Updated: Feb Trip plans "It's a Bit Less Humid Today, Right?" - a September 2018 Trip Report

Araminta18

DIS Veteran
Joined
Mar 11, 2016
Hi all!

We just got back from our glorious trip to Walt Disney World and what better way to fight the Disney depression than reliving it through a trip report?

First off, introductions!
I'm Tiffany: I turned 31 on this trip. This was my third visit to WDW; I'm the big Disney fan and the instigator of this trip. :) My husband is Trevor: he's 32 (but only until November!) and this was his second visit. He's super easy-going so our travel styles mesh really well: I go crazy with the planning and he goes along with it. :D

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This was our first trip that was a full vacation. My other trips have been extra days tacked onto work trips--first one was with Trevor staying at Port Orleans French Quarter for 4 days, and then last year was a 4 day trip with my good friend, staying at Pop Century. So we were both excited to get away for a vacation, with no real world intrusion on the Disney bubble!

It came about last May (2017), when Trevor and I were talking and I mentioned how "someday" I'd love to stay at Disney's Boardwalk, and explaining about how renting DVC points would be the cheapest way to do it. We kept talking and pretty soon had decided to try and rent DVC points for a Boardwalk studio for Sept 2018. We picked September so we'd go over my birthday, and 2018 to give us enough time to rent points 11 months out, and to give us enough time to save up money!

Since then I've been happily immersed in the disboards and vlogs, planning and planning some more, and just anxiously waiting. I also did a pre-trip report.

The other big part of my planning was changing my diet and exercising everyday, due to a combination of wanting to fit on Flight of Passage and wanting to make sure I'd be ok walking a crazy amount. I ended up dropping about 95 pounds (spoiler alert: *totally* paid off--fit on Flight of Passage with no problem and my feet didn't hurt at all!), though I gained 10 pounds back #worthit. Obligatory before and after photo:
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Due to all my planning (yep, I'm totally taking credit for it all!) we had a fantastic trip.

The Boardwalk was lovely...
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we did everything we wanted to do at Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party (including meeting Tarzan and Jane!),
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ate ALL the food (and got introduced to mocktails :) )...
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and lots of other fun things!

Anyways, I look forward to reliving the trip through this report. Hope you all enjoy it!

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Table of Contents
('cause I am dumb and forgot to reserve a post for it)

 
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Great start to your magical birthday trip report! I look forward to reading more and seeing all your great photos!
Our trip is in 11 days!!! We are so excited we can hardly stinkin' stand it! LOL
BTW you look FABULOUS!! Holy smokes girl.... 95 pounds! So happy for you! I know very well that its not easy.
 
Congrats on your weight loss, that’s awesome! We were just recently at WDW from Sept 16-20th and it makes me happy to see other people report on the humidity because I thought it was just me! I’ve lived in the heat of Texas for 11years but man, the humidity really drained us during our stay. Can’t wait to hear more of your report and hopefully it’ll motivate me to start my own TR!
 


I just binged on your entire Pre Trip report and now Im eager to see how all those plans panned out for you.

Mucho congrats on your weight loss! It's so difficult to make life changes, but you achieved it! Great job!

I can't wait to see all the photos of the delicious treats and fun activities. :flower:
 
Happy birthday!
Yay for the Boardwalk and full Disney trip!
You look amazing. Congratulations on your health journey!
 


Congrats on the weight loss! I lost 50 pounds about a year ago and gained 10 right back. Holding steady here, though, so I'm not panicking yet. :) Looking forward to reading more about your trip!
 
Great start to your magical birthday trip report! I look forward to reading more and seeing all your great photos!
Our trip is in 11 days!!! We are so excited we can hardly stinkin' stand it! LOL
BTW you look FABULOUS!! Holy smokes girl.... 95 pounds! So happy for you! I know very well that its not easy.
:welcome: Thank you! :D Also, that's so exciting that your trip is so soon! You're gonna have a great time!! :D


Great view!! I’m staying in a Boardwalk view room for the first time in December. What section of the Boardwalk were you over?
:welcome: Ooh, you will love it! We expected to like it but wow--it was amazing. We were on the right side of the yellow section, under the neon "the Boardwalk" sign. We took a pic and posted it on facebook--our room is the circled one, closest to the middle yellow section (the balcony is kind of blocked by the pillar).
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Congrats on your weight loss, that’s awesome! We were just recently at WDW from Sept 16-20th and it makes me happy to see other people report on the humidity because I thought it was just me! I’ve lived in the heat of Texas for 11years but man, the humidity really drained us during our stay. Can’t wait to hear more of your report and hopefully it’ll motivate me to start my own TR!
:welcome: Thank you!! :) Oh yea, wasn't just you--everyone we talked to was talking about how hot/humid it was and how not normal it was for September. Apparently the heat index one day was up to like 110 or 115? Nuts. And you should definitely do a TR! I'd love to hear about your trip :)


I just binged on your entire Pre Trip report and now Im eager to see how all those plans panned out for you.

Mucho congrats on your weight loss! It's so difficult to make life changes, but you achieved it! Great job!

I can't wait to see all the photos of the delicious treats and fun activities. :flower:
:welcome: Thank you! There will be lots of photos of the food...we ate SO MUCH...

Joining in!
:welcome:

Happy birthday!
Yay for the Boardwalk and full Disney trip!
You look amazing. Congratulations on your health journey!
:welcome: Thank you! :) Hopefully you're doing better, getting some kind of answers? I'm pulling for you!

Congrats on the weight loss! I lost 50 pounds about a year ago and gained 10 right back. Holding steady here, though, so I'm not panicking yet. :) Looking forward to reading more about your trip!
:welcome: Thanks! Congrats to you as well! That's awesome! I'm loving your report by the way--that's awesome that you booked a new Disney trip!

Yay! I can't wait to read more. And congratulations on the 95lbs. That is super amazing!
:welcome: Thank you! I can't wait to write it up. And I'm loving hearing about your trip--you can't leave us all in suspense about your date night! :)

Following along.
:welcome:

Following along! Great job on the weight loss.
:welcome: Thank you! :)
 
Wednesday, September 12th:
It's Go Time!

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I lied...I'm not gonna start on Wednesday...I'm gonna start a few days beforehand. :) The original plan was for us to leave *early* on the morning of Friday, September 14th. Then, about a week and a half before, Hurricane Florence happened. She was predicted to hit at the end of the week, somewhere along the East Coast. I wasn't panicking yet, but as the days went on and the forecast became increasingly dire (you can see all of us panicking together on the Hurricane Watch 2018 thread!) I really started to worry about making it down to Florida.

We'd rented DVC points from a member on here, so we couldn't really reschedule or get a refund, and then we'd bought tickets to Disney After Hours, Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween party, and several other events that were pre-paid, not to mention our Slinky Dog and Flight of Passage fastpasses! So DH and I decided that we would leave early, probably Thursday morning. But the forecast got worse, so we settled on leaving Wednesday afternoon, just to be completely sure. That meant DH would miss an extra day of work, and since he'd just started his job, it would have to be leave without pay, but we'd rather that than end up missing the vacation and losing all the money we'd already spent. I researched hotels and found several Disney hotels had availability, and lots of airport hotels too, so we could book for Wednesday and Thursday night.

So on Sunday, Southwest (our airline for flying down to Orlando) issued a travel advisory, but it didn't include the DC airports! I may or may not have been freaking out (worrying: it's what I do) and constantly checking their website and the weather forecast. All day Sunday. All day Monday....finally Monday night they updated their travel advisory to include the DC airports! Of course this happened right as the cat started barfing on the carpet...it's times like this I'm grateful he's DH's cat! He can clean it up; I have bigger things to focus on!

I immediately rebooked: we were now flying out of DC's Reagan airport at 4:40 pm. Then hotels! I booked one night at the Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside on my rewards points (free, baby!), and then one night at Port Orleans French Quarter. French Quarter was where we stayed on our first trip in 2016, and we loved it. So when I saw that they had availability (and I think it was even on sale a bit?...yes! per the "Enchanted Escape Room Offer" we paid $216 base rate. Not bad. Not great, but not bad), DH was like "YES".

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Once I had all that booked I felt a lot better. The sad part was that since we'd be spending the first night at an airport Marriott, no Magical Express picking up our bags directly from the airport...tragedy! Oh well. We were so looking forward to checking the bags in DC and not seeing them again until they were in our hotel room, but then, on the bright side, an extra day and a half at Disney! And I did get us all re-booked on the Magical Express, so nothing left to do but wait. And watch the weather.

Tuesday was nervewracking--Florence seemed to be slowing down and I became increasingly worried about it hitting us up here in DC and knocking out power. We bought a townhome this January with a basement and a sump pump, and if the power goes out the sump pump won't work, and the sump pump cover was sealed for our radon treatment so it's not like we could manually empty the water if the power went out. But a friend of ours volunteered to house sit for the weekend (when we were supposed to get the worst of the storms) and we asked a friend from church to keep an eye on the house the rest of the time, so we were as prepared as possible. But then I made a foolish choice: Southwest runs a flight to Orlando from DC everyday at 4:40, so on Tuesday I was checking on that flight, just 'cause I'm paranoid and anxious, and it was canceled! So then I started worrying about what if our flight on Wednesday would get canceled too and just....

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Luckily DH is the opposite of me and his calmness helped me calm back down and reel the crazy back in. :) He had to work Wednesday morning/early afternoon, but I took the day off. I finished packing (did I remember everything? spoiler alert: no!), and before I knew it, it was time to leave for the airport. (Most of the luggage was empty in prep for souvenirs.... :D)

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I was taking an uber to the airport with all our luggage, and meeting DH there--he was going to take the metro directly to the airport from work so he could get as much work time in as possible. The uber driver was nice and came promptly, and as we were driving to the airport the sun peeked out for the first time in literally a week, so I decided to take that as a good sign. :)

Check in was smooth, and pretty soon I was joined by DH. This was the first appearance of Vacation Trevor! :) He bought that hat on our last trip to Disney, at Disney Springs. Only appropriate that it makes up his Vacation Trevor attire. :D

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The line for security was surprisingly long, but it went fairly quick and before I knew it we were sitting in the terminal waiting to board.

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I'd been obsessively tracking the plane all day, but all was well. It landed and with astonishing speed (seriously, kudos to Southwest), we were boarding. We paid for early bird check in, so we were A31 and A32. (also side note: if you're going to have a numerical boarding process, you need to be checking to make sure people are boarding in appropriate order. Some dude snuck on at the end of the A15-A30 group with a A58 boarding pass. Mildly irritating. It would have been SUPER irritating if he had gotten the last exit row seat that we wanted, but all three of us were faked out by the guy in that seat who was bending down so far that the seat looked empty. Ha!). We got a two seats near the front of the plane and the plane wasn't full so we ended up with an empty middle seat between us. Yay! That boded well for the rest of the trip (spoiler alert: it really really did).

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(I had a pic of Trevor but the lighting was really bad so...you just get a picture of me on the plane all excited!)

There wasn't really any turbulence or anything on the flight (there usually is, so that was a pleasant surprise); I started and finished a book on my kindle ("Reflections" by Elizabeth Lim, a twist on "Mulan"--not amazing but a pleasant way to pass the time. It was only 99 cents, and appropriate for heading to Disney, right? :) ) and then we were landing. Right on time! I didn't count on that happening at all, but was pleasantly surprised. I did remember to get a fake monorail selfie though!

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We were hungry so we stopped at the Panda Express in the airport food court before getting picked up by the airport shuttle. We took so long at Panda that our luggage had already come and our flight wasn't even listed on the carousel anymore! Oh well, that just means we didn't have to wait around for it. :) Even the airport shuttle came super quickly--we waited maybe 3 or 4 minutes? He must have already been doing a pickup, but it was lovely to not have to wait.

We checked in to our room, #716. Lovely view, and the best part was the toiletries! We stayed at a Marriott the night we got married, before we headed off for our honeymoon, and DH loved the Thann Aromatic Wood scented toiletries they had, so we were both really pleased to see them in this hotel. Another good sign. :) If we were staying for more than one day I would have asked housekeeping for extras but....oh well. :)

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(hello vacation Trevor! Sorry for the bad lighting....)

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Our view! Not too shabby....

We ate Panda in our room, just relaxing and luxuriating in the feeling of actually being in Florida! I had orange chicken with noodles (yay noodles!) and cream cheese wontons; Trevor had beef with broccoli and fried rice. A yummy meal for both of us.

After eating it was about 7:45, so we decided to hit the outlets! We grabbed an uber, and were at the Vineland outlets at 8:21 (thank you emailed uber receipt). It was really hot and humid, despite the sun having gone down, but air conditioning inside the store! It was not crowded, but they didn't really have a lot. I did enjoy looking though! Trevor got two t-shirts (one Gaston, and one Grumpy)
and I got the Carl/Ellie Up magic bandits. I was a little worried I'd lose them, but for $2, I decided I didn't care (spoiler alert: never lost them! They did come off once or twice but luckily Trevor was on point about remembering to ask if I had them and spotting them when they did come off). :)

After the Disney store, Trevor wanted to look in the UnderArmour outlet, and ended up getting two Star Wars lightweight shirts (one of the Rebels, and one of the Empire). 4 t shirts and we'd only been in Orlando about 3 hours!

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It was only about 9pm, so we decided to check out the other Disney outlet, by Universal. I almost bought a skirt here, but ultimately decided against it. Didn't buy anything, but enjoyed looking. My dad called while I was browsing, so I got to talk to him, which was nice. Trevor got sidetracked by the New Balance shoe outlet, so he never made it to this Disney store. He was still engrossed in the shoes when I decided I was done at Disney, and met him in the store, and wanted to visit the Adidas (maybe Nike? I can't remember) outlet too. So he looked for shoes there too. Didn't find any, but enjoyed looking. And we got enough anyways--our haul:

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Oh I forgot Trevor got one of those Rogue One mystery vinylmations. I would tell you which one it is but honestly I have no idea. :)

After that, back to the hotel! We got back at 10:30 and basically fell into bed. We were sleepy! It had been a stressful few days, and now with the release of the "will we make it?!" stress, sleep was awesome.

Tomorrow, DISNEY!

Total step count: 8097 / 3.3 miles
 
Looks like a good first day! Glad you had light crowds on the plane and a good day shopping the outlets! Even if Florence made you leave a little early, you totally made the most of it!
 
I would have been in the same obsessive panic as you! I'm so glad everything worked out.

Thank you for the kind words. I appreciate it!
 
I'm thinking of hitting both Disney outlets on my upcoming trip? How expensive would that be in an Uber? (We are staying at an All Star resort when we first arrive.) How far apart are they from each other?

....and *sigh*.... having that middle seat between you EMPTY?!?! Travel Bliss!
 
You should make a motivational video about how you lost 95 pounds to ride Flight of Passage. I agree with renting DVC points to stay at deluxe resorts. I wanted to stay at Contemporary but I wouldnt pay $400+ per night so I rented BLT for $280 per night (no tax)
 

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