A few months ago we got the itch for a family
vacation. We wanted to avoid
having the kids miss too much of school so we were looking at options over our
upcoming school breaks. After days
of research we settled on a cruise over Thanksgiving break. The kids would miss 2 full days of
school and 4 half days – more than we wanted but it was much cheaper to fly to
Florida in November than December.
We saved over $1000 by booking airfare out of Vancouver, Canada.
Vancouver should
only be a 2 ½ hour drive, but our red eye flight had us driving through north
Seattle traffic during rush hour and during a heavy rain making our trip up
there over 4 hours! Thankfully,
we’d left ourselves a large cushion of time and didn’t have to worry about
missing our flight. The hope of
flying a red-eye is that the kids would sleep the entire time, but even if that
did happen they’d still only be getting 5 hours of sleep instead of the normal
12 hours (J, K, and D get).
We typically don’t check any bags when we travel so
we can avoid paying any baggage fees – thankfully, I was able to convince
Justin to check one bag this trip so we could bring toiletries, sunscreens,
life jackets, etc… that wouldn’t fit or be allowed in carry-ons. It still felt like we were loaded down
with luggage though. This was the
first trip we haven’t had to lug around any car seats so that was nice.
Abigail says not to forget that Drew face planted
on the escalator as we arrived at the Vancouver airport. Justin, Katie and Jason we’re up ahead
on the escalator and me and the girls were just behind Drew. He stepped on mid-crack and as it went
up he biffed it. I dropped all my
bags and jumped on to help him before he stumbled or rolled down, which left
Carly and Abigail at the bottom of the escalator with three peoples worth of
baggage to carry up. They managed
and Drew was totally fine, he didn’t even cry.
The flight wasn’t full so we rearranged our seats
to take advantage of a little extra space for the kids to spread out and catch
some zzz’s. It took Drew over an
hour to finally fall asleep. I
didn’t sleep much if at all, but I expected as much.
Our flight got us into Orlando at 7am (4am Seattle
time!) and after waiting through customs, we headed straight to our hotel with
the hopes we could get an early check-in (yeah, right!).
When we found that our room wouldn’t be ready for
several hours we got lunch and headed to Disney’s Fantasia Mini Golf where we
had free vouchers to enjoy!
The first of many Mickey waffles!
We caught a boat near Hollywood Studios that took
us over to the golf course. First
official picture of our trip!
{Brace yourself for a bazillion more!}
Golf
was so, so fun.
I particularly loved the dancing hippos.
After golfing we headed back to the hotel and got
settled into our rooms, grabbed a pizza and headed out to the pool to catch the
last bit of sunshine of the day. One
pizza wasn’t enough for all of us so after we all showered we took a shuttle to
Disney Springs and ate yummy sandwiches at the Earl of Sandwich. The Lego store was pretty impressive.
We had to be back to our room by 8pm for a grocery delivery of snacks and food for breakfast from AmazonNOW – super convenient, free delivery and very reasonably priced groceries. The kids fell asleep quickly - Abigail and Jason even fell asleep on the short shuttle ride back to the hotel - turned out the groceries didn’t arrive until 10pm anyhow. Big day tomorrow at Animal Kingdom!
We had to be back to our room by 8pm for a grocery delivery of snacks and food for breakfast from AmazonNOW – super convenient, free delivery and very reasonably priced groceries. The kids fell asleep quickly - Abigail and Jason even fell asleep on the short shuttle ride back to the hotel - turned out the groceries didn’t arrive until 10pm anyhow. Big day tomorrow at Animal Kingdom!
