Settling In
While we were on the bus over to Boardwalk, I started a test mobile order to see how it would work with the dining plan. Turns out, it didn’t yet: my only payment option was to use my card on file. While I had hoped to be able to skip the front desk for check in, it would seem that wasn’t in the cards. So, when we unloaded, we grabbed our carryon bags and headed into the line for the front desk. Just about everyone else on our ME also unloaded at Boardwalk, and we had a full bus, so it took a few minutes to be seen. I had hubby go over to bell services to hand off the bags while I waited and the kids twirled.
When it was our turn, the CM asked for my name and, within a few seconds, I had a text that my room wasn’t yet ready and a notification on
MDE welcoming me. I went back into mobile order and, before I even started one, it had a little note about making an order on the dining plan, so clearly everything was activated. I asked the CM if he could see which room was going to be ours even though it wasn’t ready yet. He said that he could see it, he couldn’t tell me what it was, but that he could tell me that based on my room request on file I would be pleased. I was quite relieved to hear that I likely wouldn’t be making the trek down the long Boardwalk hallways each night (our room request was to be near an elevator). The CM gave the girls some stickers and first visit buttons and we were on our way.
Staying on DVC points, I new that it would be very unlikely that we’d get an early check in and that “after 4pm” could mean even later. Our plan was to explore the resort a bit and, depending on how we were feeling, either go for a swim or catch a bus to MK for a monorail snack/QS tour. We went out to the boardwalk to bask in the Florida sun, drool over the Boardwalk Bakery offerings, and grabbed one of our resort mugs. Another tidbit I had gleaned from the Dis is that the photo booths are included on memory maker, so we hopped into one to take our first family photo to commemorate our trip. The kids were too quick when selecting a background, so here’s our first official family photo at Disney World.
How romantic!
I managed to take control of the design selection for the next shot, so we got this gem as well.
We were all feeling pretty warm in the sun and decided that a swim was in order. It was in the mid-70s, which isn’t swimming weather for us in the summer, but it felt much warmer coming from chilly NJ. I checked my phone for the time and saw that we had received our room ready text at 3:25pm. I was psyched that we had an early room despite staying DVC and we went to bell services to grab our carryon bags, head to the room, and get changed. We were in room 3064 and, getting off of the elevator, found ourselves just two rooms away overlooking the Creepy Clown Pool. Unfortunately, we also found the housekeeping cart parked directly in front of our room preventing entry.
A CM who must have been a housekeeping manager (she was dressed much too nicely to be actually cleaning) apologized and said she had tried to call the front desk to stop us before we came up. She had checked off that the wrong room was cleaned and ours wasn’t ready yet. She tried calling to see if we could be switched into the next room over which was done, but apparently those folks had already checked in and couldn’t be moved. She apologized again, told us to go grab lunch somewhere, and that there would be a $100 room credit on the account for our troubles. I asked if we could at least leave our bags, which she said was perfectly fine, so we dumped everything except our swim bag and headed out to the pool.
This is one of those moments where I feel like perspective really matters. I had never expected to get my room that early and I had already specifically packed one carry on with everything we would need for swimming. My plan had always been to change by the pools and hang out until our rooms were ready, so the only real inconvenience to us was the extra trip up to a room that turned out to be unavailable. I could have chosen to be annoyed about the mix-up: it was certainly disappointing to think we would get to change in the room only to have to do the awkward public bathroom clothing change. However, when my husband and I turned the corner, we were both just excited to have the money on the account towards our charges for the trip. You want to give me $100 because we brought out bags up prematurely? Sold!
I have no photographic evidence of our pool trip this afternoon. I know we all went down to the Creepy Clown Pool, got changed, and decided we should start the trip off right by sliding in. The kids went back up to slide a few more times, but the adults were starting to feel the coolness of the afternoon. It was still warm in the sun but, as the afternoon turned to evening, the shade covered more of the pool and made it pretty chilly. At 4:45, we quickly dried off and headed up to see our room and get showered. On the way up, I stopped off at the lobby to find that my grocery delivery person was just finishing dropping things at bell services. They said it was a lot of bags, so I shouldn’t try to carry it all myself, but they’d bring it up soon. They were running about 20 minutes, which I said was fine.
We were overall very pleased with the room. I never stood out on the balcony with Hubby below to get the exact placement, but we were in one of these rooms.
It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but the balcony is designed differently from the typical ones at the resort. The cut-out section where you can see the pool is smaller, but then there’s a couple extra feet behind the brick wall on each side. We had a table and two chairs but had room to drag another room chair out there so the kids could have breakfast (and drop their crumbs) outside in the mornings. I was also pleasantly surprised with how big the room felt inside. We kept the sofa folded out to a bed, the Murphy bed down, and the coffee table and chairs tucked to the side pretty much the whole time. Even with that, we had plenty of room to maneuver. My last experience with the five of us in a single room was a cruise ship room, so it’s possible that my expectations were so low that anything that didn’t involved us tripping over each other and shimmying around furniture would have been welcome.
If we had our absolute pick of the resort, we would have been a floor or two up and a couple rooms further from the elevator. A non-tree blocked view would be nice, and people weren’t particularly quiet walking to the elevators in the mornings and evenings. However, I would rather occasionally having hallway noise over having to hike halfway through the building just to get down to the coffee refill each morning. People complain about Boardwalk feeling very spread out, and we never had that feeling given our close elevator proximity.
We were all showered and ready to go by 5:30 but the groceries hadn’t arrived. I called back down to Bell Services and asked to delay them. This led to a confusing conversation in which the CM thought that I was calling to confirm my groceries were received and schedule delivery. I told him I knew they were there, I had already scheduled delivery, but they were late and we wanted to go back out. After a bit of back and forth, I just said to please make sure my groceries were not delivered and out we went.
We had decided to walk around to Hurricane Hanna’s for dinner because that was the QS menu on Crescent Lake that had the most appealing combination of food and adult beverage options. We were at Hanna’s at 5:45, ordered everyone’s food, and found a table. There are only a few tables right there and, when arrived, they were nearly full. However, by the time we left, things had completely cleared out. 5:30-6:00 must be the time when parents finally manage to drag their kids out of Stormalong Bay to eat something. The girls shared a burger and a smoothie, Hubby got the pulled pork sandwich and a beer, and I got a girly drink and the buffalo chicken wrap. Three meals for the five of us left us comfortably fed but not full, which was the goal because this wasn’t our last stop of the night.
We continued our tour around the lake with a stop at Ample Hills. Hubby and one of the girls (I think B?) said they were too full to get anything, so we only got three cones for the five of us to share.
I got the Ooey Gooey Red Velvet Cake and the girls picked the Ooey Gooey Butter Cake and the Chocolate Millk and Cookies. All of the cones were enormous, so the CMs gave the kids cups along with their cones, which made sharing that much easier. We loved our choices and, after this visit, the kids never wavered from those two choices the rest of the trip. We finished our ice cream at about 6:45, went into the bakery to get the rest of our dining plan resort mugs, and walked back towards our room. There were several kids just running on the Village Green, so the girls joined in.
We went up to our room to find that all of our bags save the single stroller had been delivered. I found the PJs and toothbrushes, left Hubby to start getting the kids ready for bed, and went to the lobby to get my groceries. There were, in fact, too many bags to carry. This was mostly the result of Walmart packing everything as poorly as possible with only 1-3 items in each plastic bag, but so it goes. I was going to do the mom thing and just load up my arms with all of the bags, but Bell Services was hearing none of that and sent a CM and a baggage cart of groceries up with me to my room. While we were walking, I asked him about the single stroller not being delivered with the rest and he assured me that it wasn’t unusual for bags to come staggered (which I had assumed) and that he would look out for a single stroller bag for me.
We got the groceries put away, unpacked enough of our bags to be ready to go the next morning, and eventually got the kids to lay quietly and rest. Right when they had stopped talking, there was a knock on the door and the final stroller was delivered. On the one hand, this woke the girls back up a bit but, on the other hand, they had been very concerned about the missing stroller. Much of the bedtime chatter had surrounded where the stroller was and what we would do if it was lost. Once the stroller was safely in hand, they calmed down and went to sleep.
Overall, we had a really nice travel day. We enjoyed exploring the resort, but still got the girls to bed at a reasonable hour so that they’d be fully refreshed for our big first park day at MK. Once they were asleep, I pulled up the email to look at the substitutions Walmart had made for our grocery delivery and make sure everything had been received. Most of our order was exactly what we had asked for and they had to make a couple of reasonable substitutions. The one weird thing they did was substituted an out-of-stock 24 pack of applesauce pouches with a 12 pack. You would think they’d give me the same quantity on the substitution but I’m assuming someone was looking at it too fast and just replaced one box with one box, not noticing the volume difference. I was generally pleased with my Walmart grocery experience, especially given the pricing. I had looked at Garden Grocer and Prime Now, but the same groceries were about 20% cheaper using Walmart and I had a coupon code that wiped out my delivery fee. I went into it expecting that it wouldn’t be perfect (Walmart isn’t generally known for its customer service) but I think the less than stellar substitution was worth my significant cost savings. I double checked the weather forecast, triple checked my park bags for the next day, and eventually managed to get some sleep myself.