Captain_Oblivious
DIS Dad #257, Galactic Salad Dodger
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2008
Chapter 14: The One With The World’s Most Expensive Bowl of Mac and Cheese
This trip really pushed us to our limits. Our previous record for driving had been over 3,600 miles on the tour of the Great Plains states, also known as the World’s Most Boring Drive In The World. But on this drive through the Deep South, we smashed that record to pieces by driving over 4,100 miles by the time we returned home. This is what happens when you drive from Delaware to Florida via Oklahoma.
We’d known from the beginning that it was going to be hard on us. Those five days doing the loop from Atlanta out west to Oklahoma and then back to Florida were grueling. And so, we’d planned our itinerary with an incentive at the end. We needed that light at the end of the tunnel in order to keep going. And that incentive was a little bit of Disney time.
It’s funny—when we’re talking with friends, they often seem to see us as “the Disney family”. Their impression is that we love Disney World and we go there all the time. And while yes, we do generally love Disney World, our kids have actually not set foot in the Florida theme parks since 2012. We’ve had plenty of tastes of Disney along the way—Aulani in 2013, Disneyland in 2014, Hilton Head in 2016…but we also like variety. Hence the 50-state tour. It’s always interesting to see how you’re perceived in different circles.
Anyway, the Budget Committee had determined that a full-blown park visit was not in the cards for this trip, but the idea we pitched to the kids was a couple of nights on-site and a visit to Typhoon Lagoon. After 2 weeks in the car in stifling summer heat, everyone thought a water park would be just what the doctor ordered.
There is no truly affordable way for a family of 6 to stay in one room on-site at Walt Disney World. It’s just a fact of life. And I can’t pull my “conveniently forget a couple of kids when booking” trick because of the fact that admission is tied to each guest. The cheapest option is the family suites at the All-Star Music resort, but there are only 6 of them available and, being a theme snob, there are other places I’d prefer to stay. We found a summer discount offer and decided the best fit was a blast from the past for me—the cabins at the Fort Wilderness Campground.
This is where my family always stayed on our visits to WDW when I was a kid. When we’d first visited, the Magic Kingdom was the only theme park and your options for staying on-site were the campground, the Polynesian Resort, and the Contemporary Resort. I remember visiting both the River Country water park and Discovery Island. During that same time period, I would walk 15 miles to and from school carrying a 50-lb. backpack, uphill both ways in seven feet of snow, even in summer. And get off my lawn!
Anyway, being a family that generally decides not to fix things if they ain’t broken, we had a great time staying in the cabins (actually, trailers at the time) and that became our base of operations whenever we went to Disney World. It wasn’t until I had kids of my own and cheaper options were available that we started trying out other places to stay. So, coming back to stay at Fort Wilderness was a nostalgia trip for me.
We drove about an hour west along the Beachline Expressway from Cape Canaveral to the Orlando area. It’s a very easy drive. I should point out that driving in Florida is made much easier with a SunPass toll transponder in your car. I don’t know how people drive in Florida without them, especially in the Miami area. Just about every major highway down there is a toll road, and many of them are fully automated. @cj9200 had hooked us up with a transponder just before our trip and it made our lives so much easier getting around Florida. However, he had neglected to give us his credit card number to handle the billing. In any case, thank you, CJ!
After that hour of driving, the kids were thrilled to finally say that they were back on Disney property. Aaaahhh…
Scotty decided to re-create his pose from the last time we’d brought them. In 2012, we’d vacationed in Myrtle Beach, SC for a week. Then, Julie and I had decided to surprise the kids with a few days at WDW afterwards. We left Myrtle Beach and turned south instead of north, and waited for the kids to figure it out. We actually made it all the way to the gates! It’s a fun story, and you can read about it here if you’d like to waste even more of your own time.
We entered the campground, and I stopped at the front office to check in and get our assignment. Everyone got out of the van, because if you have a choice between sitting in a parking lot and going inside a building that Disney Imagineers once built, you always choose the latter. Also, we’d been crammed in that stupid van for almost two weeks now.
Disney themes are the bacon of the decorating world. They make everything better.
We got our cabin assignment and a very helpful map of the resort and set off to find it and unpack.
The cabins are really nice. It’s a great setup for a family our size. The only downside is that there’s one bathroom for the 6 of us to share. But that’s also true in most of the hotel rooms we stay in. It’s always nice having an extra room to stretch out with a sofa bed so nobody has to sleep on the floor. There’s also a kitchenette, although we didn’t use it for our short stay.
Once we’d unpacked, we got back in the van and drove to the Polynesian Resort. Or, I guess it’s Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort, if you want to get technical about it. I’ll just call it the Poly because it’s fewer syllables and I’m an extremely lazy man. On this night, we were having our very first O’hana dinner experience.
I have to admit, I was originally sad to see the waterfall garden go, but the new lobby of the Poly has really grown on me.
For some reason, possibly because we’re masochists, we tried to get another photo of the kids. You can see how well that turned out.
There’s a Bible verse that says “Children are a blessing from the Lord.” You know why that’s in there? Because occasionally you have to be reminded of that.
Aha! I caught him on my phone in between making dumb faces.
Thank goodness we’d made reservations, because the lobby was packed with people. It always amazes me how many people are trying to get seats in the most popular tourist destination on earth by just walking up at 6:00 p.m. and asking for a table. I’m experiencing this now as I plan our latest Disney adventure with my brother, who doesn’t want to make reservations for dinners or Fastpasses because he’d rather “just wing it.” I told him I hope he enjoys the Country Bear Jamboree.
O’hana, as most of you know, is a dinner served family-style with several courses. It features pineapple-coconut bread (which is wonderful), salad (obligatory, I guess), and then a glorious round of all-you-can-eat beef, chicken, and shrimp fresh off the grill, served with wings and dumplings, noodles, and stir-fry vegetables. It’s an exciting, exotic blend of Polynesian and Asian flavor influences served to American tastes—which, for uncultured swine like me, basically means that they added some teriyaki sauce to some of the dishes. Truth be told, I was sold once I heard “all-you-can-eat meat from the grill”. As Jeff (@Terra Nova guy ) once said in one of our threads, “Meat + Fire = World’s Best Recipe.”
Anyway, you don’t want me to describe it. You want food photos. Here’s the kids with the awesome bread.
When looking at the menu, Dave was decidedly undecided about trying most of the food. Somewhere, my parents are laughing at me, because he’s as completely unadventurous in his dining choices as I am. Take note parents: when you curse your child with the pronouncement, “Someday I hope you have a child, and that he’s just like you!”…it works!
Our server was very helpful and found out his favorite dish in the whole wide world is mac-and-cheese, so she had the kitchen whip up a massive bowl for him.
Which is great and all, but he was 13 years old, so he got charged the adult rate for O’hana. Which is in the neighborhood of $50. He wouldn’t try anything else from the dinner. So, if I do the math...
...hang on, let me get my socks off...
...carry the one...
...That made it a $50 bowl of mac-and-cheese.
Needless to say, this put me in a bit of a foul mood when signing for the check. I may or may not have wondered if the mac-and-cheese had come with a TV in it.
Now, I do owe some context on David’s behalf here. For one thing, he had no idea how expensive the meal was. He says he would have tried more of the foods if he’d known what we were paying for him. And I believe him. He was in vacation mode, figuring he could just get what he wanted and not worry about it. And secondly, he’s really been growing up in the last year or so. Puberty is kicking in, he’s grown at least a foot, and he’s suddenly becoming a lot more adventurous in trying foods. It doesn't hurt that he's currently consuming as many calories per day as the Denver Broncos. I remember when I used to be able to eat like that. Anyway, I was angry at the time but have since learned that I owe him a break.
The rest of us thought the meal was terrific. We loved everything.
This was the only decent shot with beef I could find. I was too busy eating it.
I think the only disappointment was the bread pudding--or, as I like to call it, Lazy Man’s Cake.
"Hey, Frank, can you bake a cake for us?"
"Nah...just take this bread and dump some syrup on it. It's the same thing."
I will admit right off the bat that I’m not the target audience for bread pudding. After all, since pie is better than cake, how much better is it than the lazy man’s version of cake? So strike one is that it wasn’t pie. Strike two is that it included bananas. I don’t mind bananas on their own, but I don’t find that any foods are improved by adding bananas to them. Bananas are basically the Anti-Bacon.
For example: chocolate chip bars. Sign me up!
Chocolate chip banana bars:
And then, strike three: after such a huge meal and all-you-can-eat portions, the last thing I want is a giant heavy loaf of bread soaked in caramel sauce. It’s like swallowing an anchor.
Of course, it had ice cream with it, so I had to try some.
None of us, not even the teenagers, could finish it. Overall, though, we really loved our meal there. We’d definitely go back.
The server had tipped us off that we could watch the fireworks over the castle from the restaurant.
We finished dinner before the show started, though, so started walking down to the beach at the Poly. On the way out, we walked past the various tiki figures at the entrance to O’hana. We thought we could make for good tikis ourselves. What do you think?
I thought I could do a really effective pantomime of this guy, but for some reason Sarah objected. I don’t know what her problem was.
The Poly beach was a favorite spot of ours for years to watch the show until they built the new DVC bungalows out in the water and took away most of the view. However, there’s one spot where you can still see most everything. It’s just a little more crowded than it used to be because now everybody’s trying to cram into that space.
First came the Electric Light Parade (boy, we really needed to wipe the condensation off the camera lens).
Then the main event. Someday, we’ll figure out the proper camera settings for good fireworks photos.
Once we enter Disney property, our family usually enters a type of fugue state in which we are determined to maximize the value of every second and dollar spent there. In other words, we typically burn the candle at both ends. Everyone was interested in a nighttime ride on the monorail around Epcot to see it lit up at night. But it was also well past Drew’s bedtime. I ended up taking one for the team and driving Drew back to the cabin to put him in bed, while Julie took the big kids for a monorail ride and was left to figure out the Disney transportation system on her own to get back there. I think it involved a monorail, a boat, and the internal Fort Wilderness bus system. Maybe two buses. I’d diagram it for you, but I don’t have a big enough flowchart.
Coming Up Next: Typhoon Lagoon! Or “Mickey’s Pool”, as Drew called it.
This trip really pushed us to our limits. Our previous record for driving had been over 3,600 miles on the tour of the Great Plains states, also known as the World’s Most Boring Drive In The World. But on this drive through the Deep South, we smashed that record to pieces by driving over 4,100 miles by the time we returned home. This is what happens when you drive from Delaware to Florida via Oklahoma.
We’d known from the beginning that it was going to be hard on us. Those five days doing the loop from Atlanta out west to Oklahoma and then back to Florida were grueling. And so, we’d planned our itinerary with an incentive at the end. We needed that light at the end of the tunnel in order to keep going. And that incentive was a little bit of Disney time.
It’s funny—when we’re talking with friends, they often seem to see us as “the Disney family”. Their impression is that we love Disney World and we go there all the time. And while yes, we do generally love Disney World, our kids have actually not set foot in the Florida theme parks since 2012. We’ve had plenty of tastes of Disney along the way—Aulani in 2013, Disneyland in 2014, Hilton Head in 2016…but we also like variety. Hence the 50-state tour. It’s always interesting to see how you’re perceived in different circles.
Anyway, the Budget Committee had determined that a full-blown park visit was not in the cards for this trip, but the idea we pitched to the kids was a couple of nights on-site and a visit to Typhoon Lagoon. After 2 weeks in the car in stifling summer heat, everyone thought a water park would be just what the doctor ordered.
There is no truly affordable way for a family of 6 to stay in one room on-site at Walt Disney World. It’s just a fact of life. And I can’t pull my “conveniently forget a couple of kids when booking” trick because of the fact that admission is tied to each guest. The cheapest option is the family suites at the All-Star Music resort, but there are only 6 of them available and, being a theme snob, there are other places I’d prefer to stay. We found a summer discount offer and decided the best fit was a blast from the past for me—the cabins at the Fort Wilderness Campground.
This is where my family always stayed on our visits to WDW when I was a kid. When we’d first visited, the Magic Kingdom was the only theme park and your options for staying on-site were the campground, the Polynesian Resort, and the Contemporary Resort. I remember visiting both the River Country water park and Discovery Island. During that same time period, I would walk 15 miles to and from school carrying a 50-lb. backpack, uphill both ways in seven feet of snow, even in summer. And get off my lawn!
Anyway, being a family that generally decides not to fix things if they ain’t broken, we had a great time staying in the cabins (actually, trailers at the time) and that became our base of operations whenever we went to Disney World. It wasn’t until I had kids of my own and cheaper options were available that we started trying out other places to stay. So, coming back to stay at Fort Wilderness was a nostalgia trip for me.
We drove about an hour west along the Beachline Expressway from Cape Canaveral to the Orlando area. It’s a very easy drive. I should point out that driving in Florida is made much easier with a SunPass toll transponder in your car. I don’t know how people drive in Florida without them, especially in the Miami area. Just about every major highway down there is a toll road, and many of them are fully automated. @cj9200 had hooked us up with a transponder just before our trip and it made our lives so much easier getting around Florida. However, he had neglected to give us his credit card number to handle the billing. In any case, thank you, CJ!
After that hour of driving, the kids were thrilled to finally say that they were back on Disney property. Aaaahhh…
Scotty decided to re-create his pose from the last time we’d brought them. In 2012, we’d vacationed in Myrtle Beach, SC for a week. Then, Julie and I had decided to surprise the kids with a few days at WDW afterwards. We left Myrtle Beach and turned south instead of north, and waited for the kids to figure it out. We actually made it all the way to the gates! It’s a fun story, and you can read about it here if you’d like to waste even more of your own time.
We entered the campground, and I stopped at the front office to check in and get our assignment. Everyone got out of the van, because if you have a choice between sitting in a parking lot and going inside a building that Disney Imagineers once built, you always choose the latter. Also, we’d been crammed in that stupid van for almost two weeks now.
Disney themes are the bacon of the decorating world. They make everything better.
We got our cabin assignment and a very helpful map of the resort and set off to find it and unpack.
The cabins are really nice. It’s a great setup for a family our size. The only downside is that there’s one bathroom for the 6 of us to share. But that’s also true in most of the hotel rooms we stay in. It’s always nice having an extra room to stretch out with a sofa bed so nobody has to sleep on the floor. There’s also a kitchenette, although we didn’t use it for our short stay.
Once we’d unpacked, we got back in the van and drove to the Polynesian Resort. Or, I guess it’s Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort, if you want to get technical about it. I’ll just call it the Poly because it’s fewer syllables and I’m an extremely lazy man. On this night, we were having our very first O’hana dinner experience.
I have to admit, I was originally sad to see the waterfall garden go, but the new lobby of the Poly has really grown on me.
For some reason, possibly because we’re masochists, we tried to get another photo of the kids. You can see how well that turned out.
There’s a Bible verse that says “Children are a blessing from the Lord.” You know why that’s in there? Because occasionally you have to be reminded of that.
Aha! I caught him on my phone in between making dumb faces.
Thank goodness we’d made reservations, because the lobby was packed with people. It always amazes me how many people are trying to get seats in the most popular tourist destination on earth by just walking up at 6:00 p.m. and asking for a table. I’m experiencing this now as I plan our latest Disney adventure with my brother, who doesn’t want to make reservations for dinners or Fastpasses because he’d rather “just wing it.” I told him I hope he enjoys the Country Bear Jamboree.
O’hana, as most of you know, is a dinner served family-style with several courses. It features pineapple-coconut bread (which is wonderful), salad (obligatory, I guess), and then a glorious round of all-you-can-eat beef, chicken, and shrimp fresh off the grill, served with wings and dumplings, noodles, and stir-fry vegetables. It’s an exciting, exotic blend of Polynesian and Asian flavor influences served to American tastes—which, for uncultured swine like me, basically means that they added some teriyaki sauce to some of the dishes. Truth be told, I was sold once I heard “all-you-can-eat meat from the grill”. As Jeff (@Terra Nova guy ) once said in one of our threads, “Meat + Fire = World’s Best Recipe.”
Anyway, you don’t want me to describe it. You want food photos. Here’s the kids with the awesome bread.
When looking at the menu, Dave was decidedly undecided about trying most of the food. Somewhere, my parents are laughing at me, because he’s as completely unadventurous in his dining choices as I am. Take note parents: when you curse your child with the pronouncement, “Someday I hope you have a child, and that he’s just like you!”…it works!
Our server was very helpful and found out his favorite dish in the whole wide world is mac-and-cheese, so she had the kitchen whip up a massive bowl for him.
Which is great and all, but he was 13 years old, so he got charged the adult rate for O’hana. Which is in the neighborhood of $50. He wouldn’t try anything else from the dinner. So, if I do the math...
...hang on, let me get my socks off...
...carry the one...
...That made it a $50 bowl of mac-and-cheese.
Needless to say, this put me in a bit of a foul mood when signing for the check. I may or may not have wondered if the mac-and-cheese had come with a TV in it.
Now, I do owe some context on David’s behalf here. For one thing, he had no idea how expensive the meal was. He says he would have tried more of the foods if he’d known what we were paying for him. And I believe him. He was in vacation mode, figuring he could just get what he wanted and not worry about it. And secondly, he’s really been growing up in the last year or so. Puberty is kicking in, he’s grown at least a foot, and he’s suddenly becoming a lot more adventurous in trying foods. It doesn't hurt that he's currently consuming as many calories per day as the Denver Broncos. I remember when I used to be able to eat like that. Anyway, I was angry at the time but have since learned that I owe him a break.
The rest of us thought the meal was terrific. We loved everything.
This was the only decent shot with beef I could find. I was too busy eating it.
I think the only disappointment was the bread pudding--or, as I like to call it, Lazy Man’s Cake.
"Hey, Frank, can you bake a cake for us?"
"Nah...just take this bread and dump some syrup on it. It's the same thing."
I will admit right off the bat that I’m not the target audience for bread pudding. After all, since pie is better than cake, how much better is it than the lazy man’s version of cake? So strike one is that it wasn’t pie. Strike two is that it included bananas. I don’t mind bananas on their own, but I don’t find that any foods are improved by adding bananas to them. Bananas are basically the Anti-Bacon.
For example: chocolate chip bars. Sign me up!
Chocolate chip banana bars:
And then, strike three: after such a huge meal and all-you-can-eat portions, the last thing I want is a giant heavy loaf of bread soaked in caramel sauce. It’s like swallowing an anchor.
Of course, it had ice cream with it, so I had to try some.
None of us, not even the teenagers, could finish it. Overall, though, we really loved our meal there. We’d definitely go back.
The server had tipped us off that we could watch the fireworks over the castle from the restaurant.
We finished dinner before the show started, though, so started walking down to the beach at the Poly. On the way out, we walked past the various tiki figures at the entrance to O’hana. We thought we could make for good tikis ourselves. What do you think?
I thought I could do a really effective pantomime of this guy, but for some reason Sarah objected. I don’t know what her problem was.
The Poly beach was a favorite spot of ours for years to watch the show until they built the new DVC bungalows out in the water and took away most of the view. However, there’s one spot where you can still see most everything. It’s just a little more crowded than it used to be because now everybody’s trying to cram into that space.
First came the Electric Light Parade (boy, we really needed to wipe the condensation off the camera lens).
Then the main event. Someday, we’ll figure out the proper camera settings for good fireworks photos.
Once we enter Disney property, our family usually enters a type of fugue state in which we are determined to maximize the value of every second and dollar spent there. In other words, we typically burn the candle at both ends. Everyone was interested in a nighttime ride on the monorail around Epcot to see it lit up at night. But it was also well past Drew’s bedtime. I ended up taking one for the team and driving Drew back to the cabin to put him in bed, while Julie took the big kids for a monorail ride and was left to figure out the Disney transportation system on her own to get back there. I think it involved a monorail, a boat, and the internal Fort Wilderness bus system. Maybe two buses. I’d diagram it for you, but I don’t have a big enough flowchart.
Coming Up Next: Typhoon Lagoon! Or “Mickey’s Pool”, as Drew called it.