A few (or maybe a lot) of thoughts on our recent trip!

mousekatool

Mouseketeer
Joined
Dec 24, 2010
Hello all! I would love to write a thorough trip report on our trip this past week, but honestly know I'd never finish it, lol. However, in the interest of paying it forward, since I have learned so much from reading trip reports myself, I thought I would share my random musings on our visit to the "Dark Side"!

Our travelers were myself, DH, DD 10, and DS, who turned 8 during the week. We have been to Disney 3 times and have enjoyed each trip immensely, but had not been to Universal because the kids had not really been tall enough to enjoy the rides until now. We read the Harry Potter series and saw the movies together a few years ago, and DD has reread them multiple times since then, so we are big HP fans (except DH, who listened along dutifully, but isn't into the craze like the rest of us). I had the opportunity to attend a continuing education conference at Portofino Bay 7/25-28, so we used this as a chance for our first family Uni visit! Stay tuned for our adventures!
 
We checked in to PB on Sunday, 7/24. My only complaint with check in was that there appeared to be a large number of South Americans and only 1 TM who spoke Spanish, so she had to keep leaving her line and assisting Spanish speaking guests in other lines. But our TM was helpful and efficient.

We stayed in the East Wing, garden view room. This was fine for us as we spent almost no time in the room except to sleep. The view itself was fine- lots of pretty trees and flowers. The room was spacious and very nice. We have stayed deluxe on all our Disney trips, and this room seemed much bigger than the Disney rooms. If I could find anything to complain about, it was that we could hear our neighbors at times, which was especially unpleasant when they were yelling at their kids around 6:30 am to get up for Early Admission on a day when we were sleeping in. :crazy2: Otherwise, it was very quiet despite being near the elevators. Housekeeping was efficient and unobtrusive, always leaving us with extra towels. The walk from our room to anywhere in the resort (pool, boat dock, conference center, restaurants) was an easy, pleasant one and only a few minutes.
 
Sounds nice so far........apart from being awoken early by other guests of course.......that's never nice.

Look forward to reading some more.......
 
We decided to walk over to Citywalk for dinner after we chilled in the room a bit. The path from PB to Citywalk is really pretty. I would have liked to go through the butterfly garden near HRH if it hadn't been so hot, it looked neat. We got all the way there and went through security, only to have my husband turned around because he had his small Swiss Army knife keychain :mad: He simply forgot to take it out of his pocket, but of course, they wouldn't let him in with it, so he ran all the way back to the room to drop it off while the kids and I wandered through some shops. He took the boat back, and we decided to hit NBC Grill for dinner.

There was a bit of a wait, but thanks to you lovely folks, I remembered to show my room key, and we were seated immediately! However, it seemed like we waited forever for our food. We all thought this meal was just ok. DH ordered the grilled fish sandwich, and the bun was twice the size of the fish :sad1:. He wasn't impressed. I ordered the bang bang chicken, which turned out to be completely different than what I had imagined. Although I did read the description on the menu, I had the bang bang shrimp from Bonefish Grill in my mind- oops!:rolleyes1 It tasted good, but there were only 3-4 chunks of chicken, and tons of coconut (which I like, but if you aren't a fan, this isn't the dish for you). DD got the kids' mini burgers, which she said were good. DS ordered the appetizer blue cheese chips, minus the blue cheese. He was really in the mood for tortilla chips with queso, so this was as close as he could get. They are actually hand cut potato chips, but something about the chips, the queso and the bacon really worked. We all tried them and they were yummy. I bet they would have been even better with the blue cheese!

Afterward, we were so tired from traveling, we went back to the hotel and crashed in those super comfy beds!
 



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