We went to Disney World this past July. It was our family vacation mixed with business, mostly business. It was the beginning of the end for my marriage. My step father passed away last Spring and my Mother is in a nursing home in Florida so I thought "Okay, here's a chance to take care of her estate and have some fun too." Well, it turned out to be the vacation from hell.
I booked our vacation on Expedia and since I had not been to Disney since 1989, I was not familiar with our hotel choice. It sounded good from the reviews and location. Our flight was delayed at Orlando due to lightning, which meant we could not get off the plane. It also meant we could not get our luggage until it was deemed safe for the ground crew. This translated into no stroller from the gate to the luggage carousel. No big deal right? Wrong! Three children, one of them in my arms, carry on luggage and a 1/2 mile walk. We probably waited about 2 hours for our luggage, then about one hour for our rental car which put us at 8pm. Now we had to find our hotel. Since we arrived at our hotel so late they released our room. We were given a room with one queen bed and a cot. It does not work for five people...so we had to take a smoking room with two queen sized beds.
OK, so now it is about 9:30 pm and my kids are so cranky and hungry. Did I mention we were delayed in Philadelphia too because of runway traffic? We also had some problems because my son did not have a Boarding Pass and I had to get in line and wait while the rest of my family waited by the metal detectors. Another reason I had chosen our hotel was because of the free shuttle to the Disney parks. We were unaware that July is South America debutante/sweet sixteen month. The hotel was jammed packed with teenaged girls, speaking rapid fire Spanish. It was a tidal wave of teenagers.
We waited for the shuttle the next day for about 45 minutes and we told by the front desk that this was a third party contract and they had no control over the times. We basically had a good day at Magic Kingdom, it was HOT, HOT, HOT but hey it's Summer and it's Florida. The lines were long except for a few FAST PASS rides. We could not agree on where to eat dinner so we postponed it (mistake). Our second mistake was to rely on the shuttle schedule to be accurate. We wolfed $ 50.00 worth of hot dogs to try to make the 10:15 pm shuttle, missing the spectacular parade and fireworks but we would beat the homeward bound crowds, right?
The 10:15 pm shuttle did not arrive until midnight. Samantha thought we had to live in the Magic Kingdom parking lot, forever, and was hysterical. Every bus that came our way got our hopes raised except when we saw it was the wrong number. Repeated phone calls to our hotel and the bus company did not produce any results. After sitting in the hot, deserted parking lot and feeling grimy and exhausted our bus arrived. The passengers were dropped off according to the hotel's status (better hotels first our hotel was last). We actually passed our hotel several times before we finally arrived.
I was never to thrilled to see hordes of chattering teenagers in my life. I complained to Expedia and our hotel . Expedia gave us a $50.00 credit and our hotel gave us a free breakfast coupon for Au Bon Pain. The rest of the vacation (the business part) had a few hitches... my husband backed the rental car into a pole damaging the bumper, our departing flight was at 8 am and the airport was about a 90 minute drive plus the rental return and accident report. We split up and my husband took the rental and I got the boarding passes, checked the luggage. When we met up again and got in the security line we had minutes to get to the gate. My son's Pirates of the Caribbean sword caused some problems and we were told not to brandish it. We ran to the gate just as our flight was backing away. We missed our plane! This actually worked to our advantage because we had had a three hour layover in Atlanta and it shortened it by 90 minutes. We literally travelled for 12 hours.
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