Disney World trip report, Part 1

I've already talked about my experience at the 2019 Disney World Marathon, but I figured I'd go ahead and do a quick trip report about the rest of our time at Disney World too.  Also, as an aside, I've changed up the commenting system on the blog.  I know a lot of you had a hard time getting the comments to show up recently.  So hopefully this is an improvement and will work ok!

First off, we left on the 7am flight our of Baltimore Saturday morning.  We were a little worried about lines since it was during the shutdown but we had absolutely no problems.  And we got the 2 person exit row on the plane so score!  Once we landed in Orlando, we followed the signs to Disney's Magical Express.  We love this service since it's free transportation to Disney hotels and you don't have to stop and pick up your checked bags.  Disney will bring them to the hotel for you.  It can take several hours though so you should make sure you have anything you may need for the day with you.  We had pretty good bus luck the whole trip so we were on the bus really quickly and our hotel was the first stop.  The bus can stop at 3 or 4 hotels so if you're the last stop, it can add a bit of extra time to your trip.

 

Pretty landscaping at our hotel, that was themed after New Orleans

This time, we tried a hotel that we'd never stayed at before, Port Orleans French Quarter.  Last year we had stayed at Port Orleans Riverside so we were vaguely familiar with Port Orleans too as the hotels are close to each other and share buses sometimes.  We really liked the hotel.  It is smaller than the other moderate category hotels at Disney World, there is only one bus stop, and even though we were in the furthest building from the lobby, it was less than a 10 minute walk.

Photo ops at the expo

Our room wasn't ready (it was around 10:00am) so we dropped of our bags at the bell desk and went straight to the expo so I could pick up my race bib and Mike could pick up his Chear Squad stuff.  The expo was only open until 3 or so in the afternoon so if we missed that, it would definitely make race day difficult for me!  That's the risk of coming in the day before the race and Disney doesn't allow anyone else to pick up the bib for you.  If there had been delays in the flight, it could have been stressful.  But thankfully everything went smoothly.  There weren't a lot of lines at the expo so we were in and out of there pretty quickly.

My plate of sides at the Polite Pig

We then took another bus over to Disney Springs.  We had lunch at the Polite Pig.  Its a BBQ place, so it might seem like a weird choice for a vegetarian, but Mike really likes it and I wanted the trip to be fun for him too.  But they have fun drinks and a lot of great veggie sides so I made a meal of a bunch of sides, macaroni and cheese, roasted beets, watermelon salad, and Mexican street corn.  We checked out some of the stores and also went to the Void.  They have some really cool virtual reality experiences.  We did their Star Wars experience last time and tried the Wreck It Ralph experience this time.  We loved it and I would highly recommend it.

We had dinner at the food court at our hotel.  They had a make your own pasta bar and tofu was one of the protein options.  I found the food court pretty good for vegetarian options.  They also had a plant based burger and vegan beignets, though I didn't get to try them on this trip.  And then it was an early bed time for me so I could be up at 2am for the race.

Food court pasta with tofu and veggies

We'll skip talking about the race since it has a whole post.  After the race, I met up with Mike in the spectator area, had a beer, and then got on the bus to go back to our hotel.  I showered and got ready and we headed right back out to go to Disney's Hollywood Studios park.  We ended up taking a lyft since I didn't want to walk all the way back to the bus stop.  We chose this park since we felt like half a day is all we needed to spend here anyway because it's going through a lot of construction at the moment to get ready for Star Wars Land (opening later this year).  The construction is also impacting the front of the park and it was quite a long walk from where the car dropped us off to the front of the park.

Photo fun while waiting for the lyft

There was a new Toy Story Land we hadn't seen before so we figured that's where we would spend most of our time.  We went to Woody's Lunch Box for food first since I was pretty hungry by this point.  We tried the mobile order and it was great!  You order through the app, you don't have to wait in line to order, you get an alert when you're food is ready (just took a couple minutes), and you pick it up at the stated window.  Also, you can customize your order in the app.  For example, you can get the "totchos" with veggie chili and vegan cheese.  I didn't try it but they also have vegan grilled cheese available.  The totchos were delicious and really filling.  They also had homemade pop tarts and we were going to share one but it had surprise bacon on it.  Mike took one for the team and ate the whole thing himself :)

We had a fast pass for Toy Story Midway Mania so went on that ride with minimal wait.  But then after that, I had to call it a day.  My legs were beginning to yell about how tired they were and all the chafing was beginning to make itself known.  So We actually went back to the hotel to rest.  I stayed in the rest of the evening and watched Avengers on tv, while Mike went back to the park.  He did manage to ride the new Slinky Dog roller coaster with minimal wait by getting on during the fireworks.  He said it was a pretty fun ride so I'm looking forward to it next time.  The food court at the hotel was open until midnight so he picked up a slice of pizza for me on his way back to the room and we had dinner in the room.  We called it a night and were asleep by 10pm.

Night time Toy Story Land photo from Mike's evening there

This has been pretty long so I'll come back tomorrow to post about the rest of the trip :)