Star Wars Dark Side – 4/15/18 – 4/23/18 – Day 1

Ah, April. Spring in Florida, winter here. This would be my wife and my first runDisney race, and as you will see, will not be our last!
Let the adventure begin!

Sunday 4/15/18

This trip got off to a rough start. We were at our daughter’s best friend from high school wedding when I got a text that our flight out the next morning was cancelled. Basically the reason why was an April snowstorm to the north was preventing that plane from getting to us. Have I mentioned how much I hate this winter and spring, which has just been a continuation of winter? Delta had booked us on a 6:00 pm flight but that meant we were going to sacrifice an entire day at WDW and get there just in time for bed. I scrambled online and found us two seats on the 3:30 flight which would get us there around 6:00 pm. This meant we would still lose the day but at least have an evening probably at the resort. This also meant we lost our dinner at Liberty Tree so we quickly called to cancel. Disney was more than accommodating due to the weather and didn’t charge us a cancellation fee. This would also mean that we couldn’t meet @monkcline Melissa and @disjen Jen when we were planning to on Sunday, and that was by far the most disappointing development. Just before bed I checked again and found us two seats on the 12:30 flight! Ok, so we still lost our Liberty Tree but we should still be able to meet up with Melissa and Jen. Things were looking up! Well, that was short lived as we would find out the next day. When we got up the next morning the stupid snowstorm that caused us to not have a plane was now moving across our area in the form of freezing rain. Yippee. We left early and took our time but when we got to the airport the monitors showed the 3:30 flight was already delayed by an hour. Ours was still showing on time though. They tried to get us out on time but we wound up being delayed by about a half hour for takeoff. We even had to go through de-icing! Seriously, de-icing in the middle of April! The good thing was we had a huge plane! They had brought in one of the big ones that goes across the Atlantic to try to accommodate as many passengers from the cancelled morning flight as possible. However even those can’t beat thunderstorms, which we would find out later. Kathy and I synced up Coco on the in-flight movie so we could watch it together. Darn you Disney/Pixar for making me cry on a flight to Florida! Horrible movie! And by that I mean it was a great movie that made me cry! @bexruns you were absolutely right about this movie! By the time we were approaching Orlando the storms had rolled in. We had at least one aborted landing in which we were tossed about like a dog’s chew toy. I was holding Kathy’s hand to comfort her and thought I was going to have the guy next to me gripping my other! That was the roughest I’ve ever felt in a plane and I love to fly. Not fun at all. We wound up finally being able to circle long enough and come in from another direction to avoid the worst of it and get wheels down. But that delayed us by another 45 minutes. So we were now over an hour late on landing. Ok, still would have time to grab a quick bite at POP and hightail it over to Magic Kingdom to at least see Melissa and Jen for a little bit if all went well. With the storms circling we walked into and empty Magical Express queue, very unusual for the afternoon, and didn’t have to wait long for a bus. We were second drop off, AoA was first, not bad. As we entered WDW property though the rains came. And came. And came. We grabbed a bite at Everything Pop food court, turkey and mashed potatoes and green beans which was very good considering we weren’t getting Liberty Tree, to try to wait out the storm a bit before dropping off things in the room. That was when we got the text that Melissa and Jen had to leave MK. They were soaked to the bone. As sad as we were that we wouldn’t get to see them that evening, we understood completely. You just don’t want to be walking around a theme park all wet and drenched. We knew we had plans to see them for a bit at Epcot the next afternoon so that did ease the pain. The rain finally let up enough that we could make it to our room and so we just made the decision to stay in for the evening. They had started refurbing 50’s section, the last to receive the attention so basically half of that section was under refurb. We were in the back building, the Jukebox, on the third floor. But we could look out over the interior of the section by the bowling pin pool so it was a good room. By that time it was approaching 7 – 8 o’clock and wouldn’t have left us much time anyway. And why go get our shoes wet? That would just be silly. As it was Delta held our luggage for some reason before releasing it to Disney and it didn’t get to us until about 10:00. We would come out swinging tomorrow. We did manage to get a nice little walk around the resort as the rain let up later. The skyliner is coming along and we could see towers. They are a lot lower than I thought they’d be. So basically we still wound up sacrificing a day of our vacation but were finally Home.

Steps: 14,462
Miles: 6.52