Day 4: Disney Springs & Disney's Hollywood Studios
As I mentioned in my last post, the two late nights in a row would really come back to bite me in the you-know-where today. This was by far our worst day of the vacation, and I know the lack of sleep didn't help at all. Pair that with unexpected crowd levels, a late change of plans, and inconvenient bus trips, and it was a recipe for a bad time.
To begin, I was already cranky about today because my plans had been altered fairly last minute, and that was rather irritating. I was trying to keep positive, but it was tough on such little sleep.
Let me explain what happened. Mark's good friends from his former employer were going to be in Disney the same week as us, which was great. I love hanging out with them and their kids are adorable. We knew they would be there well in advance and we planned to meet up with them at least once while we were there. On top of that, it was their son's birthday during the trip so we wanted to do something fun for him. I came up with the idea of having Mark take him to the LEGO store in Disney Springs and letting him pick out whichever set he wanted. Mark loved that idea, and so we ran that plan by our friends. They thought it was a great idea, and they drove down so transportation to DS wouldn't be an issue for them.
Well, they aren't obsessive planners like I am, so they didn't really have anything set in stone, which I figured would work in our favor...I was wrong. Mark and I knew we wanted to spend at least some time at Disney Springs during our trip to explore the new area and see how the renovations at the LEGO store turned out. So, I made dinner reservations for Bongo's, at Mark's request, for that Friday since we would be at DHS and I didn't think that park would take us that long to explore since there really isn't much there at the moment. We could basically split our day at DHS and visit DS in the middle of the evening, but try to make it back for Fantasmic or the Star Wars fireworks which I really wanted to see.
I confirmed with his friends at least a month or two in advance the date they were leaving to make sure they would be able to meet us at DS that Friday. They said they would be leaving either that Saturday or Sunday. PERFECT! Then, our 1st or 2nd day at Disney, Mark texts them to confirm we are still on for Friday evening. They responded that they were going to do a short day in the park that Friday and then start making their way back home so they couldn't meet in the early evening.
SO, what are our options now. We tried coming up with different variations of meeting for breakfast or around dinner on a couple different days, but with our dinner reservations, the kid's bedtimes and MNSSHP the timing just wouldn't work. They then suggested meeting early on Friday morning at DS instead. This was really the only option and I know Mark really wanted to take their son to the LEGO store. However, this would mean I would have to change out all of our FP+ reservations, and we would have to go from DS to DHS to DS back to DHS. NIGHTMARE with Disney transportation.
I told Mark I would try to change our ADR at Bongo's to a place at DHS, but he said he wanted to eat there and to just leave the reservation as is. I left the reservation and was able to change our FP+ out, which I was thankful for. I was also irritated because we were meeting his friends at 10 a.m., when DS opens, so we couldn't even go to DHS beforehand because it opened at 9 and that just wouldn't make sense. My plan had been to rope drop TSM and leave my Tier 1 FP+ for RnR. So that plan was out the window. I haven't ever done TSM and it was on my list of must-dos this trip, so I was leaving hope that we could find a short wait-time for it during the day.
In the grand scheme, I know all of this isn't a big deal, but I get easily irritated when I ask people several times to confirm info for me just to have everything thrown out the window. Especially when I had been planning this trip for 9 months.
Now, let's actually start the morning....
I don't think I fell asleep until at least 2:30 the night before because I wanted to get all of our dirty laundry together so I wouldn't have to worry about messing around with it in the morning. I set my alarm for 7:00 a.m. and let Mark sleep while I got up to get our laundry done. Rookie mistake. When my alarm went off the next morning I was still half asleep. I gathered up our laundry and made my journey to the facilities. When I got there, to my surprise, there were only 2 washing machines open. Clearly, everyone had the same idea: get up early and get it done.
There wasn't enough time in the cycles for me to fall back asleep between loads, so I just went back to the room and fiddled on my phone while Mark laid there snoring. I went in and out of the room 3 different times and he didn't even stir
Of course, I'm getting even more annoyed at that point. But, I finally finished folding the last load of laundry and headed back to the room. I woke Mark up because it was time for him to start getting ready to be able to meet his friends on time and he didn't even realize I had done all 3 loads of laundry
And he was still half asleep himself so he didn't even say thank you for taking care of it, which is
really unlike him. My blood pressure was getting dangerously high at this point.
We finished getting ready and headed toward the buses. Because of the joint Typhoon Lagoon/Disney Springs buses the line for the bus was super long. We had to stand and at that point my knees were hurting SO badly from walking so much and old sports injuries that I was near tears during the drive. We were already off to a good start to the day
