Disney Trip 1

Our trip had an inauspicious start: Aaron got a head cold. My brother got a kidney stone. It took us an hour and ten minutes to travel the 23 miles to our chosen airport parking lot. Our flight was to take off at 9:30AM. We didn’t get to our parking lot until 8:30AM… right about the time we wanted to be at the airport.


Somehow, we made it from the parking lot… to the baggage check in line… through security… and to our gate IN TIME FOR THE PRE-BOARD. Once we got to the parking garage… everything shifted in our favor. The flight was terrible. Because of Aaron’s head cold… the pressure in the plane really messed with his ears. So, he screamed his head off for the first and last 30 minutes of the flight. We felt bad for him. The on-flight snack was terrible too… some kind of oatmeal raisin bar. Blah. Hehe. Actually… I was the only one in my family that didn’t like them… so I shouldn’t complain.

We made it to Orlando and took the cool monorail type shuttle from our gate terminal to the main terminal. While we were in the monorail shuttle… Emily got very excited and shouted near the top of her lungs: ‘We’re going to DisneyWorld!’ Which got many smiles and chuckles from the other people in the car with us. Very funny, stuff.

We met up with my parents and brother and got in line for Disney’s Magical Express. It was the first time I had utilized this service from Disney. It’s pretty cool. They sent us baggage claim slips that identified where the bags should be sent… we put them on each of our check in bags… so that when we got to Orlando… we didn’t need to worry about going to baggage claim. We didn’t need to worry about lugging all our heavy luggage through the airport. Disney took care of that for us… and several hours later… our bags found their way to our hotel room. Also included in Magical Express is a round trip bus ride from airport to hotel to airport again.

There are pros and cons to this service… and perhaps I’ll get into them later in a future episode of this trip report. We stayed at the All Star Sports resort. It’s one of the cheapies at Disney… but still nice. The rooms were small, but adequate for what we needed. Themes around the resort were cool… especially the baseball pool with the goofy squirting stuff at you… and the football theme. We were in the surf’s up portion of the resort. The icon was a huge Shark fin…


We took advantage of Disney’s Free Dining Promo… and we made reservations for a restaurant called Ohana’s. It’s located within the Polynesian Resort… right across from the Magic Kingdom. This was the first time I’d been to this resort. It was very well themed and the landscaping and architecture was just gorgeous.


I don’t think Melissa liked this restaurant as much… but I enjoyed it very much. The meat (Pork, Steak, Chicken and Italian sausage) came out on shish kabobs. The pork, chicken and steak were all nicely marinated and delicious. We also had cheese potatoes that were excellent… along with some tasty honey barbeque chicken wings. We went to bed on a full stomach to say the least.