Just got back from my 8 day stay at the world! 07/31-08/08
Went by nice and easy, not too fast-not too slow either. Let's just get to a few notes before we begin:
DAY UNO:
We arrive! And arrive a bit early for check in at Contemporary Resort (CR) @ around 11am. We will be staying at Bay Lake Tower, but check in is actually in CR. I should actually say that just about everything but the room for us is in CR! Everything.
Upon check in we had requested multiple times for high level rooms, and my dad even made a list of rooms he'd like to be in (lol), but that list really might of worked because we actually got one of the rooms on the list. But the guy wouldn't tell us which room, instead we were told we would be texted our room number when ready. We were stressing on which room we wanted because we booked a Bay Lake room. Not a Magic Kingdom room. But we researched and found out plenty of Bay Lake rooms offer Magic Kingdom views if you look around long enough to spot some room numbers people post. Lucky us because it worked for us!
Roughly 4 hours later, ugh, we will get the text. For now though we make our way to eat lunch at the Grand Floridian's Gasparilla Grill.
OH- and we got the Disney Dining Plan (DDP) for the first time ever, but only for the first 5 days at. I guess that's pretty big I forgot to mention that because the DDP helped our trip SO much. More on that later...
So we eat at the Gasparilla Grill with our swanky new points and it was delicious! Basic food, but it's always great atmosphere at Grand Floridian. No pictures unfortunately. I do wish we had a picture of this old man who greeted us at the front doors who looked like someone from the nifty nineties (1890's), he was very welcoming!
I will comment though that GF guest parking is absolutely atrocious! You have to cross a road and walk just about all the calories of the food you are about to eat off just to get to the front door. The other Deluxe resorts don't have this problem, why you GF?
Anyways, afterwards we took a trip to the Wilderness Lodge. The WL is where we are staying in December for our trip, so why not check it out? It was gorgeous!
^Edit- sorry that's so blurry! It's my only WL lobby picture, so I'm going to leave it.
It was my first time seeing this place, and it was worth making a side trip for! You feel very isolated even though you're so close to the "magic" (cheesy, I know). The pool looked amazing on this very hot day, but alas we had to go back to BLT because we needed to get all the stuff out of the car.
We headed back to BLT and it was maybe 2:30 ish. No text yet! So we take a quick dive into the pool (we came prepared to go to the pool from Tampa lol), and although very nice and complete with a sand beach of its own the BLT pool was still very small. Unfortunately and surprisingly this is the only time where we visited the BLT pool. I wish we had gone more times because it is a very quaint place to relax between parks and whatnot, but we wanted to try more pools I guess. Sorry BLT pool for hurting your feelings.
At around 3:30 pm we finally get a text and head up to our room! Floor 12 room 8208 (I'll edit later if this is wrong, you might want to take note of this room number future BLT travelers) or something like that And boy oh boy..... what a dud! At least that's what I thought when I first entered.... I went straight for balcony and saw a Bay Lake and dundundun a tennis court. No Magic Kingdom! No nothing. Until my mom decided to take a side view (and yea, why didn't I look at the sides?) and she found a well... decent view to say the least.... I'll let the picture speak for itself.
The Magic Kingdom was right outside our balcony! It was absolutely perfect! I could even see riders coming down Splash, the train going by, FLE construction, TTA cars zipping along, and most importantly fireworks each and every night.
A bit more icing on our viewing cake: a Bay Lake view to our right.
This picture, both pictures actually, don't do these views justice. The Bay Lake view offered an array of interesting things literally on the horizon. The most interesting being Universal which has their 1 fireworks show and the Islands of Adventure light house. I think I could even see the main spire of Hogwarts (we brought along binoculars, highly recommended!!)!! Other interesting things included the iconic globe hotel next to Wet'n'Wild (which served as the reference point to pinpoint Universal) and Old Town's zip line. And I must say that figuring out what each little building was on the horizon wasn't simple. It took a few days and looking at Google Earth a few times haha
And the Lake just stretched forever. Beautiful! A++ view!
More coming later!
Hope you enjoy!
Went by nice and easy, not too fast-not too slow either. Let's just get to a few notes before we begin:
- I've been to WDW so many times, so this time was more about EATING and enjoyin the resorts.
- I went on this trip with myself and my parents making a total of 3 of us on this trip.
- We live in SW Florida, so no airplanes for us. Car ride of 4 hours with a brief stop in Tampa to visit my sister I won't be going over, so sorry if it seems I just magically popped up in WDW.
- I didn't finish last year's trip report unfortuneately, but this year I promise I will. And quickly too (;
- We are staying at BLT (Bay Lake Tower) for the first 5 days, at AKL Kidani Village (Animal Kingdom Lodge) for the last 3!
DAY UNO:
We arrive! And arrive a bit early for check in at Contemporary Resort (CR) @ around 11am. We will be staying at Bay Lake Tower, but check in is actually in CR. I should actually say that just about everything but the room for us is in CR! Everything.
Upon check in we had requested multiple times for high level rooms, and my dad even made a list of rooms he'd like to be in (lol), but that list really might of worked because we actually got one of the rooms on the list. But the guy wouldn't tell us which room, instead we were told we would be texted our room number when ready. We were stressing on which room we wanted because we booked a Bay Lake room. Not a Magic Kingdom room. But we researched and found out plenty of Bay Lake rooms offer Magic Kingdom views if you look around long enough to spot some room numbers people post. Lucky us because it worked for us!
Roughly 4 hours later, ugh, we will get the text. For now though we make our way to eat lunch at the Grand Floridian's Gasparilla Grill.
OH- and we got the Disney Dining Plan (DDP) for the first time ever, but only for the first 5 days at. I guess that's pretty big I forgot to mention that because the DDP helped our trip SO much. More on that later...
So we eat at the Gasparilla Grill with our swanky new points and it was delicious! Basic food, but it's always great atmosphere at Grand Floridian. No pictures unfortunately. I do wish we had a picture of this old man who greeted us at the front doors who looked like someone from the nifty nineties (1890's), he was very welcoming!
I will comment though that GF guest parking is absolutely atrocious! You have to cross a road and walk just about all the calories of the food you are about to eat off just to get to the front door. The other Deluxe resorts don't have this problem, why you GF?
Anyways, afterwards we took a trip to the Wilderness Lodge. The WL is where we are staying in December for our trip, so why not check it out? It was gorgeous!
^Edit- sorry that's so blurry! It's my only WL lobby picture, so I'm going to leave it.
It was my first time seeing this place, and it was worth making a side trip for! You feel very isolated even though you're so close to the "magic" (cheesy, I know). The pool looked amazing on this very hot day, but alas we had to go back to BLT because we needed to get all the stuff out of the car.
We headed back to BLT and it was maybe 2:30 ish. No text yet! So we take a quick dive into the pool (we came prepared to go to the pool from Tampa lol), and although very nice and complete with a sand beach of its own the BLT pool was still very small. Unfortunately and surprisingly this is the only time where we visited the BLT pool. I wish we had gone more times because it is a very quaint place to relax between parks and whatnot, but we wanted to try more pools I guess. Sorry BLT pool for hurting your feelings.
At around 3:30 pm we finally get a text and head up to our room! Floor 12 room 8208 (I'll edit later if this is wrong, you might want to take note of this room number future BLT travelers) or something like that And boy oh boy..... what a dud! At least that's what I thought when I first entered.... I went straight for balcony and saw a Bay Lake and dundundun a tennis court. No Magic Kingdom! No nothing. Until my mom decided to take a side view (and yea, why didn't I look at the sides?) and she found a well... decent view to say the least.... I'll let the picture speak for itself.
The Magic Kingdom was right outside our balcony! It was absolutely perfect! I could even see riders coming down Splash, the train going by, FLE construction, TTA cars zipping along, and most importantly fireworks each and every night.
A bit more icing on our viewing cake: a Bay Lake view to our right.
This picture, both pictures actually, don't do these views justice. The Bay Lake view offered an array of interesting things literally on the horizon. The most interesting being Universal which has their 1 fireworks show and the Islands of Adventure light house. I think I could even see the main spire of Hogwarts (we brought along binoculars, highly recommended!!)!! Other interesting things included the iconic globe hotel next to Wet'n'Wild (which served as the reference point to pinpoint Universal) and Old Town's zip line. And I must say that figuring out what each little building was on the horizon wasn't simple. It took a few days and looking at Google Earth a few times haha
And the Lake just stretched forever. Beautiful! A++ view!
More coming later!
Hope you enjoy!
