Trip Reports

Summary-style feels more appropriate for this trip than itinerary style, so here goes.

LODGING:

We stayed the first night at the Grosvenor. It was nice enough, but it wasn't Disney. One bonus was that the Grosvenor was not closing it's pools down for the Great Mosquito Panic, so late night swims / dips in the hot tub were possible.

The next three nights we stayed at Port Orleans. It was wonderful! The rooms were nicer than I'd expected. We were in building 5 (room 5337), next to the pool, but on the opposite side, overlooking a large, open courtyard (complete with bunnies at night). During the day, the pool was completely filled with young kids and their parents, but after around 11pm, there were usually about 20 people there (despite the fact that the pool supposedly closed at 7pm), so we spent about 2 hours late Sunday night, going back and forth from the pool to the hot tub.

We used the package delivery three times with no problem; in each case it showed up in our room by 6pm the next day. In one case, the other two members of our group had bought some wine at Germany; when we got it, they realized we had nothing to open it with. We called the front desk, they had someone bring us a corkscrew within about 10 minutes.

I will definitely stay at Port Orleans again.

DINING:

Character Buffet at the Grosvenor - If you're going for the characters, fine. DON'T go for the food. Stale muffins and bacon that had turned into Bacon Bits about sums it up.

Teppanyaki, Japan pavillion, Epcot - We did lunch here so as to avoid the dinner prices. It was pretty much exactly like our local Japanese steakhouse. We definitely enjoyed it.

Sassagoula Floatworks - the food court at PO. Good for the prices. At various times I had the chicken gumbo, the roast beef sub, and cheese & bacon stuffed potato. The only complaint I had was about the potato, I kinda thought it would be real cheese instead of the cheeze sauce. Also had good beignets and cheesecake.

Bonfamille's - the sit-down restaurant at PO. I was pretty happy with the meal (T-Bone steak Maitre'D), but one person in our party wasn't happy with two creole-style dishes she tried (She sent the first one back because she said it was really, really bad. The second one (shrimp Orleans?) she said wasn't great either, but she didn't want to complain any more).

Boatwrights - the sit-down restaurant at DxL. We had breakfast there the second day. It was ok, very reasonably priced, but the food felt a little too... pre-processed? I had one of the tin-pan breakfasts, and the ham and potatoes were in these little PERFECT cubes that just screamed "frozen". I expected things to be a little more "home-style". The complimentary chocolate-chip bread they serve warm at the table is VERY good.

Fulton's Crab House - I wouldn't recommend this place at all. Our group of four met up with four of my family members at PI, and going to Fulton's was one of those decisions that gets made by a large, unorganized group <grin>. The menu is very small and very overpriced. My S.O. and I decided to split the broiled scallops entree. It was $18.95, which does NOT include a salad or potato. The entree arrived in a little tiny broiling dish, along with about a cup of rice. That was it. It was almost funny. When split in half, it comprised about 4 bites for each of us. The other entrees at the table seemed of comparable (small) size for the price. The only entree that looked reasonable was the rock shrimp pasta, which I believe was $16.95. It came in a fairly large dish and was very good (I had a taste). Overall, I'm sure there are better seafood restaurants with better prices. I imagine Fulton's only stays in business because of it's prime location at PI.

Rainforest Cafe - we stopped for lunch on impulse on our last day, as we were wandering around DVM and discovered there was no waiting. The atmosphere is a bit overdone, but we definitely enjoyed the food. The amazon flatbread appetizer is very good, and the Chicken Monsoon I had was excellent. No problems with service, as I'd heard.

Various dessert items along the way: I had the trifle at the U.K. pavillion, YUM! Also, I highly recommend the supreme brownies from the Gourmet Pantry; but allow them to come to room temperature first (if youcan wait that long). Had a milkshake from the Sunshine Season Food Fair at The Land. Wasn't as good as I remembered them.

Overall, we didn't get to do as much Disney Dining as I would have liked, but there's always the next trip... <grin>

PARKS / CROWDS / TRANSPORTATION

Generally speaking, it seemed to me that the parks were very uncrowded, even more so than when I went during Labor Day weekend three years ago. Maybe the Great Mosquito Panic scared people off, or maybe we were just lucky in our timing. We basically spent the first two days of our trip doing Epcot (a luxury I've never had before). We did the "right side" the first day and the "left side" the second, splitting up each day evenly between Future World and World Showcase. Everything was pretty much a walk-on. We did see some lines at Ellen's Energy Adventure, so went off and did Horizons, then returned to find it a walk-on. Likewise, Spaceship Earth had a line in the morning, but was a walk-on by the afternoon. The longest wait we had at Epcot was for the Maelstrom, go figure. <grin> At Innoventions, my S.O. got picked to do the Egghead Shred demo at the SGI booth. He said it was pretty cool (and we of course all cheered him on).

(Epcot note: Has anyone noticed that in the Horizons scene were the young woman is talking to her boyfriend over a videophone of some sort, the film you should see of the boyfriend, in the woman's room, is broken or melted? There was just this ugly brown blob on the screen. Maybe it's broken and they aren't bothering to repair it before Horizons goes offline?)

We didn't spend much time at MK during the daytime, because we had the E-Tickets. However, it hadn't really penetrated my skull that not all the attractions would be open during that time, otherwise I probably would have spent more time during the day there. We mostly walked around and looked, watched the Remember the Magic parade, etc. We did Space Mountain during the day, and there was only a 15 minute wait, so I assume the other lines were comparably short.

I didn't go to MGM studios (Mental note: 4 days is NOT enough with a park-hopper pass when you love the water parks like I do), but the 2 others in our group went, and reported that ToT and all the other main attractions were a walk-on.

Blizzard Beach and Typhoon lagoon were also blissfully uncroweded; the longest lines (less than 10 min) were for the family raft rides at each park. The biggest groups of people tended to be in the wave pools, and the "lazy" creeks at each park. Slide observation: all the slides at BB are all a lot more fun than their counterparts at TL; but you have to work harder to get to them. The stairs at TL were no problem, at BB they were a real killer. Lots of people seem to have to stop and rest halfway. I suppose we could have taken the chair lift, it just seemed too far out of the way. We definitely had the most fun at the family raft ride at BB, I think it's called Teamboat Springs, but I could be mistaken. It was awesome! Overall, I found that BB is more exciting, and TL is more relaxing.

Pleasure Island seemed the most crowded; there were very long lines to get into comedy warehouse, and generally just people everywhere. We were already a little worn out by the time we went there, and just wandered around without really going into any of the clubs. We also wasted (and I do mean wasted) two hours of our night at PI at Fulton's crab house. I'd definitely like to do PI again and do it right.

We saw no Brazillian tour groups; however, the brits were everywhere and very cheerful, even in the wake of Diana's death. Side note: we heard about the accident after returning to my parents' room at the Grosvenor after PI on Saturday night. We watched CNN for a while, and were watching when the news came in that she had died. We then went down to the pool and floated around and tried to figure out what it all meant, with little luck. A sad end to the evening.

We had few problems with transportation. Many times we found our desired bus practically sitting there waiting for us. BB seemed to be the only place that entailed a real wait. First of all, we were told that to get from MK to BB (there is no direct bus), we should go to MGM and take the BB bus from there. It seemed like we waited about 30 minutes at MGM for the BB bus to arrive; evidently we had just missed it. There was a comparable wait at BB for the PO / DxL bus. We didn't get to use the PI boat launch from PO because of the Great Mosquito Panic.

E-TICKET EXPRESS, MONDAY 9/1

We got our wristbands at about 8:30, and headed directly to PoTC. It was *COMPLETELY* *EMPTY*. The four of us huddled into the front row of one otherwise empty boat. All the boats in front of us we could see were empty. I think there were 2 people in a boat about three boats behind us. It was spooky, but fun.

From there we went to BTMRR. Again, an eerily empty walk-on.

They were only running one train, so we had to wait a bit, with about 4 other people, for the train to come back to the station. It already had 4 people on it, evidently they were on their third ride; they weren't even making people get out of the train, they were just sending them through over and over again. Needless to say, it was awesome! We only went through once, however, as we figured we'd come back to it later.

Next was Splash Mountain. I wasn't too interested, so I waited outside and relaxed for a bit (it sure is a long ride). I watched boat after empty boat get sent down. About every 5th boat would have riders in it.

After that was Haunted Mansion. The cast members seemed to be really hamming it up for the occaision. There were maybe 15 of us in the group. Once we got in the doom buggy and started off on the ride, I heard something behind me that sounded like what must have been a CM jumping out from somewhere and scaring the daylights out of someone who wasn't expecting it. (The person actually screamed and then said "Jesus Christ!!!" hehehe) I think I've heard about this, something new they've added? I was kind of disappointed that we didn't get targeted. Still, a lot of fun, especially with the complete lack of crowds. Afterwards, we had a CM show us the "wedding ring" imprint in the paving stones.

Time to head to Tomorrowland! We did Alien Encounter. There was a bit of a wait for this, but only because the CMs did not want to start it with so few people. So we had to wait until more people could be roped in. Overall, AE didn't do too much for me; I think I've read too many spoilers.

We had ridden SpaceM earlier in the day, and no one was really interested in riding it again (this was towards the end of our trip, and we were all getting really worn out, and I had screwed up my knee earlier in the day going up those treacherous stairs at BB over and over again.) Instead we did Timekeeper, which was very nice because the CM told us to just sit down on the floor if we wanted (which everyone promptly did.) Made for a very nice experience.

Last was Astro Orbiter, and then we limped back to the bus station.

Our bus driver shared some interesting info with us. First of all, he told us that only about 900 tickets out of 5000 had been sold for that night! No wonder the place seemed so desolate! It some places it sort of detracted from the fun; PoTC is really a "group" ride, for instance. He also told us that they would have had to sell 2500 tickets just to break even, so Disney evidently lost money on us that night. He mentioned that all the CMs and bus drivers were on overtime. Another interesting thing he said was that each resort has to pay $70,000 per month out of their budget for the bus services.

QUICK ENCEPHALITIS COMMENTARY

As I mentioned earlier in the report, the boat launches and pools were ostensibly closed at 7pm. As I also mentioned, people were using the PO pool at night anyway. Most of the cast members we asked about the encephalitis scare seemed only vaguely aware of it and not in the least bit concerned. For the record, none of us saw, or were bitten by, any mosquitos whatsoever.

CONCLUSION...

4 nights/4 days was not enough, even though we stayed off site the first night in order to take full advantage of our LOS passes. There were a lot of things I wanted to do but didn't have time to. Which brings me to the other thing.. we were also quite worn out by the fourth day, sore feet, stiff muscles, etc. I'm assuming that a long enough trip to take a full day or so OFF from park hopping is really the way to go. So I'm going to try to figure out how to do a longer trip next time... (of course there is a next time.. <grin>)

Many thanks to everyone who gave me lots of good advice for this trip!

Nicole LeRoy

nt@flinet.com

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