Tarkblog

Trip Report for 10/09/07

Attendees:

Me
Annie
D & M (friends we went with)
K & C (their daughters, ages 9 and 5)

Our flight departed Indianapolis at 4pm, so we started to the airport right about 1:30. Got there at two, and waited. Checkin was easy. Security was minimal. The guy directing which security line you got into looked at me and said something about “you look awfully nervous. Is there something going on?”. I’m like: “no, just excited to be going on vacation I guess”. Strange.

2 hour flight took slightly longer. I think there was some traffic. We stayed at a low altitude for a bit longer than you would expect. Flew through some storms and lots of clouds about half way into the flight, but the turbulence wasn’t bad at all.

Landed about 6pm, straight to Magical Express desk. There was literally nobody there. Got our tickets all sorted out after some initial confusion (we were splitting our stay between two hotels, and apparently this caused issues when looking things up in the computer). Anyway, all sorted out and we got right on our bus.

On our last visit, the video monitors on the busses played cartoons. This time they played promotional videos about the parks, attractions, etc. They seem to be GPS triggered as well.

First stop was Saratoga Springs, then on to Port Orleans French Quarter, which was where we were staying. It was right around 7:30 or so when we got to the lobby.

Again, no wait to check in. We had adjoining (but not connecting) rooms. No problem.

We grabbed a bite at the food court.

We walked by the pool area towards the boat dock.

The boat arrived after a few minutes and we took the nice 20 minute or so boat ride to Downtown Disney.

First stop: Goofy’s Candy Company.

We have our own special treats we look forward to here:

We continued down the shopping area bit. We looked inside the toy store, but this was really the only shop we went into. We walked all the way down to the Lego store and the girls played for a little bit.

Then we began the walk back to the boat dock. By the time we got back to the boat dock it was around 9:30 and we were all getting tired. There was a pretty long line to board; we didn’t make the first boat and had to wait for the second - about 20 minutes.

By the time we got back to the room it was about 10:15 or so. We enter our room and…NO LUGGAGE (our travel companions had their luggage, so we know that it had been delivered). It had been 3 hours, so the Magical Express *should* have had our luggage delivered. I called the front desk to inquire; she told me in a Jamaican accent that it would be “probably 15 minutes”. I wasn’t satisfied with that. We were getting ready to go to sleep here. I wanted to know if it really was going to be 15 minutes, or she was just guessing. So I asked her to look it up, and she punched stuff into the computer for a little bit, then comes back “probably 15 minutes”. Ugh. I think there was a language barrier issue.

We needed to check our park tickets at the front desk anyway, and it wasn’t a very far walk, so we decided to just go and do that and inquire with someone who spoke better English. On our walk to the front desk, I see a bell guy walking our bag to the room. I just let him continue on; I didn’t want to create any more confusion at this point. At least we knew it was here and would be in the room as soon as we got back.

I went to the lobby concierge to check our previous tickets to make sure they worked okay. Turns out the lobby concierge closes at 10pm, with a sign saying to go to the front desk if you had any questions. So we did, to another girl who didn’t speak English all that well. I simply said “these are old tickets we had on our last trip and we want to check and make sure they scan okay so we don’t have any problems when we go into the parks tomorrow”. She was very confused. She didn’t recognize the tickets (just as well, they were 18 months old!). After explaning AGAIN she finally understood, but then relented that she wasn’t able to check the tickets and we would have to go to the lobby concierge, and pointed over to the empty desk. Realizing it was empty, she told us we would have to come back in the morning at 7 when they re-opened to check.

Fine, I’m tired and ready to go to bed. We head back to the room and snuggle in for a sound night sleep. It was going to be an early morning.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.