They went to Disney...again?!

Friday afternoon at 2:00 the car was loaded and in tow was me, Mom, David & Cole. Destination? Disney!
A friend of my Dad’s gave us two vouchers for a 1 day park hopper and since David and I have annual passes, we gave them to my Mom and brother. This was the quickest Disney trip we’ve ever had but it was still a lot of fun!

We arrived Friday early evening at our hotel, Disney’s All-Star Sports Resort.


From then on the pace picked up and we didn’t slow down until about midnight on Saturday. After checking in we went and dumped our stuff, then hopped on the bus to Magic Kingdom to turn in the vouchers. Luckily that went smoothly- I was worried about them taking the tickets because they weren’t in our name and said non-transferable, but they worked just fine and we were off to our next stop. We couldn’t actually go into the park because Cole & Mom’s tickets were only valid for the one day. So then we took the monorail to the Grand Floridian Resort to check out the famous gingerbread house that’s been featured many a times on the Food Network.


It was neat, but not as impressive as we were expecting.

Moving on, we caught the bus from Grand Floridian to Downtown Disney. The bus took for-evvver. We even had to call the front desk multiple times until they finally sent a bus our way. We’ve never waited that long before. At this point we’ve been here a few hours and all Cole has seen is a gingerbread house and Disney transportation. Not off to a good start!

We finally got to DD and started to have a little fun. First stop was eating at my all time favorite, Earl of Sandwich. Yum-O!

Then we walked around the shops some, bought two new Christmas ornaments, and Cole got some ice cream from the delicious Ghirardelli shop.



We headed back to the hotel because we knew we were going to have a very busy day ahead of us. A little rock paper scissor action took care of shower order, and then we crashed.

6:00 came very early the next morning, but I was prepared with my giant chocolate chip muffin bought at Earl!

We had a plan and had to stick to it to make the most of our ONE day. By 7:10 we were at the bus stop and on our way to Hollywood Studios. We had to go there first to ride Toy Story Mania. We were there when they opened and literally RAN along with thousands of other people to the ride and wouldn’t ya know we were on the FIRST car?! You see, this ride quickly goes from no wait to 120 minute wait and with a tight schedule like ours sometimes you just gotta run. It was fun, except I came in third place. Boo!


I love the way this Hollywood pic turned out...

Then Mom, Cole and I rode Rockin’ Roller Coaster. It was fun and there’s nothing like a roller coaster at 8 o’clock in the morning!

We knew we’d be back at this park again because we wanted to see the Osborn Family Spectacle of Lights, so we got these two big attractions out of the way and we were off to the next park.

Next stop, Magic Kingdom. The crowds at this point were next to non-existent because it was gloomy, cold and early and that combo equals not a lot of early birds in the parks! We walked right onto the few rides we wanted, and took a few pictures, before heading to the next park. We would also be returning to the MK later that night for fireworks and they were staying open until 1 so we knew we’d have all night to do more attractions.
The Christmas decorations were beautiful!

We hopped on over to Animal Kingdom next.

The weather was gorgeous at this point!

We weren’t going to have a lot of time here, but we wanted to be sure Cole got to at least see it because this was his first trip to Disney since we were very little, and AK is my second favorite park so I wanted him to experience it. We ate lunch at our usual Pizzafari and then took a quick two week trip through the African Safari.

We didn’t do nearly everything here that we wanted, but that’s what happens when you have 4 parks to do in one day!

Once again, we hopped on a bus and headed on over to Epcot. We (Me & Cole) rode Mission Space and then we all hit up the single rider line for Test Track since the wait was so long. Then we moaned and groaned but stood in line for 65 minutes to do Soarin’. We left Epcot around 5:30 and headed back to Hollywood Studios.
Love this pic too!

The light show was amazing – I could watch that every night!
It even "snowed"!

Then we went and did a drawing session at the neat animation studio we found on our Summer trip. These pictures should speak for themselves about who has the most talent. HAHA!!

Top left – David; Top Right-Tam; Bottom Left-Mom; Bottom Right-Cole

Mom’s looks like Minnie needs to go on a diet! Bahah!!

We said goodbye to Hollywood Studios and headed towards our final destination, back to Magic Kingdom. We first grabbed some dinner and I had my delicious taco salad. Then we got some delicious ice cream from our favorite ice cream shack. Then we grabbed a spot to watch the Wishes Fireworks show. It never gets old…The castle was in full on Christmas decoration and was dripping with tons and tons of white lights. So pretty!


After the show was over, we went and did the last few rides we hadn’t gotten to do in the morning. We were hoping to make it til 1, but during our 11:30 It’s a Small World ride, I slept and woke up as we were docking. Haha! It was time to go, we were exhausted, and not to mention freezing!

A bus ride and a hot shower later we were all horizontal and snoozing like babies.

A great, fast, whirlwind of a trip!

Can’t wait til next time:)