Sunday, August 6th
Our journey begins as soon as our youngest DD, K, is finished performing as Gadshill in King Henry IV. We went and watched her 4pm show, understood very little because, well, we really don't understand Shakespeare. We jumped in our SUV and took off from Indiana to Midway - our flight wasn't until Monday morning, but we thought we'd try spending the night somewhere on Cicero Avenue and not have to fight workday traffic on I-80 or 294.
We stopped at the Best Western for 79 a night - and the only room they had available was smoking. I quit for good 10 months ago but I swear I've NEVER smelled a room so smokey in my life. We jumped in the car, had Applebee's for dinner then popped over to Jewel and grabbed a big spray bottle of mega strength Febreez. Boy, that stuff can work some miracles ... my smokey headache was gone. We fell asleep at around 11pm and ....
Monday, August 7
Woke up to our daughter's fighting while sleeping in the same bed at 3am. Ugh. Now we're all awake ... this is going to be a LONG day.
At 6am we grabbed some breakfast from the lobby, picked up our suitcases and we're off to Midway.
Now, our girls are used to flying ... so we really try and use carry ons only if we're doing theme park vacations. So that's exactly what we did this time ... and knowing that our flight wouldn't arrive home after our vacation until 11pm, I was so happy we weren't going to have to deal with baggage claim and sleepy kids at the same time. (People, this last paragraph is called foreshadowing. LOL)
We're at the gate, I pop a Valium (I'm a horrible flyer) and we're on the plane pretty quick. We're in line for take off almost immediately (gotta love Midway) and ... we're off. Flight is pretty uneventful and we're down in Orlando before you know it. Down at baggage claim we spot our driver from Tiffany Towncar, we pop in the car and are at the HRH in about 20 minutes.
The girls go to check out the lobby while DH and I check in - and lo and behold, we've got a room ready! And it's a Queen Deluxe ... whoooo-hooooo!!! (Apparently, calling to beg does the trick!) We're handed our documents and park tickets since I requested hotel delivery, we get our room keys with cool little Club 7 stickers on them and off to 7 we go. (And we're all giggly in the elevator because we need to use our hotel keys to access 7 ... we're such VIPs! LOL)
We pop our heads into the concierge room and see pop, water, lemonade, cookies, bags of Doritos and trail mix. But we're really interested in seeing the deluxe room ... we open the door and OMG ... I'm thrilled! When we do Disney we stay at the Contemporary - with a big reason being the size of the rooms in the Tower. But the deluxe room is bigger and more spacious. If only it had a balcony ... but oh well.
The bellboy is up within minutes with our luggage and explains the timeline for snacks and stuff ... but basically, we're starving and out the door.
We head on down to the Kitchen (formally known as Sunset Grill) - DH gets a burger, oldest DD gets a burger too, younger DD gets her free (as in Kids Eat Free) chicken nuggets and I get a Philly Steak sandwich ... which unfortunately, was very dry. But who the heck cares ... we're on vacation! And off to the parks we go!!
Everyone's favorite (well, everyone except me because I get motion sickness REALLY easily!) ride from our last visit was Spiderman ... so our first stop is IOA.
Before I continue, I have to say a couple of things ... first, they closed the shortcut. (You'd go through the Beach Club restaurant and stay to the right, go through the gate, go through a bit of parking lot and voila! you were right at the Universal gates.) Huge HUGE bummer. And second, I've read on some internet boards (maybe this one too ... I'm not quite positive) that some people think using the FOTL pass that comes with your hotel key can be abused. Like there's a long regular line, you use FOTL, get off the ride then do FOTL again. Some have said that's abusing the system. If that's how you feel, then you'll probably hate this trip report. Because we use FOTL over and over again ... we paid a truckload of money to stay on property and buy this perk, and we're not ashamed to use it. Okay, disclaimer over.
Our first stop is Spiderman. And then our second stop is Spiderman. And I end up taking off the 3D glasses during the trip down the building. Ugh that makes me nauseous.
Next up is the Flying Unicorn that our youngest DD loves ... all four of us go on, and then DH and little DD go once again for good measure.
Now ... it's time to kill dad. 3 years ago when we were here, oldest DD was a wee bit too short to do Hulk and Dueling Dragons ... and she had talked DH into going on them with her. And somehow, talked me into doing FRONT ROW Dueling Dragons. But her death wish for her dad is first. Little DD and I wait for them to come off the ride and watch all the people with perplexed expressions leaving the ride. Those looks didn't make much sense to me until I rode Fire myself two days later.
Oh, did I mention the heat? Holy crap was it hot. We've been to Florida in August before but there wasn't ANY rain the entire time we were there ... not a drop to take the edge off.
Now we're on our way back to the hotel ... and we're all exhausted. After all, it's now 6pm and we've been up since 3am. (I'm tired again just thinking about it.) We head up to our beautiful room to change into bathing suits, but we first grab some snacks (meatballs, cheese, crackers, etc.) to munch on. We take the plates back to our room, eat, change into suits and DH promptly passes out on the bed. I figure I'll take the girls down to the pool and DH will wake up soon and be down.
We end up hanging around the pool for two hours and no DH is to be seen. I finally gather up the girls and we head back ... only to find DH in exactly the same position. He was so completely and utterly exhausted. Hard week at work, we had a client for our side business all day Saturday, and now the poor guy is just beat.
So we're in for the night ... cookies and milk and we called it a night.
Up next ...
We take Universal Studios by storm, discover a love for deep fried mac n cheese and thrill readers by posting a ton of pictures.
Photos:
http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=1QZuGLlwzYuNg¬ag=1
(There's a pic of a train cookie jar on the concierge desk - inside are a secret stash of oreos!)
Our journey begins as soon as our youngest DD, K, is finished performing as Gadshill in King Henry IV. We went and watched her 4pm show, understood very little because, well, we really don't understand Shakespeare. We jumped in our SUV and took off from Indiana to Midway - our flight wasn't until Monday morning, but we thought we'd try spending the night somewhere on Cicero Avenue and not have to fight workday traffic on I-80 or 294.
We stopped at the Best Western for 79 a night - and the only room they had available was smoking. I quit for good 10 months ago but I swear I've NEVER smelled a room so smokey in my life. We jumped in the car, had Applebee's for dinner then popped over to Jewel and grabbed a big spray bottle of mega strength Febreez. Boy, that stuff can work some miracles ... my smokey headache was gone. We fell asleep at around 11pm and ....
Monday, August 7
Woke up to our daughter's fighting while sleeping in the same bed at 3am. Ugh. Now we're all awake ... this is going to be a LONG day.
At 6am we grabbed some breakfast from the lobby, picked up our suitcases and we're off to Midway.
Now, our girls are used to flying ... so we really try and use carry ons only if we're doing theme park vacations. So that's exactly what we did this time ... and knowing that our flight wouldn't arrive home after our vacation until 11pm, I was so happy we weren't going to have to deal with baggage claim and sleepy kids at the same time. (People, this last paragraph is called foreshadowing. LOL)
We're at the gate, I pop a Valium (I'm a horrible flyer) and we're on the plane pretty quick. We're in line for take off almost immediately (gotta love Midway) and ... we're off. Flight is pretty uneventful and we're down in Orlando before you know it. Down at baggage claim we spot our driver from Tiffany Towncar, we pop in the car and are at the HRH in about 20 minutes.
The girls go to check out the lobby while DH and I check in - and lo and behold, we've got a room ready! And it's a Queen Deluxe ... whoooo-hooooo!!! (Apparently, calling to beg does the trick!) We're handed our documents and park tickets since I requested hotel delivery, we get our room keys with cool little Club 7 stickers on them and off to 7 we go. (And we're all giggly in the elevator because we need to use our hotel keys to access 7 ... we're such VIPs! LOL)
We pop our heads into the concierge room and see pop, water, lemonade, cookies, bags of Doritos and trail mix. But we're really interested in seeing the deluxe room ... we open the door and OMG ... I'm thrilled! When we do Disney we stay at the Contemporary - with a big reason being the size of the rooms in the Tower. But the deluxe room is bigger and more spacious. If only it had a balcony ... but oh well.
The bellboy is up within minutes with our luggage and explains the timeline for snacks and stuff ... but basically, we're starving and out the door.
We head on down to the Kitchen (formally known as Sunset Grill) - DH gets a burger, oldest DD gets a burger too, younger DD gets her free (as in Kids Eat Free) chicken nuggets and I get a Philly Steak sandwich ... which unfortunately, was very dry. But who the heck cares ... we're on vacation! And off to the parks we go!!
Everyone's favorite (well, everyone except me because I get motion sickness REALLY easily!) ride from our last visit was Spiderman ... so our first stop is IOA.
Before I continue, I have to say a couple of things ... first, they closed the shortcut. (You'd go through the Beach Club restaurant and stay to the right, go through the gate, go through a bit of parking lot and voila! you were right at the Universal gates.) Huge HUGE bummer. And second, I've read on some internet boards (maybe this one too ... I'm not quite positive) that some people think using the FOTL pass that comes with your hotel key can be abused. Like there's a long regular line, you use FOTL, get off the ride then do FOTL again. Some have said that's abusing the system. If that's how you feel, then you'll probably hate this trip report. Because we use FOTL over and over again ... we paid a truckload of money to stay on property and buy this perk, and we're not ashamed to use it. Okay, disclaimer over.
Our first stop is Spiderman. And then our second stop is Spiderman. And I end up taking off the 3D glasses during the trip down the building. Ugh that makes me nauseous.
Next up is the Flying Unicorn that our youngest DD loves ... all four of us go on, and then DH and little DD go once again for good measure.
Now ... it's time to kill dad. 3 years ago when we were here, oldest DD was a wee bit too short to do Hulk and Dueling Dragons ... and she had talked DH into going on them with her. And somehow, talked me into doing FRONT ROW Dueling Dragons. But her death wish for her dad is first. Little DD and I wait for them to come off the ride and watch all the people with perplexed expressions leaving the ride. Those looks didn't make much sense to me until I rode Fire myself two days later.
Oh, did I mention the heat? Holy crap was it hot. We've been to Florida in August before but there wasn't ANY rain the entire time we were there ... not a drop to take the edge off.
Now we're on our way back to the hotel ... and we're all exhausted. After all, it's now 6pm and we've been up since 3am. (I'm tired again just thinking about it.) We head up to our beautiful room to change into bathing suits, but we first grab some snacks (meatballs, cheese, crackers, etc.) to munch on. We take the plates back to our room, eat, change into suits and DH promptly passes out on the bed. I figure I'll take the girls down to the pool and DH will wake up soon and be down.
We end up hanging around the pool for two hours and no DH is to be seen. I finally gather up the girls and we head back ... only to find DH in exactly the same position. He was so completely and utterly exhausted. Hard week at work, we had a client for our side business all day Saturday, and now the poor guy is just beat.
So we're in for the night ... cookies and milk and we called it a night.
Up next ...
We take Universal Studios by storm, discover a love for deep fried mac n cheese and thrill readers by posting a ton of pictures.
Photos:
http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=1QZuGLlwzYuNg¬ag=1
(There's a pic of a train cookie jar on the concierge desk - inside are a secret stash of oreos!)
*goes back to reading* excellent so far 