It's taken me 6 months to understand how long it takes to get 2 kids ready and out the door. The day we went to have breakfast with Donald was a good example. I had planned for us to leave the hotel at 7am and I don't think we left till almost 7:30. We overslept (the first of a developing pattern in October) , as our normally 6/6:30am riser didn't rise then.Fortunately we were staying close to the Animal Kingdom at the All Star Sports Resort (resort is used loosely). I'm not a fan of the All Star resorts (there are 4 of them), but Lore' snagged $65 rates through AAA--and its hard to argue with that for one night.
Some of you may know, I'm a bit of a Disney fan, but that has dimenshed in recent years as I've not exactly been thrilled with the direction Michael Eiser was sterring Disney. Maybe that will change in the future, but I digress.
So we needed to allow time to drive to the Park (we were going to head straight for the beach)--Disney owns a lot of property, but they make you think you are on more property by making you travel in the most circuitious routes. Then once you park, even if you get the first spot, you have to travel quite a distance to the park entrance and for this breakfast, quite a distance into the park to get to the resturant. I wasn't prepared for the later--it took at least 15 min. to walk from the car to the resturant. The cool thing about this gameplan was that you could enter the park a full hour before it opened, eat breakfast and we already in the park when it opened and not have to stand in a line to get in. I wondered how this would be handled and at the entrance I felt like we were in a VIP line at a hip club, as they had a clipboard and if your name wasn't on it for the early seating, you didn't get in.
So if getting there in time wasn't enough drama, I realized I might have left our tickets in the room, not just the 1 day passes I had foolishly bought from the desk at the hotel for this visit, but our park-hopper, multi day passes from several years ago. If you haven't been in a while, Disney has a new complicated way to suck the money from you. Without going into great detail, the tickets we had from years ago were now quite expensive, and ireplaceable. I was able to get Guest Services to put me in contact with housekeeping and direct them not to clean the room so I could run back after breakfast and check the room. Jump ahead to breakfast, Den casually asks if the tickets are in my wallet. After nearly 10 years together (!), he definitely has my thought process down. Sure enough, there they were. Whew!
This character meal was a departure from the previous night when the characters stayed with us for a while because the resturant just wasn't very crowded. We did get a table off in the corner (I think making a reservation with a 6 month old gets you a corner table so you can nurse without being smack in the middle of the resturant). It was very crowded and each character stayed with us a max of two minutes and it was onto the next table. Talk about having to work a room!
Eddie was so incredibly excited to see Donald. As with the previous night, I missed several shot in which he was absolutely beaming. He was examining Donald beek and really checking out all the characters. We did get some group photos, but we always felt so rushed, like if we didn't hurry, the non-speaking character would slip away without taking a photo. Looking at Josie it cracks me up, she just didn't know what to make of it.
They had a great spread of food, but it was definitely rushed. Yet, we did see Donald and pretty much everyone Eddie had hoped/expected to meet.
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