Day Five: Nana (x2)
Our marathon travel day began with a fueling adventure at Boma. This was originally a dinner reservation for this same day, meant to fill us up after a day at Typhoon Lagoon. Thankfully, there were plenty of last-minute reservations available for breakfast, and that saved us some money anyhow. Our reservation was for 8:15, and the place was pretty stinking empty. It did eventually fill up closer to 9.
We were seated in an area totally by ourselves near the window, and E was appropriately impressed!
Explanatory side note: E has a banana for breakfast EVERY morning. She has since well before she turned 1. She loves those "nana"s. We didn't feed her a "nana" in the room because we were headed down to breakfast almost as soon as she woke up and drank her milk. As we were riding down in the elevator, she kept chattering about her "nana". Then as we were checking in, she made sure to talk to the CMs behind the desk about her "nana". Then as we met our server and placed our drink orders, she asked about a "nana". We went up to the buffet and built our first round of plates and ..... no bananas. They had fried plantains, but no just normal fruit selections. Ha! Jeff literally had to go all the way back up to our room to get a leftover "nana" to bring back down to E.
Pro Tip: If your kid eats something "normal" for breakfast every day, make sure you pack one with you even for a buffet breakfast. You never know what you may or may not find on the buffet line!
I don't have pictures of Boma food because I think people have seen plenty of them, but I really liked the Pap (although that name just makes me thing of ... other things) and the made-to-order omelet. And, of course, the bread pudding. Yum. Jeff and I were filled to bursting and very happy with our last Disney meal. We wandered a bit before heading back to our room to finish packing. Today hurricane preparations were obviously in full force. As a Missourian, I've never seen hurricane preparations before. I was pretty floored to discover they involved mostly plastic wrap and some rope! Even trash cans were plastic-wrapped to nearby poles.
Also, each door and outside-facing window had 4 or 2 sandbags by it. Maybe those more familiar with hurricanes than me could explain the low number of bags?
We stopped by the gift shop for some last-minute purchases. E still had about $30 of souvenir money that she needed to spend. I think I've mentioned before that Jeff and I had bought a LOT of Disney gift cards from Target to save about 5% on our vacation thanks to our Red Card discount. And I'm a planner/budgeter, so the amount on that gift card was pretty much exactly what we would've needed for our original vacation. which meant that by cutting a day off, we had a little over $100 left on our gift card too. We got E a drum and a maraca thing from the gift shop because she had been playing with them a lot, and we have a dedicated "music room" at our house with lots of instruments. So we know they'll get used in the future, and they'll help us all remember this trip and especially remember AKL. Jeff did get a small carved animal, but we didn't get anywhere close to using the balance of our gift card. We determined we'd just save it and use it for Christmas gifts online or something.
We got back to our room and I finished up the packing while E demonstrated her new-found AKL expertise:
Our check-out had to happen before 11, but DME wasn't until 11:40, so we headed down to the lobby where I checked us out. I was given an itemized receipt for our stay (we didn't charge anything to the room since we just used our gift card), which was to make sure that we got the refund we were due for the last night on our original reservation that we weren't using. The CM made sure to point out that we were due $230.63, and that we should be on the look-out for it in a week or so since Disney billing was likely going to be closed or under-staffed during/after the hurricane. I also made double-sure that they had cancelled our additional one-night reservation that was made earlier in our stay when we thought we'd be staying through the hurricane. She assured me it was taken care of. (Flash forward, it turns out it wasn't. They never cancelled it, but since I never checked in for it online or otherwise, it was automatically cancelled and "refunded" since Disney was giving 100% refunds for all no-shows during this time anyway).
Also, we had quite a bit of food left over in our room and mini-fridge. When we thought we'd be riding out the storm, we started rationing the snacks/provisions we had ordered through Prime Now. And since we didn't figure out until Friday that we were leaving Saturday morning, we didn't have time to eat through everything. We ended up with over a pound of grapes, over half a gallon of whole milk, 5 yogurt pouches, and 3 bananas left in our fridge. I asked at the front desk if we could somehow donate it to a family stranded at the lodge by flights or something, but they said no. I totally understand that - it's a food safety/health issue, but it made me feel bad that people were obviously scrambling for provisions that day and we were wasting a lot of food that we couldn't bring with us
Meanwhile, E was babysitting in the lobby.
Refund handling aside: We eventually did get our full refund, but it took a lot of proactive monitoring on our part. About 5 days after we got home, we got refunded $200 to my credit card. Called Disney billing and was told they weren't operational yet. But somehow a portion of my refund went through anyway? A couple of days later I did get through, and they explained that they can only refund to original form of payment. We had only paid a $200 deposit with the credit card, and paid for the rest of our reservation with gift cards. So the remaining $30.63 had to go on a gift card. But apparently that part of the refund somehow got stuck/lost and it wouldn't have happened if I didn't call. The lady I talked to said she'd put in a request to mail us a gift card for $30.63. 2 days later I got a call from Disney Gift Card Services asking if we already had a gift card with a balance (we did) because they were going to cancel that one and send us a new one with the total balance from the old card plus the $30.63. What? Why? I called back to ask if they could just add the $30.63 to our existing card number, and they said they could. So they did.
Also, we had two unused water park tickets. They were sort of a free perk of the group package we booked through the
travel agent, so when we checked at the concierge desk, they said they couldn't refund that value. I decided to email guest services after our stay just to double-check the policy, and they sent us a voucher for two water park tickets that don't expire until 2034. Yay! Actually, it was a smooth move on Disney's part, because if they hadn't given us vouchers, we likely would've just skipped the water parks on our next trip. Now we have two free tickets, and by the time we go to WDW again, E will be over 3 so we'll be "forced" to buy an additional water park ticket to use our two "free" tickets. Sneaky ...
We hopped on our DME at 11:40 and we were the first stop. We also stopped by Pop and AOA, then were on our way to the airport. Our driver let us know it was the busiest, craziest morning they had ever had. There were so many flights added to MCO that morning it was crazy-packed and chaotic, but we were one of the last buses of the day thanks to flight timing and the airport shutting down. Thankfully, since we were one of the last flights, things had mostly calmed down by we got to the airport. We walked right up to the ticket counter, then got in line for security.
You know you planned your Disney trip right when the longest line of the entire trip is airport security ...
By the time we got through security, it was almost 2 pm and our Boma breakfast had finally worn off. We got some Chinese food in an eerily empty MCO. Lots of the food locations were shutting down imminently, and there generally just weren't many people around. There were only 3 more hours of flights departing, and even though planes were still arriving, there was no one on them - so only people headed to gates, no people headed the other direction. The airport also utilized the plastic wrap strategy for hurricane readiness!
Our flight was on time and we got to Midway (Chicago) around 5:30. My mom was stuck in some traffic trying to get to us, so we grabbed our bags, used the restroom, and headed out to wait for her. A little after 6 her car pulled up and E exclaimed, "Nana!" (that's her non-"Grandma" name). Appropriate for her day to start and end with Nanas, I think! Jeff agreed to drive home since mom had already logged a lot of driving time. Thankfully, she had just filled up on gas. We gave her our thank-you-for-rescuing-us present
, which was a perch for the Banshee she bought during her Disney trip in June. We stopped for some dinner at Chick-Fil-A (we are Chick-Fil-A addicts), and then drove drove drove. E had a good time entertaining Nana in the backseat - my mom has a car seat for E in her car, thankfully - and eventually fell asleep around 8:30 (which felt like 9:30 to her little body still on Eastern time). We managed to make good time without stopping any times after dinner and got to St. Louis' airport parking (where our car was) at 11. E woke up when we transferred her from Nana's car to ours and was VERY awake. She stayed awake the whole way home. We knew she was tired (we were exhausted), but would likely need her bedtime routine in order to fall back asleep. Only problem with that was her bedtime routine involves drinking milk, and we had none at home. So at 11:35, we stopped by Walgreens by our house, got some milk, and headed home. Bedtime routine complete, we placed E in bed and collapsed in our bed. Our marathon was over! We made it!
I'll follow up soon with a summary post with my thoughts and some pictures of my favorite lodge ever - thanks so much for joining me on this journey!