Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Nov 25: WDW Day 1

We got up early this morning and flew to Orlando to spend Thanksgiving at Walt Disney World. We've never been, and Doug and I always said we'd go when we had kids. Well, now we have Carter, and we thought why not give it a shot? We decided to stay at the Animal Kingdom Lodge because we thought it would remind us of Africa. Of course, we've since read that this is one of the worst times to come here because it's incredibly crowded. :-P

Travel was easy today, and we didn't run into any crowds or bad weather or long lines, even flying through DFW. We got to Orlando and got in our rental car and stopped at a grocery store on the way to the resort. Our room is a one-bedroom condo with a full kitchen, so we decided to take advantage of the opportunity to eat in our room for a lot of our meals. The idea of waiting in a long line for every meal with a toddler was NOT appealing!

The lodge is called Jambo House, and it's really cool. The lobby is all decked out for Christmas, with a huge tree and lots of lights. Our room is really nice. Notice that Carter is in all of these pictures! Here is the kitchen. It has a dishwasher and everything.



There's a dining table and a big TV in the living area, and a balcony that looks out over the "savanna".



The bathroom is huge, always a nice feature.



Carter enjoyed taking a bath in this tub tonight. He said it had a "slide", LOL. (It's a jacuzzi tub with a slanted back so you can lie back and relax.)



The bedroom opens onto the same balcony. Having a separate bedroom is really nice for traveling with Carter, because when he's asleep, we can just close the door and watch TV. That's hard to do in a typical hotel room.



Check out the Disney touch:



Here's a view of the whole living area.



And yes, you can really see wildlife off the balcony! We've seen giraffes and zebras and several kinds of antelope and lots of birds. Carter doesn't realize how amazing it is to see a giraffe from the room. He just says, "giraffe!" like it was a dog or a cow, LOL. It was kind of rainy and gloomy, so I'll try to take pictures of the animals tomorrow.



The balcony is pretty big, a good outdoor space.



We went to Epcot this evening, and even though it was drizzling the whole time we had a lot of fun. The park was lovely at night, and the rain kept the crowds away. We had dinner at a German restaurant, and did a complete walk around the park.

I'm not yet sure what we're doing tomorrow, but I'll post more pictures sometime during the day.

Oh, and we found out tonight that Carter can count as high as 12. He doesn't hit all the numbers every time, but he'll randomly say about half of them as he counts (like 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12) and while we were in the car tonight ended once on 12. I didn't know he knew any numbers higher than 10, so that was a surprise!

1 comment:

Debby said...

WOW...What a beautiful place...love the granite coutertops and the room looks so spacious..I know you will have a wonderful time...Happy Thanksgiving...I will be at Bonnies tomorrow, I will show Mom and Dad your photos...Love you all...Mom/Nana