Sometime in the middle of Katya's mission, she decided that she really would like to go to Disney World as a family once she is back. Therefore, we made plans to spend a long weekend in Orlando with Katya and Mark (Alex couldn't come as he was at BYU).
Really quickly, a rundown of how we magically ended up paying very little for this trip...besides the tickets and food at the parks. For flights--we flew Southwest, with points, and because we have two Southwest companion certificates, we basically bought two tickets and two tickets were free. Because of taxes, we paid $5.60 per person each way. And because I had opened a Marriott credit card that gave me 5 free night certificates up to a certain level of room, I booked us three hotel nights at the Disney Swan, a hotel that's not a Disney hotel but is located on Disney property. I had to pay $35 or so extra for each room for a resort fee, but it was still worth it.
Early on Friday morning, we headed for the airport. A merely 2 hour flight to Orlando--and boom we are there!
Disney Swan.
We were able to check in early to our hotel, so we practically threw our suitcases into the room, changed our clothes and took a boat to Hollywood Studios straight from the resort (convenience of staying on property).
We spent the rest of the afternoon here.
Every time we saw a character, I was reminded of all the times that grown ups ran over to the characters at Tokyo Disney and that made me chuckle inside.
Mark was still unimpressed.
We took lots of selfies to send to Alex to make him jealous. Not really...he was fine. He said because Katya missed Finland, it's okay he missed WDW.
We were a bit unlucky with the whole Star Wars rides situation-hahaha.
We got onto the simulated flight ride, buckled up, got all our instructions from the recorded system....and then something broke and we were all sort of stuck inside the "space shuttle" for a bit. Then they shifted us to another one, same spots.... but I am sorry, it all kind of lost its magic at that point because we knew for sure it was not real-haha.
And then!!! We got to the coveted Star Wars ride (which indeed is pretty amazing) and right at this point when you come out and they tell you strictly to obey orders or something and you see all the storm troopers...they stopped us and told us that the ride is suspended because of a malfunction and that we'll get to go at a later time. Bummer....so we left and had to come back a couple of hours later.
More selfies!
Mark shows us exactly how he feels about Florida. Wait...but he loves FL because he was born there!
After a few hours, we actually took a monorail to Epcot!
We hadn't been to Epcot since 2009! It was actually really great--the perfect place to get some yummy food. Crepes!
We did some goofy pictures too.
So then we took some pictures in front of the Epcot ball. We are definitely not influencer material because look how we didn't care if we have people in the background...
Back to Italy, for a selfie. I think this is the third picture where Mark is chewing something.
So then an actual Disney photographer took a few pictures of us. We had bought a special picture package (which was a decent price because of the military discount), so we did let them take pictures randomly at the parks and then see how good they turn out on the app.
At some point they gave Mark a bucket and told us all to look with surprise at the bucket. We didn't know what we were looking at until after we got the pictures uploaded into our app-haha.
Back in France, for Mark's model profile photo shoot.
And then we went back to Hollywood Studios so that the big kids (Robert included) could ride the Tower of Terror. The lines are always enormous for that ride...
This is early March and doesn't look very crowded...but somehow it still is!
Oh! And as the highlight of the evening, we were able to watch the amazing Fatasia parade. Lots of beautifully decorated boats, music, lights! I loved it!
And that was the end of our Day 1. We were happy we didn't have to go far to go back to the hotel. The hotel was super comfortable and worked great for four of us.
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