday.  On that day, school was actually held at someone’s house instead of at the usual school.

A couple weeks before his birthday, my wife’s parents came out to visit and we did a small party with them as well.  We picked up a small cake and let him open the presents that they had brought him.  We couldn’t help but feel that maybe he was a tad spoiled with all these separate celebrations that year, but we also wanted to accommodate everyone that wanted to celebrate with him.

Coming soon, I’ll conclude this series with reports from this year’s birthday!

Continuing my look back at my son’s previous birthdays in celebration of him turning 6 this week, here are my memories of his 4th birthday.  As he has gotten older, I have found that I had a tendency to take more photos, so the remaining posts will cover just one year at a time.

Age 4 (2007)

Andy’s 3rd birthday was the first that he still remembered pretty well a year later.  Because of that, he decided that he wanted to do pretty much the same thing as the year before, returning once again to Farrell’s.  This time, we decided to forgo the formal birthday package and instead just let everyone order whatever they wanted off of the menu.

As with the previous year’s visit, we included some play time in the game area at Mountasia.  Once again, Andy used the majority of the game/ride credits that we got for him to ride on the little merry-go-round.  During this visit, he did also give skee-ball a try for the first time, although I really was doing most of the work.

A couple months before his 4th birthday, Andy started his first year of pre-school.  For birthday kids, the teacher had a short celebration where the child was given a birthday crown and allowed to put candles onto a felt birthday cake. 

Finally, we did also do the now-traditional cake and gift-opening at home on his actual birthday.  Once again, the cake was an ice cream cake.

He had received most of his major gifts during the party at Farrell’s, but we gave him a toy fire truck that I had found at a really good sale price between the two parties and he also had gifts from his grandparents to open.

To Be Continued with Memories of Age 5.

Age 1 (2004)

To celebrate his first birthday, we attended the Disneyland Birthday Celebration that they offer a couple times a day at the Plaza Inn restaurant on Main Street.  At this event, everyone gets an undecorated cupcake along with small cups containing frosting and sprinkles to use to decorate them.  A character named Pat E. Cake hosts the event and Mickey and Minnie Mouse also pay a visit.  Quite a few of our friends were able to join us at the park for the party as well.

The first birthday also started our now usual tradition of going out somewhere for a bigger party, but also having a little family-only party at home with cake and the opening of his presents from us and various relatives.

This was also the one time that we attempted to make his birthday cake instead of buying one from the store, but we found that we generally lacked much cake decorating talent.

Age 2 (2005)

Andy’s 2nd birthday was probably his most low key birthday celebration to date.  Originally, his grandparents (my wife’s parents) were planning to come out and visit during his birthday.  Pretty close to the last minute, the trip was postponed until early December.  This led us to do a small party at home with just us.  A trip to Disneyland the following weekend gave us an opportunity to get together with some of our friends, but that wasn’t really treated as a birthday party.

For this birthday, we bought an ice cream cake from the grocery store, which he enjoyed very much.  In fact, the ice cream cake has now become something of a birthday tradition for the family.  Generally, Andy wants us to get one for his birthday each year and also strongly encourages my wife and me to have them for our birthdays as well.  It looks like I somehow didn’t get any pictures of the cake that year, but I did get several of him eating it and the aftermath.

Of course, he also had quite a bit of fun opening his birthday presents, which were mostly toys that year.  This was, I think, really the first time that he was very aware that the packages all contained fun things for him.  I find it pretty funny that the photos generally show him with such a serious expression of concentration.  Opening gifts is serious business!

Age 3 (2006)

For Andy’s 3rd birthday, we decided to take him to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour in Santa Clarita.  Farrell’s was a very popular, party-oriented chain of restaurants when I was a kid, but it pretty much went out of business in the 1980s.  In recent years, new owners have been working to revive the chain and the Santa Clarita location (which is located inside the Mountasia Fun Center) was the first location they opened.  Remembering the fun we had there as kids, it seemed like a perfect place to take our son.

We decided to go ahead and buy one of their formal birthday packages, which included pizza, small ice cream sundaes, drinks, and a number of Mountasia game/ride tokens.  Andy ended up using the majority of the game tokens for repeated rides on a little coin-operated merry-go-round.  For some reason, he has a kind of sad-looking expression in all the photos that I took of him riding the merry-go-round, but I promise that he really did seem to be having lots of fun on it!

This was the first year that my wife and I decided to try and get Andy the hottest toy of the year as his birthday present, which was the special 10th anniversary “TMX” edition of Tickle-Me-Elmo.  This toy was difficult to find, having been very much in demand following a generally impressive demonstration on Good Morning America on TV.  After several weeks on a waiting list, but were able to get it from a local toy store in time for his birthday.  While we found the toy pretty amusing, it actually was never really all that popular with Andy.  In fact, he found it kind of scary at the birthday party and he never warmed to it entirely.

The Farrell’s party was actually the second of two birthday parties that we had for Andy that year.  My wife’s parents visited a couple weeks before and we had a pre-birthday party where we served another ice cream cake and let him open his presents from that set of grandparents.

To Be Continued…

I’m sure it is normal for us as parents to have quite a bit of apprehension and uncertainty as our son starts school.  We have a lot of awareness of both his strengths and weaknesses and can’t help but wonder how each will affect his experience.  We do know that our son is quite smart, even already having some pretty decent reading skills.  He has known basics like his alphabet and counting since not too long after he learned to talk and he has even learned some simple math.

On the other hand, he also has some definite problems with listening and following directions, which are going to take some work to overcome.  After his very first day of school, the teacher already noted that he wasn’t listening as well as he should and moved him to a desk closer to the front of the room.  We’ve also recently learned that his eyesight is not very good.  While he got his first set of eyeglasses yesterday, he is still nearly blind in one eye even with the lenses.  Obviously, that is going to be a bit of a challenge to overcome and probably also explains why his motor skills haven’t been as strong as his intellectual talents.

Our son has been through 2 years of pre-school as well as a few months at a drop-off school-skills class, so we didn’t experience as much separation anxiety as some families do.  Even when he first started pre-school, there really wasn’t any major problem when my wife left him for the first time, something that surprised us a bit since he had always had a really difficult time with babysitters.  My wife, who is a stay-at-home mom, has probably had more of a difficult time with the adjustment than my son has.

The shift from pre-school to Kindergarten is still a big adjustment.  His pre-school was only 4 days a week, 3-hours per day.  The elementary school he is going to has a full day Kindergarten, which means 5 days a week, 6 1/2 hours per day.  This includes lunch at school, which is also a pretty big change.  The pre-school was a cooperative type, which meant that my wife stayed to assist with the class one day a week.  It also had pretty much an open-door policy where parents were pretty free to stick around if there was something going on that they wanted to observe.  Not surprisingly, Kindergarten has much more of a closed atmosphere.

We definitely do still intend to be very involved in our son’s school experience wherever we can.  My wife has already made certain that the teacher and the parent’s organization are aware that she is available to volunteer as needed and we expect that there will be many opportunities.  The class has 24 students and there are no teaching assistants, so the teacher did indicate that parents should have opportunities to stick around and assist in the classroom periodically.

While my work schedule limits my availability, I certainly hope to be able to take part whenever I can as well.  I did take the day off of work this week so that I could go along to the parent orientation on Tuesday, which gave me the opportunity to meet his teacher and see the classroom.  I expect to attend parent activities and meetings whenever my schedule allows.  I also definitely plan to continue to spend lots of time working with my son directly to help reinforce and practice the lessons he is learning in school.

I was impressed by the teacher and the classroom during the orientation on Tuesday.  The classroom immediately made a very good first impression due to the teacher’s decision to heavily feature “The Cat in the Hat” as a central theme to the decoration.  That was one of the very first books that we bought for my son and we have read it (and its sequels) together numerous times over the years.  My son’s reading skills have been improving rapidly and, just last weekend, I helped to guide my son through his first time reading “The Cat in the Hat” himself. 

The teacher herself definitely seemed very kind and skilled to me, based on my first impression.  She has quite a bit of teaching experience and seemed to have a good handle on how to work with kids this age.  After the first 2 days, my son’s impression of her is very positive and he still seems excited about going back again tomorrow.

While it is not always easy to watch my child gain independence and move forward, he is also my greatest pride and the most important part of my wife’s and my lives.  I look forward to continuing to share this adventure with my family!

Unfortunately, the experience was disappointing at best and we ended up changing hotels after the first night.  I do want to emphasize that the problems we encountered were somewhat unusual and, to a degree, outside of the hotel’s control.  We didn’t feel that the hotel management and staff handled the situation exceptionally well, though.  I acknowledge that the hotel was generally reasonably nice, but our experience does leave it a very unlikely choice for us for future visits to the area or if anyone asked us for recommendations.

Whenever possible, we prefer to book hotel stays in 2-room suites, since we generally like having the extra space and, more importantly, because our son gets to sleep much easier and more quickly when he is in a separate room from my wife and me.  After a long day at a theme park or doing other touristy things, my wife and I both tend to like to spend a little time reading or using our laptop computers to unwind before we go on to sleep, but our son doesn’t go to sleep easily unless the lights are all off and the environment is mostly distraction free.

I was able to find a rate of $139/night at the Marriott for a 1-bedroom, 2-room suite with a king bed in the bedroom and a pull-out sofa in the living room.  This was an excellent rate for exactly the room type that typically works best for us.  The offer was sweetened a bit more by the promise of a $20 Visa gift card to be given to us at check-in as a sort of rebate.  The deal was only hampered a bit by the $14/day charge for parking, but it still overall worked out to a nice price.  My research found that the hotel was pretty new and appeared to have decent amenities (as would be expected with a Marriott), so I went ahead and booked it.

We were taking advantage of a Sea World admission offer for a second-day free, so we went straight to the park on Friday afternoon, stayed until closing, and then headed over to check into the hotel afterward.  This means that we arrived at the hotel around 10pm.  We were all pretty tired after the drive to San Diego in the morning and 7-8 hours at the theme park.  Of course, it was also pretty far past my son’s usual bedtime.

The Hotel Circle area is aptly named, essentially a split roadway (divided by the freeway) with a continuous series of hotels on each side.  Essentially every major hotel brand is represented here, some with multiple properties (Marriott has a Residence Inn in the area in addition to the Courtyard).  The Courtyard Marriott is a high-rise (10 stories) building pretty far down the street, but still pretty easy to get to and find. 

Parking is all outdoors (no garage) and is not overly secured.  They had access control gates at the entrance and exit, but they were not in use during our stay.  There was only a very limited amount of parking in the front of the hotel and we did have to drive around a bit before we found a time-limited “registration only” space to use while I went inside to check us in.  We also were delayed a little bit because the entrance road and “to registration” signs directed us into a loading/unloading area in front of the lobby that was only one car-width wide, causing a bit of a back up.  More parking was available at the back of the hotel, although I don’t know how full it was as, after checking in, we did manage to grab a spot near the side entrance. We did notice that quite a few cars were parallel parked on the driveway on the side of the hotel, although those spaces were striped.

Check-in was fairly quick and the desk clerk was friendly.  One minor glitch was that they had run out of the $20 Visa gift cards, but they wrote our information down and promised to mail it to us later (it hasn’t yet arrived at the time that I’m writing this).  During check-in, he confirmed that we had a suite and indicated no problems or concerns about the room.  Usually, I will go up and check the room at a hotel before getting our luggage, but it was late and we were tired so instead we immediately gathered all of our stuff after re-parking and headed up to the room.

Immediately after opening the door to the suite, we were immediately greeted by the unmistakable, very strong odor of cigarette smoke. At that point, my first thought was whether I had accidentally booked us a smoking room (unlikely since I’m very sensitive to cigarette odor and tend to be careful about that) and I quickly pulled up the confirmation email on my cell phone to double check.  The email confirmed that, in fact, smoking was prohibited throughout the hotel.  That surprised me a bit as most non-smoking hotels mention it at check-in and even have the guest sign a statement authorizing a cleaning fee if the policy was violated.  Nothing had been mentioned when we checked in, though.

Walking into the living room area, we immediately noticed that a portable air purifier had been placed in the middle of the floor, obviously indicating that the odor had been noticed by the hotel staff earlier in the day.  The odor wasn’t too bad in the bedroom area, but was very intense in the living room area, which is also the location of the pull-out sofa that our son would be sleeping on.  We quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work and I headed back down to the registration desk to discuss the problem.

A different clerk than the one that checked us in was at the front desk and she didn’t seem overly concerned about the problem. She explained that the hotel was “sold out”, but that she would send some one from the maintenance office up to see if he could do anything.  The maintenance man came up and immediately acknowledged that the problem was obvious and that the air purifier device showed that it was known.  He said all he could really do is bring in some air freshener, but that he doubted it would accomplish anything.  He then said he would go down to consult with management to see if there was anything they could do and send someone up.

At this point, another 10 minutes or so passed until we finally got a call from someone (I think the same woman I had spoken too at the front desk) offering to move us to a standard, 2-queen bed room.  She said that they could drop the price down to $109/night (a $30 reduction), but that was really all she could do.  A little research since then has shown that rate was almost certainly the regular price for that room.  I asked for her to please send a manager up to the room and was told that the manager was currently “off duty”.  At this point, I was tired, frustrated, and irritated at the prospect of being stuck with a room that was much less than we had wanted/expected on this vacation and I lost my temper a bit and insisted very strenuously that I be allowed to speak to a manager.

The manager (or at least someone saying he was a manager) did call us back a few minutes later.  He still insisted he could not go below the $109 rate, but he upped the offer to a standard room with a king bed and a sofa bed (instead of two queen beds) and he also offered to comp parking, give us $40 in meal vouchers, and 5,000 Marriott reward points.  This was a reasonably decent offer, essentially knocking another $54 off our out-of-pocket price for the night and we really didn’t have much of an alternative, so we went ahead and took it.

While the savings weren’t bad, the $109 rate for the night still seemed pretty high for a pretty small room that didn’t really seem much nicer than what you typically find at a Holiday Inn or similar class of hotel.  Eliminating the parking fee was nice, although the hotel really shouldn’t be charging one to begin with considering that they have a completely outdoor, non-secured parking lot.  As of this time, the 5,000 bonus points haven’t shown up in our rewards club balance shown online, although the regular points for the stay are there.  It still wasn’t that much of a bonus as a single reward night starts at 7,500 points at their lowest end motels.  Even most of their low-end Fairfield Inn locations are 10,000 points and the Courtyard Marriott where we were staying started at 15,000.

The meal vouchers were probably the best bonus given to us.  We used them for breakfast the next morning and were able to get bacon and eggs for both my wife and me as well as a pastry for our son and bottled juices or water for each of us.  We were a bit surprised that the hotel restaurant was counter service instead of full table service, though, with only a small number of tables that were shared with the business center.  Initially, I thought the restaurant was just a coffee bar and even went up to the registration desk to ask for directions to the restaurant.  The prices were pretty inflated, although probably typical for a hotel.  For the $40 (including a $5 tip), we got a meal that was similar in quality and content to what you would pay around $20 for at a Denny’s or somewhere similar. 

I was still a bit irritated that the manager didn’t seem overly apologetic and kept insisting that they had “done their best” to solve the problem before we arrived.  Other than the one air purifier device, we really didn’t see much evidence that they had done much.  For starters, when we arrived, the room was closed up tight and the air conditioner was turned off, which would have kept the air from circulating much.  While we don’t really know exactly how much cleaning was done, there was none of the cleanser odor that might have suggested any kind of deep cleaning such as shampooing the carpet or furniture.  Admittedly, they wouldn’t have known that we wouldn’t be there until 10pm and were probably trying to have the room ready by the 3pm check-in time, but it still seemed like they could have done a lot more than they did.

I do realize that the problem was ultimately primarily the fault of the guests that stayed in the room the night before.  Looking at the hotel’s website, I see that they only have 8 suites and I do believe that the other 7 were almost certainly already occupied by that time on a Friday night.  I do wonder a bit if they might have been able to find us a more suitable room at the nearby Residence Inn, though, or possibly even at one of the numerous non-Marriott hotels in the area.  While we were waiting for the manager’s call-back, I even took out my laptop computer and started doing some quick research into availability at other area hotels, although we ended up having to make a decision before I had time to get very far with that.

Of course, this problem didn’t ruin our trip and we did at least have a reasonably clean, safe, and comfortable place to stay.  Walking into the tiny standard room after seeing the much nicer two-room suite did dampen our spirits and we all did end up getting to sleep later than we had hoped (it was around midnight by the time we settled in) without really having any time to decompress.  As is typical in standard rooms, getting our son to sleep was not very easy, adding to the frustration and fatigue.

Once we were settled in the new room, I did get out my laptop again and started a search for a better option for Saturday night.  I ended up finding us a 2-room suite at the Embassy Suites in La Jolla (about 10 miles north of Sea World) for $143.10.  After confirming with the front desk staff at the Marriott that there would be no fees charged for us checking out after just one night (no argument at all there), I booked that.  We ended up very happy with that hotel, where the room was just about perfect for our needs and the amenities, including a very good included breakfast buffet, were all really great.  We will definitely keep that hotel in mind for future San Diego trips and I really wish we had found it during our initial research.

My first computer experience was with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III that my father purchased in 1980 (when I was 10 years old).  Around that same time, Radio Shack made a deal with CompuServe to package and promote their service.  Under branding that Radio Shack called “Videotex”, they packaged CompuServe either with a dumb terminal or with terminal software sold for the TRS-80s.  My father bought a 300-baud modem and the Videotex package for the Model III, giving us our first look at connected computing.

My exposure to the features of CompuServe during this time was really just a taste as the service came with a pretty high hourly fee for use.  I mainly recall spending a little time watching over my father’s shoulder as he used it to access various news, weather, and information like that, although I recall that he generally preferred a competing service called The Source, which CompuServe eventually bought out and absorbed.  I also recall having a couple rare opportunities to spend an hour playing some of CompuServe’s primitive early online games.

Due to the hourly fees, I never spent any time in discussion boards or chat, instead getting early exposure to these via privately-run Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and, a few years later, with General Electric’s GEnie service, which was one of the first to offer discussion boards and a few other services at a fixed monthly fee instead of charging by the hour.  CompuServe was actually one of the last services to drop the hourly charges, which probably played a big role in their eventual decline.

After I graduated from college in 1991 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, CompuServe was one of the many technology companies to which I applied.  I ended up accepting a job with them as a junior engineer in their Entertainment Technology group, which focused on game products and the CB Simulator, which was their name for online chat.  I worked there for around 4 1/2 years, before I decided to move to California to pursue other opportunities in mid-1996.

The CompuServe headquarters was a campus in an industrial park located in the Columbus, Ohio suburb of Upper Arlington.  It consisted of two major buildings, the larger one (where I worked) housing the corporate business offices and the operations managing the consumer service.  The other building mainly housed their very lucrative network services division.  There was a nice employee cafeteria (The Oak Room), which was run by Marriot and an employee fitness center.
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The Oak Room had pretty decent food and I generally ate there a couple times a week.  They had a selection of standard grill items (burgers, chicken strips, etc.) that were available every day as well as a featured entree.  They would occasionally do prepared to order stir-fry or pasta that were immensely popular and would result in long lines during lunch hour.  I’d typically eat there on days that the entree sounded particularly good or when my schedule made it tough to leave the office for lunch.  When I did leave, there was a Wendy’s, a Pizza Hut, and a sandwich place across the street as well as numerous other restaurants that were a fairly easy drive.  The Oak Room also served as a location for larger meetings and employee gatherings.  I even remember just about everyone in the building gathering in there to watch the OJ Simpson verdict on a big-screen TV.

A couple years into my employment, the company started construction on a large new office building in nearby Hilliard, Ohio.  Much of the operation was eventually to move there and it also included a new state-of-the-art data center.  I did visit the new building a couple times (mainly tours and the occasional meeting), but my department never moved over there.

After the complicated deal where AOL purchased the consumer service and MCI/Worldcom bought the network division (which eventually ended up at Verizon), it appears that the CompuServe headquarters remained in Upper Arlington while the new building went to MCI/Worldcom.  Looking up both locations on Google Maps, it appears to me that AOL still has offices in Upper Arlington and Verizon still uses the Hilliard building.

During the time that I worked at CompuServe, the company was owned by H&R Block, which had bought it in an attempt to establish a strong year-round business to keep a revenue stream going outside of tax season.  It wasn’t an extremely obvious fit for them, though, and I’m not sure that Block ever became overly comfortable with the product.  As employees, we did get some pretty nice discounts on tax services, though.  H&R Block’s sale of the company to AOL and Worldcom came about a year after I left.

The overall business culture was fairly traditional, particularly compared to the Silicon Valley technology companies that were starting to rise at the time.  The employees tended to be somewhat older and experienced.  Being fresh out of college, I definitely felt pretty junior there and was also in a minority being single and childless.  Weekend and evening hours were very rare at the company as well, with most people working pretty traditional 8-5 work hours.  The dress code tended to be “business casual”.  Jeans and t-shirts were not really acceptable, but at least I didn’t have to wear a tie to work.

One part of working at CompuServe that I particularly enjoyed was my involvement as one of the adult leaders of a company-sponsored Explorer Post, which focused on computer technology.  Explorers is a vocation-based, coed program run by the Boy Scouts of America, targeted towards teenagers.  Our weekly meetings typically featured presentations by various CompuServe employees, covering different areas of computer technology.  I think my favorite was probably the meeting where the head of security came in and talked to the kids about the various efforts to thwart hackers that were trying to subvert CompuServe’s systems.  Several of the kids weren’t entirely innocent in this area themselves, which made this lecture hit home.

I also accompanied the kids as one of the chaperones on one ski trip (where I stayed in the lodge reading and drinking cocoa, since skiing has no appeal to me) as well as putting in a lot of work on a booth that the kids manned at an annual scouting show.  Those of us that worked as the adult leaders of this group did develop pretty good friendships, including very enjoyable dinners out together after the meetings.  Two of my fellow leaders even eventually started dating and ended up getting married to each other.

Reflecting CompuServe’s pioneering position in the online services business, the corporate culture was somewhat ahead of its time in a few ways.  Already in the early 1990s, email was already the dominant form of internal communications at CompuServe, not too surprising considering that it was one of their key products.  I remember undergoing a bit of a culture shock when I left the company in 1996 for a new company that did not yet have an email system in place.

Via the same phone numbers that customers used to access CompuServe’s services, employees could access all the various servers that were used for developing, testing, and configuring applications.  That meant that we had access to the vast majority of our work from home, if needed.  My department even included one employee that had switched to primarily working from home after the birth of her child.  This was at a time when I don’t think the term “telecommuting” had even been coined yet.

While my department officially handled all games and entertainment products, the truth is that there really wasn’t a lot of internal development of games going on at the time that I was there.  With access still pretty strictly dial-up and the service still largely text based, online games just weren’t that big a business yet.  As I mentioned earlier, the CB Simulator (chat) was officially classified as a “game” product and it really was our team’s primary focus.  As the junior engineer on the team, I was the one that tended to be assigned secondary tasks, which means I probably did more that wasn’t chat related than anyone else on the team.

One story that was pretty widely circulated among the employees at CompuServe, although I admit I don’t have verification that it was entirely accurate, was that the classification of CB Simulator as a “game” was the single biggest mistake that CompuServe made.  The product was the first online chat room made available to consumers and the widely told story was that CompuServe had considered taking out a patent on it, but decided that it wasn’t worth the time and cost of going through that process for something that was “just a game”.  As a result, online chat never was patented by anybody.  Assuming this is true, it certainly seems very likely that owning the patent on chat could easily have resulted in a pretty dramatically different fate for CompuServe.  Even today, some of the CB radio inspired terminology is still often used for online chats, including calling individual chat rooms “channels” and referring to the user nicknames as “handles”.

Before delving into the specific projects that I worked on, it would be helpful to give a little overview of the primary technologies used at CompuServe, which did tend to reflect the age of the product.  The primary infrastructure was built around Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 mini-computers, which the employees pretty much always simply called “tens”.  While the operating system running on the servers was derived from DEC’s standard TOPS-10, it was very heavily customized by CompuServe’s engineers.   CompuServe was so dependent on the PDP-10 technology, that they licensed the architecture from DEC so that they could continue to manufacture them for years after DEC officially discontinued them in the early 1980s.

Those that used the original CompuServe service likely recall the difficult to remember numeric user IDs, which were generally in the form 7xxxx,xxxx, although they eventually expanded to 10xxxx,xxxx once they ran out of the lower numbers.  This was a reflection of the PDP architecture, matching its typical format for user accounts.  The numbers were octal (base-8), which meant that none included 8 or 9 among the digits.  Employee accounts were those where the first number was less than 71000.  I was issued two user accounts, one for use in official work-related tasks (this account had administration rights in some services) and a second free account for my personal use.  The work account had the very easy to remember ID of 70000,1111 and the personal account was 70004,1065.

The various CompuServe applications covered a range of technologies.  Many of the older applications were written in the Fortran programming language and quite a few were written in a now largely forgotten, language called Bliss, which had been pretty widely used in the early days of the PDP systems.  There were also a few applications that were in Pascal, while most new development was done in C or C++, including re-writes of some of the key systems and services.  Many of these newer and upgraded systems were being built on Intel-based servers, typically running BSD UNIX.

For much of the time I was working there, much of the focus of the company was on modernizing the existing systems. While CompuServe had long been the industry leader for online services, AOL, and to a lesser degree Prodigy, were experiencing dramatic growth with much more graphical and user-friendly systems.  While CompuServe never really had a plan to completely abandon its text-based user interface, they did create the CompuServe Information Manager (CIM) software, which was available for MS-DOS, Windows, and Macintosh, that enabled a graphical user interface (windows, pull-down menus, mouse-control, etc.) on some of the core services.

The graphical interface in the CIM software was based around a proprietary protocol called HMI, which stood for “Host-Micro Interface”.  In order to provide the graphical interface on services, their application had to be modified (and often re-written) to use the HMI protocol.  This could be somewhat complex coding, since there was generally a strong desire to keep the text-based interfaces around as well for those users that still preferred to use some other terminal software to access the service.

For the Entertainment Technology department, I was the engineer that was assigned the job of investigating and learning the HMI protocol.  As a test case, I used CompuServe’s existing Biorhythm charting game.  Other than the mathematical formulas for the actual calculations (which I never really understood), this was one of the simplest games on the service, making it a good choice for conversion.  I started off by converting the entire application from Fortran to C, re-organizing as I went to separate the user interface portion from the calculation and chart-generation.  I then put in some detection to determine whether a user was coming in via CIM or some other software and then branch them either to my re-designed HMI interface or to the original text version.  I suspect that some CIM users who stumbled on this game probably found themselves wondering why in the world we had gone to all this trouble to make a fancy user-interface for Biorhythms.

The largest individual project that I did for CompuServe was the development of a pretty complex package that allowed for creation of quizzes and surveys.  The project had started off as a fairly replacement for an existing multiple-choice quiz game.  As I started working on it, I quickly realized that it wouldn’t take that much effort to expand it to also allow fill-in-the-blank answers as well.  I don’t really recall for sure how extensive the survey capabilities were, although I’m pretty sure the data storage was pretty primitive.  The whole package was completely HMI enabled (while also working in text mode) and very customizable to fit different uses.  I designed and coded pretty much the entire product and it ended up being pretty widely used across the service.

I’m having a little bit of difficulty remembering the specific features set of the quiz/survey package.  A large part of the reason for this is that my current job has included some work on a very similar package and I have trouble remembering which features I implemented in which version.  I currently work for the web division of a large media company and have found that quite a bit of the experience that I gained at CompuServe very directly related to the work at my current employer.

As I mentioned before, the CB Simulator was the top focus in our department.  Much of the time I was there, most of my teammates were pretty focused on a complete re-write of the software in C++ running under UNIX.  I did very little in the way of actual coding or design work on this, but was involved in some engineering related to testing and reporting, work that ended up being very similar to some of the key initiatives that I have put into place at my current job.

I had the responsibility of doing load testing of the CB Simulator in order to ensure that it would work properly when large numbers of users were hitting it all at once.  This type of testing involves creating automated scripts that try to simulate some or all of the ways that real users would interact with the product.  I learned a lot about the value of this kind of testing and the techniques involved with implementation doing this work.  I was able to apply that knowledge in my current job by designing a load test lab and the surrounding procedures and policy and selling them to management in order to get them implemented.

The load testing work that I did at CompuServe was kind of primitive compared to the tools and resources available today.  Currently, there are a lot of commercial and open source tools available for scripting load tests and gathering and reporting test results, but at CompuServe I had to program the test scripts manually using the fairly low-level network protocols.  The CompuServe network didn’t really fully match any industry standard, but it was at least mostly based on the X25 protocol.  I had to learn the basics of that protocol and write programs that would open multiple connections to the network and then construct properly formatted packets to log a user in, go to the CB Simulator, and do some basic chat operations.  It was pretty complicated programming and most of the data gathering was largely focused on human observation, but it did provide a lot of useful information and uncover a number of bugs.

The other major task that I had for the CB Simulator was the very first project I was assigned.  In many ways, it was as interesting a lesson in human nature as it was a learning experience technically.  The CB Simulator was completely human moderated, with each active channel always monitored by someone designated by CompuServe.  The moderators were often trusted members of the online community who had been offered a contract by CompuServe.  These moderators had access to commands that allowed them to send private warning messages to users for inappropriate language or an inappropriate handle as well as to kick people out of the channel.

Whenever the moderators used any of these commands, an entry was written to a log file indicating the time, warning given, reason, and the user ID of the person receiving the warning.  For handle warnings, it would also log the handle that prompted it.  My project was to create scripts that would parse through these log files to generate reports that could be easily read and reviewed by the customer service team.  These reports also included some basic data about the frequency of each type of warning on each channel for any given day.  As you might expect, the log entries for the handle warnings could be especially fascinating and, within our department, we would often get some laughs out of the most interesting ones.  I wish I could still remember some examples, although even if I could I’m not sure that including them wouldn’t be less family-friendly than I usually strive for on this blog.

The last really major project that I was involved in at CompuServe was probably the beginning of the end of the company’s independence.  In light of AOL’s ever growing market share, the decision was made that CompuServe needed a separate service that would attempt to more directly compete.  The product that they came up with was “CompuServe WOW!”, which was designed to strictly use a graphical interface (based around an enhanced version of HMI) and to also include extensive family-friendly features, including very strict parental controls.

Our team’s involvement with WOW! was, as you might expect, to adopt the chat application to meet the needs of the new product.  The biggest requirement that didn’t previously exist was the need to allow users to create their own self-named channels and the necessary moderation features surrounding that.  The family-friendly goal of the site and related parental controls also required that we build in much stricter controls for limiting access.  As with the previous CB Simulator projects, the vast majority of the coding and design work was left to the more senior engineers while I was more involved in the testing and troubleshooting work.

The WOW! product was not a success and the product only survived for less than a year.  The big problem was that it didn’t really offer much that wasn’t already available from AOL, which provided little motivation for users to sign up for it instead of the more popular and better established service.  The product had very little appeal to existing CompuServe customers either, since most were looking for something much more business and/or technology oriented.

It was during the WOW! project that I started to see the writing on the wall and realized that CompuServe was a company in decline.  When that was combined with my continued position as the low man on the totem pole in our department, my thoughts definitely started to focus on finding new opportunities.  A vacation to Southern California in late 1995 kind of clinched the decision for me as I had always thought I probably would be happier living out there, a feeling that was pretty much solidified by that trip.  Not long after I got home from that vacation, I updated my resume and started sending out applications.  I left CompuServe to take a job with a small Los Angeles based game developer in May of 1996.

As I mentioned earlier, employees received a free personal account on CompuServe and I did put it to pretty heavy use.  I particularly became a very active participant on the Showbiz Forum, which was a discussion board focused on movies and television (the TV stuff was eventually spun-off to a separate forum, where I also participated).  At the time, I was an extremely frequent moviegoer, typically seeing 1-2 movies in the theater every week as well as being an avid collector of Laserdiscs.  I had already been an active participant on similar boards on the GEnie service and it was great having another place to discuss these topics.

CompuServe had made a deal with Roger Ebert to offer his reviews on the service.  As part of that deal, Ebert was given his own section on the Showbiz Forum, where he was a very active, direct participant.  During those years, it was great fun being able to discuss movies directly with Ebert and he often used the forum as a source for some of his articles, especially his “Movie Answer Man” column.  At one point, he published a book of those columns and I was amused to find my name in the book’s index.  I even had more page citations than Martin Scorsese!

I did meet a few people from the forums in person over the years as well.  One participant on Showbiz was local to Columbus and wrote movie reviews for one of the smaller area newspapers.  On a number of occasions, he invited me to come along to some of the press screenings for new movies, which was pretty cool.  In particular, I remember seeing Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” at a screening that was held a couple months before it finally opened in Columbus.  During the Southern California vacation in 1995, I met up with a pretty large group of forum regulars for dinner and also met up with various forum members a few times after I moved out here.

I signed up for a paying account and continued to participate on the forums for a while after leaving the company, but eventually drifted away from them as my interests changed.  In particular, Disneyland became more of a leisure-time focus for me instead of movies and I generally found more active discussions about that on Usenet newsgroups and, eventually, on web-based forums.  Of course, the CompuServe forums generally declined greatly in activity as the web came into prominence anyway.

AOL is still keeping the CompuServe name around both for a web portal (essentially the old Netscape portal now carries the CompuServe name) and for the “CompuServe 2000” product, which is essentially a re-skinned version of AOL itself.  These products are really just CompuServe in name only, though.  The CompuServe that I knew and have written about in this post no longer exists.

As this very long post probably illustrates, CompuServe played a very important role in my life and I can’t help but feel a bit sad as the original service has finally passed into history.  I’m honestly a bit surprised that it lasted as long as it did, and I haven’t really used it myself for several years, but I still am sorry to see it end.