Just got back from our 11 day trip! We had a great time, even though there were some not so great moments (watching my mom faceplant on the concrete at Boo Bash was a bit terrifying!).
We normally go in September, and since we go every year, we tend to do a handful of special events each trip and focus less on getting on all of the rides. Since most of the events aren’t back yet, this trip was a bit different than our normal Septembers, but we still had a blast. We do miss the events, especially the food and wine special lunches, so hope those come back next year!
I tried to post updates each day here during the trip, so I’m going to keep this short and touch upon stuff I hadn’t mentioned previously.
So first the hotel, we stayed at Yacht Club as we normally do, and while I still love the resort, it wasn’t the best stay. They were preparing for the exterior painting outside our room while we were there, but since they don’t do work on the weekends we didn’t even realize how much this would impact our trip until our 4th day in the hotel so we had already unpacked. And when staying for 11 days, we pack A LOT, so once we realized we would not be able to use our balcony during the week, we had already unpacked all of our suitcases so my mom did not want to move.
Now I realize that was totally on us for not requesting a move that day, but we had been assigned a different room that wasn’t ready when we arrived, but this room was ready so they put us in it as if they were doing us a favor. I wish they had told us that they were doing work on that rooms balcony when they offered it so we at least had a choice of an earlier room or a room where we could use the balcony.
The good news is we had very quiet neighbors this trip, so it was gloriously quiet at night!
The crowds this trip were very varied by park and day, but we did find Epcot to be the worst with the crowds overall. We did have some nice seemingly low-ish crowd times there, Tuesday and Wednesday were great, but compared to past years where WS seemed empty during the week mid-day, this year it definitely seemed more crowded. We have a picture from I believe 2019 or 2018 of the pathway in front of Germany around 1:00 in the afternoon with absolutely no one in sight. We took it after realized we hadn’t seen anyone else around since Norway and wanted to document the awesome emptiness. I miss those days!
That being said, wait times were great this trip! We were really surprised, usually in September the waits are worse, but the overall number of people around seem a lot less. This trip the wait times were fantastic, but there just seemed to be a lot more people wandering around the park than in past Septembers.
For mask compliance, it was pretty near perfect this trip, much better than in April. We only had two occasions where people weren’t wearing them where they were supposed to and the CM didn’t say anything. The first was on the bus to AK one morning, of the full bus only my mom and I and one other family wore masks, no one else did, and the bus driver didn’t say a thing. The crazy thing is the people wore masks outside at the bus stop but took them off right when they got on the bus. So odd. Although I did overhear a mother at the airport this morning tell her family it was ok to take their masks off since they were finally inside the airport, so maybe some people are just confused about where they are required?
The other time was in MK before Boo Bash on Friday. Lots of people not wearing masks in indoor lines and CMs didn’t say anything, but once Boo Bash started everyone we saw was complying with the rules.
One thing I found awesome this trip is people were great about personal space! In April people weren't so great, I kept having people physically touching me in lines (and this is back when the 6ft distancing was around!), but this trip we never had anyone crowding up on us in line, in fact most people stayed 2-3ft away. Hope people stay that courteous, really hate when people crowd up on us especially when it's surface of the sun hot that day!
Oh, and one last thing. The
MDE app was awful this trip. I’ve never had issues with it before like I did this week. Three times during the trip I went in to find that our trip had been deleted from the app so I had to go find the confirmation number in my email from over a year ago to reenter it. Besides that it was just supper buggy all trip, wonder if the imminent release of Genie had anything to do with it.
