Our Fabulous, yet Also Sort of Terrible Disney World Trip

We just got back from Disney World last weekend and, wow: that was….something. This was supposed to be our first ever stay at Fort Wilderness, but, sadly, our trailer has been at the dealership for over a month now getting extensive work done, mostly fixing the water damage we first noticed over the summer (more on that in another post, but to sum up: it’s really good that we found it before the warranty expired). So a few weeks ago we had to face up to the fact that it would not be ready in time and switch our reservation from Fort Wilderness to Disney’s Art of Animation Hotel. Dave couldn’t take a whole week off, so the plan was that I would drive down over the weekend and stay off property with the kids for a few days and then Dave would fly down Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning we’d move onto Disney property (original plan had him driving the trailer down Tuesday night/Wednesday morning).

I’m going to do a few different Disney posts. This one will be a general trip report kind of thing, with lots of pictures and tales of woe, and then I’ll do some more information heavy ones later. This one is going to be long! In fact, I may break it into two posts.

So the kids and I left early Saturday morning and everything went fine for the first….couple of hours? And then the check engine light came on. It actually flashed on and off precisely three times and then stayed off. And did the same thing a bit later in the (nearly 500 mile) drive. Hmm.

Turns out a flashing check engine light is Very Bad and means your engine is misfiring. The internet told me that later. But the owner’s manual didn’t, and the car seemed to be driving fine (as long as I didn’t demand quick acceleration on hills), so we pressed on and made it to the place we were staying outside of Disney World. I will not tell you the name of this place, for reasons I’ll make clear later.

By now I had googled, and learned that I had probably completely destroyed my car by driving if after the check engine light flashed and/or it was going to catch on fire and kill us all if kept driving it. I decided to rent a car first thing Sunday morning and then have the car towed to the Toyota dealership Monday morning. I’m telling all of this as if it was a really straightforward sort of thing, and leaving out how totally stressful it was and all the going back and forth about the best course of action and how much I wished Dave were there so I could just make him do all the adulting.

But that part of the plan went pretty well. I took a Lyft to pick up a rental car Sunday morning and we headed over to Epcot and had a great day with much compartmentalizing to keep me from fretting about the car situation.

This was essentially Abe’s first Disney trip (he was four months old last time we went), so that was really fun. He was into all the fast rides and not nearly as interested in the slow ones. Daredevil! Although he also really loved interactive stuff designed for kids, like the Jedi training at Hollywood Studios, Turtle Talk with Crush in Epcot,  and Enchanted Tales with Belle at Magic Kingdom.

In the parking lot! We finally made it! (not at rope drop as planned; the rental car place didn’t open until 9)

I’ll talk more about our experiences with the new to us Fastpass + system in another post, but for now I’ll say that all my carefully made in advance plans went out the window because of the car stuff, and I spent a lot of time rearranging fast passes. We weren’t even supposed to be at Epcot this day; I had a Magic Kingdom day planned, but I think Magic Kingdom was closing early, so we decided to switch since we wouldn’t be able to get there early. Fortunately, it was a pretty uncrowded time of year (we were there the second week of September) so obsessive planning was less important than during busier times).

We got in rides on Living with the Land and the unexpectedly uncrowded Soarin’ before lunch:

We ate lunch at Sunshine Seasons in The Land pavilion, which is one of my favorite quick service lunch places at Disney. And then off to the rest of Future World:

We took an afternoon break this day and went back to the place we were staying for a few hours to rest and eat a quick dinner before heading back for the evening.

We had fast passes for Test Track, but it started storming and the ride shut down, so they gave us a fastpass to use the next day instead. But we did ride Mission Space multiple times so that people who wanted to could do on both the green (wimpy) and orange (motion sickness inducing) sides:

And Abe had his first Mickey bar:

And somewhere in there we rode Spaceship Earth:

So a great first day in the parks! Yay!

BUT THEN

Ari started to go to bed that night and came back out holding something on a paper towel. “Is this a bedbug?” he asked. OMG. It WAS a bedbug. In fact, there were quite a few bedbugs on his bed. It was 11:30 by now, two of the kids were already asleep, and I felt momentarily paralyzed. We’d never encountered bedbugs before. What should we DO?! But of course, the only thing to do when you find bedbugs is to flee in the middle of the night, so that’s what we did. I checked Art of Animation and found that they had rooms available so that we could check in a few nights early, and we dragged a bunch of stuff out to the car and drove over there right away, checking in around 12:30.

It’s moments like that that will really make you miss your nice, clean trailer that no one else has ever slept in.

I left all the luggage that had been in the bedbug infested place in the car for several days, because I read that temperatures over 120 kill bedbugs (it was a million degrees or so outside the week we were there, so I’m fully confident the car, parked in the sun, hit 120 no problem). I slept for four restless hours or so and then got up to go BACK to the first place, because I still needed to 1. get the rest of our stuff 2. wait for a tow truck driver and follow my car to the Toyota dealership and 3. get a refund from the bedbug place.

I’m not outing the bedbug place because as soon as I went in the office and told them they were super apologetic and offered me a full refund without my needing to ask (I was very worried that I’d have to fight them for one and that that would make me cry). And the place otherwise seemed very clean and well-kept, so I believe it was just bad luck on their part and mine and that they took care of it right away when they found out. Their reviews online are glowing, so I’m sure this isn’t a regular occurrence for them.

Car dropped off, bedbugs in the past (knock wood, but I think we’d know by now if we had any hitchhikers), we set off for another day at the parks, this time in Magic Kingdom. We were all kind of exhausted, but this trip was not cheap and I was determined to have fun. MAGIC, dammit!

And we did! From here on out things went smoothly. Well, except for the part where we had pay $1200 to get my car fixed (a week after spending another $1200 on unrelated repairs on the same car). It’s a 12 year old car and it was all standard old car stuff, but it would have been nice if it hadn’t all happened at once. Or if it had at least waited until after we got home.

Anyway, though, Magic Kingdom!

We headed over to Fantasyland and used our make up fastpass from the night before on Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, which hadn’t been open last time we were there. This was Abe’s first Disney roller coaster, and he loved it:

We had no real plan for today, since this was another day that had gotten changed up when all the drama happened, so we just kind of wandered around and did whatever looked good. We said hi to Pooh and Tigger:

We did the Peoplemover. Abe lost his second top front tooth just a couple of days before we left, and I was very excited about the implications for my Disney pictures:

We Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and confirmed that Abe really likes roller coasters. And I took a picture of Gus in the line:

Tea cups:

We learned that there’s pretty much ALWAYS a show going on in front of the castle these days:

And then we went back to our awesome, bed bug free room at Art of Animation. I’ll do a whole post about Art of Animation later, but we loved it. The family suites are so well designed and felt so spacious.

Tuesday was another Magic Kingdom day. There was a Halloween party scheduled that evening, so the park was closing at 6, with the result that crowds were very, very low all day (lots of people don’t want to use a park ticket on a park that’s going to close early). So we had a great day and rode tons and tons of stuff with little waiting in line.

Look, it’s FALL! Only not really, because it’s 92 degrees and incredibly humid!

We had three full Magic Kingdom days scheduled, so we had plenty of extra time to check out stuff we don’t always get to, like the train:

First ride on Space Mountain for Abe! This was actually one of the very few things that made him nervous; he didn’t like how he had to sit in front of me instead of next to me.

They couldn’t be more excited about posing in front of the castle for me:

Look! There’s a show going on in front of the castle! Just like every single time we walked by! The stilts guys always make me very nervous, with so many kids running wild all over the place.

Abe is much more cooperative about posing for photos than his big brothers are:

Abe thought it’s a small world took way too long. He needed to get back to his beloved roller coasters.

We did Enchanted Tales with Belle for the first time of the trip, and Abe got to be Belle’s father, Maurice. I’m continually impressed with how many things like this Disney manages to do and do well, where kids get to participate and feel special even though there are a gazillion kids there every day.

My kids hate parades, so we only get to see them when we stumble across them by accident. Truth be told, it was really hot and I didn’t particularly want to sit and watch a parade, either.

Next up on our list of things we don’t always get around to doing was a visit to Tom Sawyer Island. The kids really enjoyed the nice and cool caves, but we didn’t last too long there because (have I mentioned?) hot:

We’ve only seen the Country Bear Jamboree once before, and Dave hated it so very much (“you’d have to pay me to watch the Country Bear Jamboree again”) that we’ve never been back. So we went to see it, since Dave wasn’t there. It was…okay. We did not hate it like Dave does.

We took advantage of the short lines to do a few more rides, like Big Thunder Mountain again:

And then we called it a night fairly early. This was the night Dave was flying in, so I’ll pick up with his arrival in my next post.