Hi everyone, and welcome to my TR… For those of you who do not know me, my name is Reese. I am a single mother to a very handsome 8 year old son, Devon!!! He is the light in my life and I am so glad that he has the Disney bug like his mommy!!!
I figured I’d start with how this trip came about. You see I am surprising Devon with a trip to Disney in December as an “early Christmas gift” We are going December 3rd (my birthday) to December 11th. We are staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and are traveling with Devon’s best friend and his mom! I plan to tell Devon about the trip on Thanksgiving day which is a week before we leave! Not sure how I am going to surprise him exactly yet, but who cares about that right now! Anyway, being that Devon doesn’t know about the Dec trip he has been asking since school let out what we are doing for vacation. And my response had been… “You know mommy is super busy at work b/c it is an election year, so we really only can do day trips on the weekend this summer.” Well, Devon seemed to be fine with that response, but as we got into the 2nd week of July, he says to be mom you know we haven’t done anything yet this summer, what are we going to do??? Ok, so at this point I really needed to start figuring out where the heck I was going to take this boy for a mini vacation… We live in Philadelphia, which is a little less then 2 hours from the Jersey Shore, so I figured I’d just take him there (we usually make a trip there once a summer)… Anyway, as I started pricing out places to stay, how much it was going to cost me on the boardwalk to ride rides and play games all weekend and feed us, it was going to cost me well over $1000!!! I just could not justify paying that much $$$ to go to the stinking shore for 3 days!!!
Well, at that point the wheels in my head started turning and I said to myself I bet I can do a long weekend in Disney for cheaper!!! I wanted to do this as cheap as possible since we are going in December, so I called Disney and asked them if I could use the same % off pin code that I used for my December trip if I wanted to do a room only reservation in August??? ( I only needed a room only b/c I planned to use our Give a Day Get a Day vouchers to get us into MK) They looked it up and said absolutely!!! So I asked if there was any availabilty at All Star Sports for August 12th to the 16th? The CM said there was so I asked her to hold the room for me that I just needed to get a few things in order. I immediately hung up the phone with her, priced the airfare out and called my friend who works at a TV station in Miami to see if he would be able to get us free passes to Universal. He said he could!!! Woo Hoo!!! At this point I called my brother Tim to see if he wanted to come with us! Every year we go to Disney he always wants to come, but b/c we have been going in the fall and winter the last few years, he hasn’t been able to join us with his college class schedule. I ran the details by him and told him how much it would cost him and he didn’t hesitate for a second!!! YES!!! Looks like we are going to Disney and Universal!!!! Oh and by the way, the whole trip did end up costing me less then it would have to go to the shore!!!
I booked the trip the 3rd week in July, told Devon all about it and I was told I was the BEST MOM IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!! Now all we had to do was wait a little less then a month and we would be on our way!!!
Departure Day!!! Thursday August 12th
Since I have to take off more then a week for our December trip, I decided that I would book a later flight to Orlando so I could work at least a ½ day today. Our flight was scheduled to depart Philly International at 7:10pm. Of course today is an overcast day with pop up showers expected all day!!! Just great!!! I dropped Devon off at the babysitter and headed to the train, I work in the city so I get to make my lovely commute by train everyday!!! By the time I got to the train station the skies opened up!!! Lovely!!! I can see the delays at the airport happen as we speak!!! As soon as I get in the office I jump on to PHL’s website to see what kind of delays there are already… There are a few but my flight seems to be right on schedule! YES!!!! By the time lunch time rolled around, it cleared up and I was about ready to jump out of my skin!!! All I wanted to do was go home and leave for vacation!!! Luckily, it was pretty busy for the rest of the afternoon and before I knew it it was time to leave!!! But before I go, let me just check one more time to see if my flight is still on time. It was!!! I say my good byes to my work family and run, for the train!!! Thanks to some texting back and forth with blacktheidiot my train ride was super quick! Even though I was about to beat the crap out of the chick sitting next to me b/c she was cracking and chewing her gum like a freaking cow!!! Anyway, back to the story… Picked Devon up from the babysitter, ran home to get changed, took out the trash, grabbed our bags and was out the door to pick my brother Tim up!!! Woo hoo!!! We live not even 10 minutes from the airport so we headed to my parent’s so my oldest brother John could drop us off at the airport. We put are bags in his car and we were off!!!
We arrived at the airport a few minutes after five, not bad considering I didn’t end up leaving work till 4pm!!! We said see you later to my brother and headed inside!! One thing I swore I would not do this trip was check bags since we were only going for 5 days. So, once we got into the airport, we headed straight to the security check point… While waiting in line, I glance up at the departure screen only to see that our flight is delayed till 11:47pm!!! WHAT!!! Are you kidding me??? It was on schedule not even an hour ago!!! At this point I am freaking out just a bit! WTH am I going to do in the airport with an 8 year old for all these hours??? UGH great start to the trip!!! But then…. As I am putting the baggage up to go thru the scanner thingy, a light bulb when off!!! The flight to Orlando that was scheduled to leave a few hours before our original departure time was also delayed and that flight was now leaving at 6:21p!!! That was in like 45 minutes!!! We grabbed our bags and ran thru the terminal to the gate that the 621p flight was leaving from… Out of breathe at this point, I compose myself and calmly, ok semi-calmly as the nice gentleman at the gate if there was anyway we could get on this flight instead?? He asked my how many people, I told him 3. He then asked if I had checked bags, to which I replied NO!!! He said, I was making his life very easy… He punched away at the keyboard and I prayed as he was doing this… Then he says… You’re in luck, I think I can make this happen for you!!! THANK YOU DEAR GOD!!! He tells me the only seats left were the last row in the plane… Fine by me!!! We handed over our boarding passes for our original flight and he handed us knew ones. At this point it was a little after 6 and we were going to start boarding in a few minutes… We hightailed it to McDonalds for some food and ate while we waited to board.
Here’s us waiting
Our Plane, which Devon thought was pretty cool!!!
Finally boarding!!!
Tim and Devon waiting to take off!!!
So, remember how I said we were suppose to take off at 6:21pm… Well, that did not happen… Air traffic was all backed up, so we pretty much sat on the tarmac in line to take off!!! We finally lifted off around 7:30p. Not to bad I guess, considering we could have still been sitting in the airport!!
The flight was pretty uneventful and before we knew it, the captain had come over the loud speaker to say that we were beginning our desent into Orlando!!! It was about 9:15p at this point.
We landed just about at 9:30p. Since we were in the last seat of the plane we were one of the last people off the plane, oh well gave me a minute to call my parents to let them know we arrived safely. We grabbed our bags and headed to the tram to take us over to the main airport so we could hop on the Magical Express!!!
Here is Devon and Tim on the tram at MCO
Devon said the cutest thing on the Tram ride.... He said “mom, doesn’t it feel good to be back at our second home” I just smiled and sais “Yes it does”!!!
Since we had our ME docs, we walked right up to the podium and were directed to the ME bus that would take us to All Star Sports. Once on the bus we waited probably 15-20 minutes for the bus to lad up and we were on our way with All Star Sports being the first stop. After a quick 20 minute ride we were were pulling thru the gates of the All Star Resort !!! Woo hoo!!! Collected our bags from under the bus, thanked the bus driver and walked into All Star Sports!!! We were finally there!!!
I proceeded to the online check in area and was helped right away.
Here’s Devon looking around while I checked us in!
Check in went smoothly, we were given a room in the basketball section, but I had requested to say in either the baseball or the football section, since they are Dev’s two favorite sports. I kindly asked the if we could be moved to one of those locations, she made a phone call and we were moved to the fooball section!!! YAY!!! We were on our way!!!
Here is where we would call home for the next few days!!!
Continued in next post....
I figured I’d start with how this trip came about. You see I am surprising Devon with a trip to Disney in December as an “early Christmas gift” We are going December 3rd (my birthday) to December 11th. We are staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and are traveling with Devon’s best friend and his mom! I plan to tell Devon about the trip on Thanksgiving day which is a week before we leave! Not sure how I am going to surprise him exactly yet, but who cares about that right now! Anyway, being that Devon doesn’t know about the Dec trip he has been asking since school let out what we are doing for vacation. And my response had been… “You know mommy is super busy at work b/c it is an election year, so we really only can do day trips on the weekend this summer.” Well, Devon seemed to be fine with that response, but as we got into the 2nd week of July, he says to be mom you know we haven’t done anything yet this summer, what are we going to do??? Ok, so at this point I really needed to start figuring out where the heck I was going to take this boy for a mini vacation… We live in Philadelphia, which is a little less then 2 hours from the Jersey Shore, so I figured I’d just take him there (we usually make a trip there once a summer)… Anyway, as I started pricing out places to stay, how much it was going to cost me on the boardwalk to ride rides and play games all weekend and feed us, it was going to cost me well over $1000!!! I just could not justify paying that much $$$ to go to the stinking shore for 3 days!!!
Well, at that point the wheels in my head started turning and I said to myself I bet I can do a long weekend in Disney for cheaper!!! I wanted to do this as cheap as possible since we are going in December, so I called Disney and asked them if I could use the same % off pin code that I used for my December trip if I wanted to do a room only reservation in August??? ( I only needed a room only b/c I planned to use our Give a Day Get a Day vouchers to get us into MK) They looked it up and said absolutely!!! So I asked if there was any availabilty at All Star Sports for August 12th to the 16th? The CM said there was so I asked her to hold the room for me that I just needed to get a few things in order. I immediately hung up the phone with her, priced the airfare out and called my friend who works at a TV station in Miami to see if he would be able to get us free passes to Universal. He said he could!!! Woo Hoo!!! At this point I called my brother Tim to see if he wanted to come with us! Every year we go to Disney he always wants to come, but b/c we have been going in the fall and winter the last few years, he hasn’t been able to join us with his college class schedule. I ran the details by him and told him how much it would cost him and he didn’t hesitate for a second!!! YES!!! Looks like we are going to Disney and Universal!!!! Oh and by the way, the whole trip did end up costing me less then it would have to go to the shore!!!
I booked the trip the 3rd week in July, told Devon all about it and I was told I was the BEST MOM IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!! Now all we had to do was wait a little less then a month and we would be on our way!!!
Departure Day!!! Thursday August 12th
Since I have to take off more then a week for our December trip, I decided that I would book a later flight to Orlando so I could work at least a ½ day today. Our flight was scheduled to depart Philly International at 7:10pm. Of course today is an overcast day with pop up showers expected all day!!! Just great!!! I dropped Devon off at the babysitter and headed to the train, I work in the city so I get to make my lovely commute by train everyday!!! By the time I got to the train station the skies opened up!!! Lovely!!! I can see the delays at the airport happen as we speak!!! As soon as I get in the office I jump on to PHL’s website to see what kind of delays there are already… There are a few but my flight seems to be right on schedule! YES!!!! By the time lunch time rolled around, it cleared up and I was about ready to jump out of my skin!!! All I wanted to do was go home and leave for vacation!!! Luckily, it was pretty busy for the rest of the afternoon and before I knew it it was time to leave!!! But before I go, let me just check one more time to see if my flight is still on time. It was!!! I say my good byes to my work family and run, for the train!!! Thanks to some texting back and forth with blacktheidiot my train ride was super quick! Even though I was about to beat the crap out of the chick sitting next to me b/c she was cracking and chewing her gum like a freaking cow!!! Anyway, back to the story… Picked Devon up from the babysitter, ran home to get changed, took out the trash, grabbed our bags and was out the door to pick my brother Tim up!!! Woo hoo!!! We live not even 10 minutes from the airport so we headed to my parent’s so my oldest brother John could drop us off at the airport. We put are bags in his car and we were off!!!
We arrived at the airport a few minutes after five, not bad considering I didn’t end up leaving work till 4pm!!! We said see you later to my brother and headed inside!! One thing I swore I would not do this trip was check bags since we were only going for 5 days. So, once we got into the airport, we headed straight to the security check point… While waiting in line, I glance up at the departure screen only to see that our flight is delayed till 11:47pm!!! WHAT!!! Are you kidding me??? It was on schedule not even an hour ago!!! At this point I am freaking out just a bit! WTH am I going to do in the airport with an 8 year old for all these hours??? UGH great start to the trip!!! But then…. As I am putting the baggage up to go thru the scanner thingy, a light bulb when off!!! The flight to Orlando that was scheduled to leave a few hours before our original departure time was also delayed and that flight was now leaving at 6:21p!!! That was in like 45 minutes!!! We grabbed our bags and ran thru the terminal to the gate that the 621p flight was leaving from… Out of breathe at this point, I compose myself and calmly, ok semi-calmly as the nice gentleman at the gate if there was anyway we could get on this flight instead?? He asked my how many people, I told him 3. He then asked if I had checked bags, to which I replied NO!!! He said, I was making his life very easy… He punched away at the keyboard and I prayed as he was doing this… Then he says… You’re in luck, I think I can make this happen for you!!! THANK YOU DEAR GOD!!! He tells me the only seats left were the last row in the plane… Fine by me!!! We handed over our boarding passes for our original flight and he handed us knew ones. At this point it was a little after 6 and we were going to start boarding in a few minutes… We hightailed it to McDonalds for some food and ate while we waited to board.
Here’s us waiting
Our Plane, which Devon thought was pretty cool!!!
Finally boarding!!!
Tim and Devon waiting to take off!!!
So, remember how I said we were suppose to take off at 6:21pm… Well, that did not happen… Air traffic was all backed up, so we pretty much sat on the tarmac in line to take off!!! We finally lifted off around 7:30p. Not to bad I guess, considering we could have still been sitting in the airport!!
The flight was pretty uneventful and before we knew it, the captain had come over the loud speaker to say that we were beginning our desent into Orlando!!! It was about 9:15p at this point.
We landed just about at 9:30p. Since we were in the last seat of the plane we were one of the last people off the plane, oh well gave me a minute to call my parents to let them know we arrived safely. We grabbed our bags and headed to the tram to take us over to the main airport so we could hop on the Magical Express!!!
Here is Devon and Tim on the tram at MCO
Devon said the cutest thing on the Tram ride.... He said “mom, doesn’t it feel good to be back at our second home” I just smiled and sais “Yes it does”!!!
Since we had our ME docs, we walked right up to the podium and were directed to the ME bus that would take us to All Star Sports. Once on the bus we waited probably 15-20 minutes for the bus to lad up and we were on our way with All Star Sports being the first stop. After a quick 20 minute ride we were were pulling thru the gates of the All Star Resort !!! Woo hoo!!! Collected our bags from under the bus, thanked the bus driver and walked into All Star Sports!!! We were finally there!!!
I proceeded to the online check in area and was helped right away.
Here’s Devon looking around while I checked us in!
Check in went smoothly, we were given a room in the basketball section, but I had requested to say in either the baseball or the football section, since they are Dev’s two favorite sports. I kindly asked the if we could be moved to one of those locations, she made a phone call and we were moved to the fooball section!!! YAY!!! We were on our way!!!
Here is where we would call home for the next few days!!!
Continued in next post....
:sohappy: :lookaroun
