It's about time I told you all about our stay at Walt Disney World. I will be writing this in several parts otherwise this post would end up being very long, so be sure to check back for part two soon. It has always been a dream of mine to have a WDW holiday and I had been lucky enough last year on my trip to Miami that me and my sister were able to take a one day trip up to Orlando to visit Disney's Magic Kingdom, I honestly thought that until I had my own family in the very distant future that I wouldn't get to go again and visit the other parks. Aimee had also been dreaming about going for the last 18 or so years, and with our pal Bekka being lucky enough to work at Disney over the summer we embarked on a trip to celebrate the end of Bekka's programme and to make mine and Aimee's childhood dreams a reality.
Throwback to September 1st and I was hopping on a tiny plane in Avignon, France, back to London to meet up with Aimee before our flight the next morning. We stayed at the Bloc Hotel inside Gatwick, which was really convenient for our flight the next morning. The rooms are very small, just a bed, a bathroom and just enough room for our luggage, all that you really need for a good nights sleep before a 9 hour flight.
We flew with Virgin, and were blessed with a whole row to ourselves, having that extra seat in the middle to place your things makes a flight so much more comfortable. I watched the (relatively) new Power Rangers movie on the plane which I really enjoyed so if you haven't seen it before I highly recommend that you watch it. Once we arrived in Orlando we made our way to the Magical Express which we had previously booked over the phone, however we didn't have any physical confirmation however the staff were very helpful and accommodating and found our booking with no problems and we were soon on the short journey to Walt Disney World!
During the trip we would be staying at two different resorts, Art of Animation for the majority of our stay and then All Star Movies for our final night due to the room we required at AOA being unavailable. We were arriving a couple of days after Bekka and her friend Ellie, we had previously communicated this with the hotel who had placed our Magicbands to one side for us to collect upon our arrival so we just needed to pick them up to access our room. We were staying in one of the Little Mermaid themed rooms, which was adorable, however is one of the buildings furthest from the resort entrance which felt even longer after a long day on your feet. The room was a relatively good size for 4 twenty something year olds, however I don't think I could've spend longer than a week there with all four of us.
Staying at a Disney hotel has it's advantages, not only do you have use of the free shuttle buses to and from the parks, you also get early access to the FastPass system, so me and Aimee obviously utilised this perk. We had booked one for the love of our lives Tower of Terror for the night that we arrived, not really knowing if we would have the energy to actually go. When we got to the hotel we freshened up and decided that we would use of Fastness for TOT before going to meet Bekka at Magic Kingdom for our first viewing of Happily Ever After, I mean how else would you spend the first night of a Disney vacation.
Magic Kingdom had extra magic hours the night we arrived so was open until midnight, we didn't stay that long since we had been up since about 6am UK time (1am Orlando time) but we did use some of the extra time to go on Pirates of the Caribbean and take some pictures with the Tangled lanterns which came out so cute. With our tickets we got Disney's Photopass included for free, I highly recommend that if you can find tickets with it included or if you have the money to buy it separately to do so. Before we got to Orlando me and Aimee compiled some what of a plan for the rest of the week, what parks we wanted to go to on what days, which firework shows we wanted to see, the main rides we wanted to ride, although we didn't follow it fully it did really help us see/do pretty much everything we wanted to do. We also used the My Disney Experience App excessively during our stay, to see wait times, our Photopass pictures, to book Fastpasses etc, so I definitely recommend that you download it before you go, plus there is free wifi within the Disney parks so you don't need to worry about having roaming data to use it.
Thanks for reading so far, check back soon for my next post where we go to HOLLYWOOD!
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