Trip Report Oh, the Places We go, The People We See

Welcome to my newest Trip Report. For those who don’t know me, I am Jen.

That’s my Daughter Claire with me.



We just got back from an amazing vacation with several family members.

We traveled Nov. 1st thru the 15th, 2012. We rested our headed at 6 different places on this trip, and though it wasn’t always easy to keep moving from place to place, I am happy to have tried some new resorts out and stayed at some familiar ones as well.



This trip came about over a year ago. My Mom’s cousin Vicki wanted to take a trip with her and my Aunt Mary. Her Daughter Katie also wanted to come along.

After some talking and planning it became a group of 16 traveling. I was elected ring leader since I have quite a bit of Disney experience.

Plans were made, some were changed, and some were a little slower at making decisions than others.

My husband Skip is what is known in the Disney groups as a resistor and he decided NOT to come along. He was not so happy about the amount of time I was going to be gone.



The dates for the cruise were set first, Nov 4 through the 8th on the Disney Dream. We all planned to arrive a day early and stay at the Residence Inn near the port. Soon I decided that I must add a few Disney days, and so did everyone else eventually. I thin decide…heck lets add some more, and Claire and I ended up staying 3 more days after the rest left.

Then after doing some research and with a heads up from my good Dis-friend Carey, I was alerted to the fact that the last Halloween party was on Nov. 2nd. How could I pass that chance up? So Claire and I decided to fly in a day earlier than everyone else to hit that party. Claire and I also decided to fly out of Columbus. My family lives near the Toledo, OH area, and the best direct flights are out of Detroit. My youngest sister, who was not going on the cruise, lives in Columbus, and I was able to get a decent priced direct flight from there, so Claire and I drove down Nov. 1 and spent the night before our early flight.



Plans were finally all set in stone and we just had to wait for our time to arrive. Not an easy task, but we all managed.



Let me introduce you to the crew. This is a picture of a picture. My sister has the CD with the actual digital copy, but hasn’t yet loaded it to the computer, so I had to go with this for now till I can get a copy.

In the back row, left to right, we have my parents, Joe and Paula, next to them is my Uncle Geoff. Next to Geoff is cousin Vicki and her son in law Thad. Next to Thad is Pete, Vicki’s husband and then me. Aunt Mary is on the end, she is married to Uncle Geoff and my Mother’s sister.

Down towards the front, left to right, is my nieces Alexis and Abby with their parents Rob and Gail. Gail is my sister. Front and center is Claire. Behind Claire are Jude, and Katie. Katie is married to Thad and is Pete and Vicki’s Daughter. And then we have baby Luke in the stroller. He is only about 9 months old and what a cutie he is.



This trip had the usual ups and downs that most every family will have, but I have to admit things went much smoother than I planned. We never felt the need to kill each other for the most part. LOL

We had several cruise newbies and several Disney World newbies as well.



Please join me in reliving a very magical trip with all the places we traveled and all the people we met along the way!

 

[jenseib]

Kids and their rules! My cousin makes rules like that for all her big cousins all the time! lol

Love the pics of the lobby. I definitely see the comparisons between AKL and WL in the lobby. Both are so grand and beautiful!

Claire is very good at giving me orders! I'm not always so good about taking them though.

 

[jenseib]

I was starting to get a bit antsy that our room was still not ready. It was just after 2 now and I knew our chance at getting a nap was fading away faster and faster.

We decided to head into the gift shop. This place is amazing!

This shop is definitely different than other resorts gift shops.

 

[jenseib]

After our quick browse through the store we headed outside to see the front of the resort.

 

[jenseib]

 

[DisneyPrincess5]

I love your Zawadi photos!!!!! This is one of our favorites and IMO one of the best shops of any of the resorts.

 

[joanna71985]

Following along! AKL is one of my favorite resorts that I've stayed at

 

[jenseib]

Sorry for the lack of updates. It's been a busy week with the Holidays. I plan to get back to writing this next week.

 

[jenseib]

I love your Zawadi photos!!!!! This is one of our favorites and IMO one of the best shops of any of the resorts.

It is a great shop. I was really impressed with all the stuff they had.

 

[jenseib]

Following along! AKL is one of my favorite resorts that I've stayed at

Welcome! We really loved the AKL too. We tried a few other resorts this trip after the cruise and I think AKL was our favorite of them all.

 

[jenseib]

We sat down for a few minutes out front of the Lodge and Claire was ready for another swim. I told her I would give her 20 minutes and then we were going to go and ask about our room. I was at the point of starting to get a little mad that we hadn’t heard anything yet.

We headed out for the swim.

The only pictures I took that time were of Claire holding Flat Ben.

After about 20 minutes of swim time I told Claire we HAD to see if our room was ready. We needed to get changed soon to go to the Halloween party.

She reluctantly got out and we made our way to the front desk.

It was now 3 PM and when I went to the desk they said yes my room was ready and gave me my number. I was kind of mad that I never received a text and I did mention that fact that it never came and we had been waiting all day, but I got no response.

We headed off to our room, which was very far away from the lobby, but we figured that would be the case since I had booked a standard.

We walked in and Claire immediately had to see our view. Now I warned her that I didn’t book an “animal” view, so we may be looking at a lot of nothing. Well imagine our surprise. We went out to the balcony and this is what we saw.

Claire was so excited!

 

[jenseib]

This was some sort of holding pen and animals were switched out every so often.

We were extremely happy with our view!

And you can see by the smile on her face that she was very pleased.

Back inside the room. As you can see, our luggage was already there, which led me to believe the room had been ready for some time now.

 

[jenseib]

The bathroom door has a mirror on it.

The art on the wall, with a nice glare from the window.

This clock is not right. I have no idea why it says that time, but it was actually about 3:15 now. That could be displaying the time a message came though because we had a blinking light and a welcome message at 2 PM. That also irked me, because that meant our room has probably been ready since at least 2. That would’ve worked out perfect for a nice short little nap.

 

[jenseib]

Still touring the room, I moved on to the bathroom area.

And back to the main part of the room.

I can’t remember if I have mentioned this yet or not, but our room is obviously a studio. I was using a friends points to stay here for one night.

Here you can see the box that was sent to me with a fellow Disers fish extender gifts.

Opening up the cabinet to see what’s inside.

 

[jenseib]

It was now around 3:15ish. We needed to get ready for the Halloween party. I had wanted to arrive right at 4, but it was looking like that plan was not going to be followed. We had to sort out a few things, repack 2 backpacks and get ourselves situated.

A little before 4 we were ready to head out towards the bus stop.

Of course I took a few pictures on the way.

I just had to get a shot (or two) of Claire on the bridge.

I looked for the mailbox as I had a few postcards to mail out from “Mickey” to a few friends.

A walk through the lobby.

And then out to the bus stop. If I remember right, we did not wait too long at all and a bus arrived. Yay! We were so excited to be going to our first ever Halloween party at Disney!

 

[jenseib]

I caught myself in the mirror.

And the time. We weren’t “too” far behind schedule.

I texted my Dis friend Carey to let her know we were running a bit behind. We had wanted to meet up kind of right away, and I sure didn’t want her waiting at the front for me. Good news, she’s a slacker too! They were running behind as well, so we should be arriving very close to the same time.

Our first sights of the Holiday décor.

Now it was a bit of a madhouse getting in. Lots of people coming and going. I had to go through bag check and so did Claire as we had to backpacks. Then I asked where to go in at, but was directed in the wrong direction, gave my party ticket and then they realized I needed to go to the far end to enter with that. Ok, I was trying to be patient, but we were just so excited.

We got in finally, and we did the boring thing ….stopped to get a locker. I knew this was driving Claire a bit mad, as it was doing the same for me, but there was no way I was carrying these 2 bags all day. We got our locker, put 1 bag in and emptied the other as much as possible so I only had to carry the minimal stuff and we were on our way to a PARTY!!!!!!!

Going in during this time of year, you just can’t help but gasp at the decorations.

There was a photopass set up right at the front and I wanted to do it, but Claire said no way was she waiting in that line. Darn it.
This was the best I got from her.

 

[jenseib]

But I did make her follow me around to take pictures of all the cute scarecrows.

Those were so cute. I tried again to get her to do the photopass op right there, but nope she wasn’t going to.

Carey and I were in contact and they had just gotten off the bus. Claire and I slowly made our way up main street as we waited for them.

I love all the pumpkins.

And we stopped for a photopass picture since there wasn’t a line.

 

[jenseib]

He took one with my camera too. It was really dark, so I tried to lighten it.

And then some of my Princess.

Our first magic shot.

 

[jlsHouston]

We found the other hot tub.

Getting artsy.

And pool games.

Pool games, I think, are more common now at all resorts than they used to be. I think up until last year, they really didn’t have much going on at Values, at least not like they do now. But since we never really have taken a full resort/pool day, we have never witnessed this too much. This was all new to Claire and as the time went on, she really loved “watching” the games.

OMG the pool games at AKL so enthralled my grandkids they didn't want to go to the parks!

 

[tropicalsmile]

I love your AKL pictures! We wanted to explore the resort after we ate at Boma, but it started pouring!

 

[jenseib]

OMG the pool games at AKL so enthralled my grandkids they didn't want to go to the parks!

Claire really liked them too. She would go up and watch them, but never actually participated. I think if her cousin was with her, or another friend, she would've though. She was memorized by them