I still have quite a bit more to say about the cruise, but since I haven’t had much time to write anything over the last couple days, I thought I’d switch gears a bit and write up a few notes from our first few days at Walt Disney World.

For this part of the trip, we have returned to the Wilderness Lodge, which is our favorite resort.  This is my 4th time staying there and my wife’s 3rd stay.  On my first visit and the first visit with my wife, I stayed in a regular room.  While I loved the decor and location of the resort, my one complaint was that the rooms are a bit small.

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I’ve already mentioned in a previous post that dinner on our first night was at Triton’s. This is the most upscale of the regular dining rooms, not including the special adult-only restaurant, Palo. The restaurant is lightly themed to The Little Mermaid, but doesn’t generally include any show elements or anything like that. It is a very attractive and elegant dining room. This is also the one restaurant that differs from those on Disney Magic, which has a dining room themed to Beauty and the Beast (Lumiere’s) instead. That made this one a somewhat new experience for us, although the overall atmosphere of the two is really pretty similar.

Dinners on our second and third nights of the cruise were at Animator’s Palate, which is the cruise line’s most showy restaurant. The restaurant is entirely themed to Disney animation and is designed so that, over the course of a dinner, the surroundings can transform from black and white to color. This is accomplished through a fairly sophisticated system of video projections and lighting effects.

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Today’s port-of-call on the cruise was Nassau in The Bahamas.  This morning, we got up early enough to go down to Tritons for a table-service breakfast.  I ordered french toast and bacon.  The french toast was very thick and rich with a dusting of cinnamon and powdered sugar.  It was really very good.

As always, the service on the ship is a big part of the experience as well.  The syrup for the french toast was served directly by the wait staff.  They also had someone circulating around the restaurant with a big plate of various rolls, danish, croissants, and other similar treats.  My son and I each had a cinnamon roll and really enjoyed them a lot.

Of course, one of the advantages of dining on a cruise ship is that there are a lot of choices and it is generally possible to have as much or as little food as fits your appetite at any given meal.  Most of us had fairly good size breakfasts, including my french toast, eggs benedict for my father, an omelette for my mother, and pancakes for my sister.  On the other hand, my wife and son each decided that they really only wanted a bowl of cereal and some bread or a roll and they were easily able to accommodate those requests as well.

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For our first night at Walt Disney World, we stayed at Saratoga Springs, which is our DVC home resort.  Even though it is our home resort, this was actually the first time we had visited that resort, much less stayed there.  In our past visits, we have generally been able to get rooms at other resorts closer to the park (Wilderness Lodge Villas and Boardwalk Villas).  We are staying at Wilderness Lodge (our favorite!) again for the WDW portion of this trip too, but decided to go ahead and try out our “home” for our arrival night before the cruise.

Our feelings about Saratoga Springs were somewhat mixed.  It is a nice complex overall and the room was great (typical of DVC rooms), but I think the place is overall just a bit too big and spread out for our tastes.  I know that some people really tend to prefer the more spread out resorts like this, but we generally like the more compact resorts overall.  They just feel a bit more comfortable to us and we like the feeling that everything is pretty quickly accessible.

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A couple years ago, we bought into the Disney Vacation Club timeshare and have been doing annual visits to Walt Disney World in Florida.  This makes a lot of sense for our family as we are all big Disney fans (my wife and I even met, got engaged, and had our wedding at Disneyland) and my parents and sister also live in the Orlando area. 

For this year’s trip, we saved up enough points for a 4-night cruise on the Disney Wonder followed by 5 more nights staying at the Villas at the Wilderness Lodge.  As much as possible, I’m going to try and keep up with at least some general reporting on the trip as it goes.  I’m actually writing this entry during our flight from Los Angeles to Orlando.

The last 12-hours or so before the trip didn’t exactly go smoothly. Shortly before I was ready to head home from work last night, I got an email from my wife that water was backing up in our kitchen sink and washing machine drains.  As soon as I got home and confirmed that it wasn’t a problem that could be quickly fixed, we called for a plumber.  It took them until around 11pm to get the problem fully repaired at a cost of around $1300. 

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If you missed part 1 of this trip report, click this link.

Day 2: Sea World

The second day of our trip to San Diego was dominated by a visit to Sea World. Our son has been very into sharks and other marine animals for quite a while, so Sea World seemed an obvious destination. I admit that the Sea World parks have never been my absolute favorite theme parks. The parks are good showcases for marine life and I certainly admire their conservation efforts, but for me a little tends to go a long way when it comes to animal exhibits. I do enjoy occasional visits, just not all that frequently. This was only my second visit (as an adult) to the San Diego park, with the last visit being around 5 years ago. I have been to the Orlando park a couple times as well, although it has been close to a decade since my last visit there.

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As a bonus for hard work and extra hours put in for a major project early this year, my employer offered me a pretty large credit at my choice of several resort hotels. After researching the various options, we decided that our family would get the best use out of a stay at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina. We reserved an “Executive Suite” room there for the weekend of August 24-26. Since the hotel is very close to Sea World, the center point of the trip included a visit to that theme park on Saturday.

This report shares some of our experiences during our visits to the Sheraton, Sea World, and nearby Balboa Park. The traveling party for this trip included my wife, my 3-year-old son and me. There are some photos included in some parts of this report, but I admit that I’m not the most diligent photographer when traveling, so I don’t have an exceptionally complete collection of photos. Part of this is the nature of traveling with a 3-year-old, where the job of parenting frequently trumps the job of photographer. In a few cases, I do include some external links to official sites where you can find some photos of places where I didn’t take any.

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