Trip Report The One With the Hashbrown Style Potato Barrels - July 2017

Helllllllo humans! I've only been back from the world for about 3 days and the PDD has already severely set in. We had one of the most wonderful, relaxing, adult Disney trips with possibly the best food we have eaten. Ever (aside from one meal, but we'll discuss that later). So without further adieu let's get this TR kicked off because I am over the moon excited to write it!!

Who: Me (Mary, a former CM) and my mom (Mona, a middle school SPED teacher/speech pathologist who specializes in social skills with children with Asperger's. Believe it or not, that will come up later in this report.) We are Disney obsessed, to say the very least.

When: July 17-21, 2017

Where: Port Orleans French Quarter, our home away from home and fave resort (even though the Polynesian is my "home", or was my home for 6 months! If you perused the gift shops ((specifically Moana Mercantile 99% of the time)) between February and June of 2016, you more than likely saw my bright and smiling face and heard me say "Tap mickey to mickey!" or "Yes I can absolutely convert your 25 leftover counter service meals into 75 snacks in the 7 minutes before you have to board the Magical Express!!")

Why? Well, we got an amazing "bounce back" offer in the mail after our trip in January and could NOT turn it down. So we found a time that would work for me being off work that my mom hadn't gone back to school yet and jumped on it. Turns out, it fell perfectly, because I was burnt out on work, my mom's going to have a looooong school year, and my boyfriend had just dumped me. Over text message. Yeesh. But hey, that's nothing a visit to my happy place couldn't heal!

 

[meg0039]

Wow hi! Thanks to a stomach virus that's been going around my store, I'm bedridden for long enough to hopefully finish this thing up!!
Day Four, Part 1!
We woke up a little bit later this morning and got ready at a leisurely pace before calling an Uber and heading to the Grand Floridian for breakfast! We had snagged a Grand Floridian Cafe reservation the night before. I ended up just getting a Grand Mimosa and the corned beef hash and both were fantastic! I was very impressed with their breakfast and would most definitely go back.

After that we headed into Magic Kingdom to use some of our free fastpasses and ride some of the things that we hadn't done the day before. We started off with my personal favorite, the Haunted Mansion!

I was happy to see that the flowers had been laid out for the master. I have been a few times with no flowers on the grave and it always bothers me. I love that little attention to detail!
After that, we headed over and hopped on Small World. Believe it or not, this is in my top five attractions on property. It was one of my favorites as a child and I love it still!

We rounded out our trifecta of fastpasses with another old family fave, the Jungle Cruise! A good friend of ours was a skipper that had just left the week before which was super sad. We were hoping that we'd get to see her, but oh well!

I always appreciate Disney's bolder attractions

I did NOT however appreciate the boldness of this man! His phone hanging out over the side of the boat made me so beyond nervous. I am a huge advocate of "all hands and feet inside the ride vehicle at all times" and personally know someone who has dropped their phone INTO an attraction so I get nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
We spent about another hour just leisurely walking around the park and looking through gift shops before taking the monorail over to Epcot. I pulled up MDE as soon as we got there and saw something truly amazing...

We ran over to the land and the wait time still read 10 minutes, but something about it seemed off, so I asked the cast member and he said it was probably closer to 30 minutes, so we decided against it. Our tummies started making the rumblies so I pulled up the app to see what reservations were available and got a Coral Reef for almost immediately. I'm not going to lie, I was nervous going into it. As a cast member I had a lot of people come in with complaints about it, but we had never eaten there and decided to try it for ourselves.
I thought the restaurant itself was so cool! It was a little dated, but I felt like that added to the atmosphere, as weird as that sounds. I'm a sucker for OG Epcot!

I sent this to my dad, who is a diver, and suggested a new career for him.

I got the salmon with goat cheese risotto as my entree and Oh. My. Word. This was FANTASTIC. I love salmon and I love goat cheese, so I was in absolute heaven. The sauce on it was amazing as well. I was so blown away by this restuarant. Mom and I both loved our entrees (She got the shrimp and grits, and as a southerner, it was very good!) and the service was impeccable. I would 10/10 return without hesitation!

 

[Driver]

Ahhh so you get it!! I was joking with my mom that other day that if I ever took transtar I would leave two hours before my shift juuuuust in case. We had a bus catch on fire and another run over an alligator and break down on my program, so I stayed far away!

We call them "deathstar" their maintenance is horrible

 

[meg0039]

Ahhh my poor little abandoned trip report... between all of my photos getting wiped from storage (Apple had never betrayed me before now... sigh) and school getting crazy, this child of mine has fallen by the wayside.
However, there's an additional reason for not finishing up! I was offered a position on a second college program this Spring and will be returning home in January!! I'm going to try to get my mom to join the boards to post her trips to visit since i'll be down there living it (and she'll be AP and already has a trip a month PLUS a trip to Disneyland planned...), but I just thought I would share the good news here and give a small explanation of me being MIA!

 

[meg0039]

I am back, once again, with an ultimate resolution to this TR.
When I first abandoned this thread, aside from applying for a College Program, I had applied for one other role. For two months now, I have been through a few different interviews (including one where I called the merchandise proprietor of DHS by the wrong name... yikes) and am so excited to say that I have accepted a position as a Merchandise Management Intern at a resort on property! I decided to go a little silent on here during the process for the obvious reasons.
With that said, my whole life is one big Disney trip now! So here is a shameless plug for my social media that I am transitioning to being Disney (and Orlando, in general) centric!
Follow me on Instagram @marygaylor_ and feel free to connect with me! I'm always down to talk Disney or answer any questions about the College Program/Professional Internship process as well as Disney!
So with that said, I'm going to read a few (hundred) trip reports and catch up with everything!