The Blue House Chronicles: Disney: road trip down, first night and check-in

We decided to make the 9.5 hour drive to Disney World to give ourselves more flexibility as to the timing of our coming and going (and to avoid the hassle of flying with three kids). We loaded up with books, snacks and DVDs in the hopes of making the ride more bearable. When the kids woke up on the day of the trip, they each had a little treat bag to take in the car with them:

I thought they might spontaneously combust from excitement at that point. Thank you Amanda for making the cute initial Mickey ears for the bags!!

{The drive down, and our first evening in Orlando, were documented exclusively by my iPhone, as I did not break out the camera until day 2}.

The ride down was pretty smooth. I was hoping for a little good old fashioned sleeping from the back of the van to help make the ride seem shorter for everyone, but they were way too wired. They finally zonked out for a bit close to the end of the trip:

We could not check into our Disney resort until Monday, so we stayed outside the park on Sunday night. After we dropped our bags off we headed off to Disney's Boardwalk for dinner:

We grabbed some pizza and watched street performers do their thing.

We had a great view of our resort, the Yacht Club, from the Boardwalk:

After dinner and ice cream we headed to Downtown Disney, mainly because Jacob wanted to see the famous Lego store. Unfortunately we are big meanies and didn't think that a $100 Star Wars Lego set that could be gotten outside of Disney World -- perhaps by Santa Claus? -- made for a great day 1 souvenir, so we had to deny our Star Wars enthusiast right out of the gate. But given that we had just entered a world in which every attraction dumps out into a gift shop, that was probably good practice for everyone. While Jacob was making his pitch to David about the Star Wars set, I took some pictures of the girls with some cool Lego creations.

Buzz:

Woody:

We then headed back to our hotel so we could get a good night's sleep and be up and at 'em early to check into the Yacht Club and hit our first park.

We received such a warm welcome from the Yacht Club. The "cast members" made such a big deal over the kids, handed out "first visit" buttons to everyone (it actually was Jacob's 4th visit and Elizabeth's 3d, but it was Caroline's first, so we just went ahead and called it a first visit all around!), and generally made the kids feel like VIPs. I know Disney is not everyone's bag, but it is hard to deny that they do what they do REALLY WELL. We were able to check into our room around 8:00 a.m., which was awesome, and the kids and I looked around the resort for a bit while David worked on getting our {fifteen, said the bell hop ticket} bags to the room.

The resort was beautiful, and the kids and I gave it eight big thumbs up as we wandered around the grounds.

When we got into the room, A-tisket A-tasket a Disney Welcome basket was waiting for the kids. It held some Mickey ears, which they promptly tried on for size: