Trip Report Janir's Winning at marriage squad goals WDW vacation AAR

Alright, time to get this After Action Report started I think.

The Trip: Janir (me) and the DW. Aug 18-25th Our last Disney adventure was last November at DLR as part of the Hawaii trip. Bought our DVC interest in CCV in Hawaii. Original plan was I'd rent off my 2018 points to my boss who was planning a trip but that fell apart for him so I decided, lets use the points for our anniversary! And lets use the 2019 points for our birthdays next March! And thus, lets get some AP's to go along with it all as its cheaper to get AP's than two sets of tickets! Owning DVC has been a bream of ours since we got married
years ago in WDW and its finally happened and now were going on our DVC points! Too late to get into CCV but AKL was a bucket list resort for us and a Savannah view was available.

Aug 16th:
First I gotta run these two clowns to go stay with my sister's family. We'll miss them but having them gone a day early will help with packing and last minute preparations and no last minute driving across town.

The King of Gondor himself.

Stryder, posing with his namesake (several years ago now). He's old enough now to claim the Kingship of Gondor.

And our resident Princess...

little miss Ella, as in Cinderella, (DW's favorite Disney animated) with her white 'slipper' feet. And she KNOWS she's the princess. Cute little stinker. Here she's sporting a Cinderella outfit and is wondering when she can get out of this outfit.
Both dogs are staying with my sister and her family. We trade off dog sitting services as needed, they take our two and we take her one. Great arrangement for both parties, but they are never happy to leave us, but picking them back up they are never happy to leave my sister's either. ;-/

Now it's Friday Aug 17th, 7 pm and the DW finally gets home from work. She drives 45 minutes one way and while I was able to take a day of PTO she wasn't. I really needed it as I needed to still pack and sort out the Disney box. (The Disney Box is something we made up years ago when dealing with our Disney Wedding. Anything we thought we'd need for WDW, goes into the box the second we think about it, assuming its not a daily use item. This holds things like back pack cooler, magic bands, rain gear, swim suits, etc. If we didn't want to forget it, it goes into the box.)

After I spent the day packing and she gets home, vacation officially begins. I found some glassware on Amazon that I bought for this trip and it was time to get this party started!

Close up of the glass text says "I'M DONE ADULTING, I'm going to (Mickey ears logo) Disney"

Now its time for last minute pack and prep as 4:30 in the morning our airport shuttle arrives. So time to sleep so we can get up in 6 hours.

Up next -It's DISNEY DAY!!! We'll be back home, in the 'world in no time!

 

[Janir]

Aug 18th: It's Disney Day now!
Get up before the Alien Swirling Saucers crack of dawn (swidt?) to get cleaned up, dressed, and pack last minute stuff. Glad I spent time figuring out how to pack the CPAP machine and all of my lat minute packing logistics as I needed every last second to get the final packing and staging luggage done. I get the notification that the airport shuttle is on it's way. What's funny to us is the shuttle depot is about 3 miles away from the airport and we're just under 2. It's a longer drive for the shuttle from the depot to our house than from home to the airport ticketing dropoff. It was also cheaper than airport parking. Not as cheap as getting family to drive us, but we were leaving early and getting back late so I didn't want to bother family this time around.

Airport, pretty easy deal. Our airport really sucks for restaurant options at 5 am but we find something in our concourse that didn't look too bad. A breakfast sandwich that was so meh, I didn't take any pictures of it. Would have preferred a simple McDonald's or Burger King. I paid for Southwest pre-boarding so we're in the first group, right int he back. for whatever reason, the DW and I have boarding numbers that are not sequential and we're intermixed with a family of 5 going to WDW themselves. We chat a bit of shared love for WDW and we finally get on board. DW gets a window seat and I get an aisle. eventually someone comes and takes the center seat.
I put on the noise canceling headphones for the trip and manage to zone out, not really sleep, but I rest ok. DW can't sleep on planes at all so she reads a book.

Land! Woohoo, we're in Florida!! Having been 6 years since the last and only time we used Magical Express I'm not sure where we're going and neither is the family we met in the Southwest boarding line. Our paperwork says where to go, but its taking us a bit longer to reconcile that with our actual location. Then the DW points out the airport shuttle rail we need to take FIRST before anything I'm reading will make sense. Smart lady.

We walk to M.E. and finally get checked in and wait for our bus, then get on. I forgot how easy M.E. makes getting to WDW. no luggage hauling except carryons.

It's not too long before the driver announces we're reaching WDW!

My arch pic sucked being too far back in the bus but the side shot came out.

I swear the Disney Bubble is a physical manifestation! The second we cross I could feel it! Relaxing and carefree time was now ours to enjoy for the next week. Work and

regular life was left behind.
Our firs stop was Coronado Springs and our first look at the Grand Destino tower. we'd be back Saturday next weekend to see it up close so I didn't bother with pictures. Next Jambo House at AKL! Dropped a few more off and then it was just Kidani Village drop off - we're HOME!!
We drop off carryons and get on the bus to Disney Springs. Its almost lunch and I'm hungry.

We think about lunch and I decided I wanted to try Morimoto's street food shop and the ribs. DW wants a food truck. I get my food and eat it there, then we walk to the food trucks and shes gets a Spring Street steak bowl.
Ribs were yummy , but I forgot to take a picture. The bowl was mostly meh. Ok, but nothign the DW would want to write home about.

Coming up: Blasting stormies and dinner with no A/C.

 

[Janir]

Aug 18th continued:
After spending days upon days checking for reservations for The VOID Secrets of the Empire we had reservations for 4 pm. Now, chances were I didn't need a reservation but chances were that I wouldn't get into Secrets of the Empire when I wanted to either, which was 4 pm just before dinner at Edison.
SPOILER "Secrets of the EMPIRE SPOILERS HERE!"
You put on a VR vest rig and helmet and you are magically transformed into a stormtrooper, or really a Rebel agent in stormtrooper armor. ;-) We got to pick our accent colors and we get grouped with two teenagers for a small 4 person squad. WE got started and Cassian Andor tells us he's been tracking some mystery box the Empire has on some shuttle and can't do the last part, but can send K2SO and another agent with stormie armor so we can complete his mission to find out what's in the box. We find were landing on some unknown base on Mustafar. As we're not expected we are instructed to leave our blasters behind. We take a skiff off our ship to the base and just after we dock, K2SO manages to hack a computer gaining us base access and some blaster rifles. We march out and after some small walking around in a circle, we encounter white jobs on the base and have to start blasting to attempt to keep up with the mystery box. Some stormies and more blaster fire and finally our rebel agent manages to get into the box and finds it's some sort of lightsaber. Stormtroopers ares till all around us and we're taking fire from all angles. We're taking so much fire that we have to start some serious volume of return fire but Stormies all hold their positions and don't take cover. Its easy to to shoot them but there are enough that its hard to nail them fast enough to reduce the incoming fire. Then we see our agent with the lightsaber get stabbed and we hear mechanical emphysema nearby to our left flank. Vader pops up and is blocking shots and redirecting them to us and now we're taking hits. Soon Vader blasts our rifles to junk and we have to run away, but K2SO has got us a path out roughly back the way we came. We get away and take off mission accomplished as we discovered what was in the box and lived to tel the tale! We could feel the blaster shots on the parts of the vest we wore and the gauntlets we wore. The only problem we had was the VR system seemed to confuse itself between your own body senors and the other players we they were close. I could move my arm out and my VR showed DW arm in front of me and vice versa. There's some deep level hardware coding that needs to be made to keep the mixups from happening but once we got started those problems never happened. Only when waiting.

The VOID VR experience was fun. If your a Star Wars geek, then this is a must do for you. Spend the $30 and the hour time out of your plans.

Dinner time! Edison. DW likes steampunk and has a steam punk outfit she's put together for GenCon every year and so Edison was a bucket list item for us. Nice restaurant. fun to look at, but for some reason the A/C was out that afternoon and evening and while it wasn't sweltering, it was warmer and normal and almost uncomfortable and slowly getting warmer. I was hankering for some good burgers so I ordered an Edison and DW ordered a Caesar salad, and we shared some with the Delicious Duo of Tomato and Mozzarella and again I forgot to take a picture of anything. We were tired and me especially as my feet were aching from the Void after us walking around Disney Springs all day. (I got some issues relating to my feet) Food was good, we could get med rare burgers so we were happy. The tomato/mozz appetizer was very fresh and the tomatoes tasted in season, dunno if they sourced from EPCOT or not but tastes like it would have been. Med rare burger hit the spot, but the the fried were rather limp and somewhat mushy and a disappointment. I didn't plan on eating many anyways so having disappointing fried helped not eating them. After eating, and still being tired we made our way back to Kidani and home. Quick gift shop walk though showed some potential swag to buy.

Its like TDO knows this was actually a popular ride yet they killed it.

Got the wrong directions to our room and started going down the wrong wing of the building. Got to the end and found out we were in the wrong place, got back to the lobby, asked again, got the SAME directions of which we said that's impossible as we just came from there and the entire BLOCK of rooms with our number isn't even that direction. Finally get the right directions to the OTHER wing and had to walk all the way down that wing of Kidani to get to our room. We get into our room, a CM delivered our luggage and our Amazon prime Now order and we sorted ourselves and settled in for the night after looking at some animals off the porch in the nightlight.

Coming up EPCOT Day 1!

 

[riverside]

(The Disney Box is something we made up years ago when dealing with our Disney Wedding. Anything we thought we'd need for WDW, goes into the box the second we think about it, assuming its not a daily use item. This holds things like back pack cooler, magic bands, rain gear, swim suits, etc. If we didn't want to forget it, it goes into the box.)

I like this idea!!

 

[KellBelle]

Along for the ride!

 

[Janir]

I like this idea!!

I tell ya its a near vacation time stress reliever. I used to make lists, then I'd misplace the list or I couldn't find the item on the list that I needed and had to improvise or something. Now the important stuff is always int he box and all I have to do is sort the box and the items in it. Several times it turns out that there are some thing that are in the box that we no longer need so it never went on vacation.

 

[Janir]

Wake up int he morning to animals feeding in the backyard. Not a ton this morning but it was cool to see.

EPCOT day 1.
This was a advanced planned EPCOT day with FPs. Our first being Frozen. We liked Maelstrom back in its day but Frozen is a fun dark water ride for us. The roof top areas of grass always look wrong to us. It's missing a goat. I understand why they can't have a goat or two up there in EPCOT but it still needs goats. (If you've ever been to Al Johnson's in Door County Wisconsin (Sister Bay) Swedish restaurant, you would understand goats are required for grass roofs. Otherwise who wants to go up and mow that lawn weekly? )

Of course when it comes to the photopass point, I'm looking down and not up at the camera, and my hat is blocking my face. (Last row)

Some reason these two crack me up.

After Frozen, our next FP was going to be Mission Space but we had an hour. But at this point my feet and lower legs were killing me. (medical fun) so I decided time to go get an ECV or I wasn't going to make it past lunch. After yesterday in DS and already late morning in EPCOT. So got the ECV and then headed to Mission Space. I got worried that the last thing I needed right now was a blood pressure spike as I was probably already up at this point, so we went Green. First time we've done green and it was fun but not as fun as Orange. But it was enjoyable.

So since were here and Under the Sea with Nemo was our last FP, was a while away, it was lunchtime and Katsura Grill was the menu plan for lunch today. The DW wanted to try it so we planned for it today.

Here's the DW holding her sake along with her lunch of beef teriyaki, while I had the chicken and beef.

From here we made it back towards Norway, first stopping by the trains in Germany.

These outdoor train sets are pretty cool. I couldn't get a simple electric trainset working reliably as a pre-teen for Christmas under the tree. but these trains all run on time.

While DW was getting school bread dessert, I took a visit in the Stave Church.
The wood carvings are just awesome.
Not Hiddleston. ;-)

Next up, we say Hi to the Phoenicians and dinner.

 

[Janir]

EPCOT continued
After leaving World Showcase we stopped to say hi to the Phoenicians and friends before our Nemo FP.
Too dark for good pictures in SSE but it was cool to see it once last time before refurb, round 5?? IDK, lost count.
But I got a nice view of the entire SSE on the way to Nemo.

Then on our way to Nemo. Nemo is fun and the aquarium is always cool to wander around in, specially on hot days.

We caught a FP photographer on our way out for a picture. I look like a goof with my hat but I wanted the sun block around my head.

Wish I took some pictures of the aquarium, but I have plenty of those from other trips. Our wedding dinner reception was in Coral Reef 2nd floor we we had aquarium views thru the entire reception party. So the Seas aquarium has a special place for me.

Now we are making our way to Morocco for dinner. We take our time and go back into World Showcase by way of Canada this time.
We get seated immediately which was nice. I forgot how much I liked the interior of Restaurant Marakesh. We haven't been back here since our very first trip together before we were married.

We started with the beef brewat rolls. Ok, but it needed something more onion and coriander/cilantro inside with the beef.
I had the Braised Beef Short Ribs "Meshoui-style". I had already started eating when I remembered to take a pic.


DW had A Taste of Moroccan Salads


On the way out we got a nice PP pictures, This one with a magic shot frame was inserted in our MDE.

We took our time with dinner, watch the dancer in the middle for a while and eat slowly and enjoyed the place. After dinner it was time for fireworks, out last viewing of Illuminations. Also a special spot in my heart as it was the fireworks at our wedding dessert party.
We picked out a spot where DW can sit as I effectively have a chair already. We picked out a spot in UK area where we had our dessert party years ago.

Great viewing spot. an hour later FIREWORKS!!

WE had seats so we didn't want to move up right to the fence. It was nice as we got to chatting with our neighbors aroudn the planter who were also DVC members and we got to chatting about our experiences with our first DVC trip and they told us about teir various trips. Fun meeting people in WDW waiting for attractions. WDW is all of our jam!
Illuminations is done, and we're tired. Time to be turning around and head back home to the resort. on the way back to return the ECV I got this shot as it was just so cool at night. Spaceship Earth lit in purple.

All of my pics are cell phone. I'm gonna have to buy a decent camera soon I think.

Up next - Our first Animal Kingdom day! First time we see Pandora in person. Pictures and videos online do NOT do it justice...

 

[Janir]

Animal Kingdom day! Our first time in Pandora
Last trip to the 'world we saw the blocked off walls to Pandora (kinda like the walls blocking Batuu in DHS this trip)
We made a beeline for Pandora and found a PP right under the falls. Ok, we gotta stop and get a picture here.
I liked the magic shot of the banshee in the background but it would have been cooler if that banshee would have been a bit bigger, like in garden behind us or something.

The steaming, spitting plant. Ready for a pop person to be pushed right out!

The kid was having too much fin so we didn't want to interrupt them.

Pictures just do NOT do the themeing any justice, especially the floating mountains, compared to seeing it with your own eyes. Get closer and the mountain effect is just grander.

The feel of the size just isn't captured in a picture. The forced perspective and architectural work makes me feel like this is Disney Imgaineering work.
We didn't have FP for FoP but we did have a Navi River Journey to go on. That had the feel of "classic Disney Dark water ride" and I really liked it. Even with the 'screens' for some of the effects. It was ell done and fun to go though and just relax and enjoy.

I really liked the Shaman, her movements are so fluid and well timed. I'd love ot see the mechanics int eh background on this animatronic some day. She felt alive.

Again, my sorry Alien Swirling Saucers cell phone pics. I need to play with the settings for dark movement so I can capture some pictures better. Yes flash was off. ;-) HEck my hand was covering the screen as to not spoil anyone's vision.

It was time for some lunch and of course gotta try Satu'li Canteen. Both had the make your own bowls. I did the split meat and should have stuck with just chicken, it was more flavorful. DW did the beef only.


We had a FP to Expedition Everest next so time to leave Pandora. (but we'd be back in a few days for the DVC Moonlight Magic party. ;-) )
I was planning on riding but wasn't feeling so great after lunch. My sugar was low from just before lunch and while I now had some real food, I was still a bit wrung out feeling and vertigo and being wrung out is not a good combination. But the DW loved this ride so I jsut waited for her. Didn't think to swap our MB and let her ride again. DOH!!

Now we're just meandering for a bit until our safari FP. Wish we could have done an earlier safari but we did see plenty of animals even mid afternoon.

I love the AK safari. Missed doing the AK Lodge safari but one day we'll plan for it and head to AKL and do that one.

By the end of the safari, we look some leasurly time to get around back to the entrance, then we made it back to our room and chilled a bit before Sanna dinner. Again I fell down on the job on the pictures but Sanna was good.

We started with the famed bread service and oh man is that good. Carbs arn't supposed to count on vacation but oh man... DW is not a spicy food eater at all so 1 type of the naan was spicy and was unexpected. She wasn't a happy camper. But got past it and it just left the spicy stuff for me. ;-) Then the entrees came, a Braaivleis for me and lamb for DW. Both were excellent, but we couldn't finish them all, we took leftovers back for another time. WE were planning on passing dessert but then our waiter brings out some African Triple Chocolate Mousse for us to share as we were wearing our Celebrating buttons. Ok, so we ate the dessert. Still left some of that behind but that was yummy!

With good day in the park and good food in our bellies it was time to go crash and sleep.
But tomorrow was gonna be a great day! We had Magic Kingdom on deck and some Dwarven meet and greet plans! But thats the next update to this report!

 

[Janir]

Sorry for no updates recently but I just got whacked by layoff and have been a bit pre-occupied since Friday morning. I should get back to this in a day or 2 once I get the immediate post layoff things in place in life so I can find a new job.