Disney 2016 Day One

This is the incredible view from our room at the Contemporary Resort. We're at Disney World!!! Our room is on the ninth floor and overlooks Bay Lake. Natalie and Eric sat on our balcony for a while when we got here, just relaxing and enjoying the view.

We all got up at 3:30am so we could leave by a little after 4am. Our plane flight was scheduled to leave at 5:45am. We got to the airport in plenty of time, and the security line was short. We had a little complication, however. We had planned to carry on our luggage, but I forgot to tell Natalie not to put liquids greater than three ounces into her luggage. The lady checking her luggage at least offered to let me go back out to the Southwest Airlines counter to check in Natalie's luggage, instead of automatically throwing out all of that expensive Aveda hair product. The two kids waited for me at one of the restaurants past the security checkpoint. Thankfully, everything went smoothly after that, including an uneventful plane flight. Eric even said, "The plane flight wasn't that long." That was because he was watching the first Harry Potter movie on the iPad the whole time.

As you can see from the view from our balcony, we had a great view of the resort pool. When they saw that, Natalie and Eric wanted to swim in the pool and play on the beach. I had to convince them that we had to go to Magic Kingdom first, to at least eat lunch, before they could swim in the pool. At that point, Natalie became super grouchy, and she just wanted food at the first restaurant we came to. That was a sit-down restaurant where each entree cost at least $20--um no.

We finally decided on hot dogs. Even then, three hotdogs (one with chili and cheese), two fries, and a lemonade--cost over $30. Ouch! Later in the afternoon, Natalie said that she didn't even like hotdogs, ever since she saw the Nathan hotdog eating contest special a couple of years ago where they described how the competitors were able to eat so many hotdogs. So that meant spending over $30 and she didn't even like the food! At least they ate their hotdogs.

They were much more agreeable after they ate, especially Natalie. She even agreed to getting her picture taken by the Disney Photopass photographer. She had previously refused to pose for a photo with Cinderella's Castle in the background even though I begged her to. After she ate, she even asked me if I wanted a picture at this spot or further down in front of the statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. She also agreed to pose in front of Belle's Castle later on. She usually is not that agreeable to photos in general.

As you can see in the picture, there were a lot of people at the Magic Kingdom, and it was sunny, in the upper 80s, and humid. Part of the sky looked pretty dark at one point, and it drizzled, so we started walking back towards the monorail, with a few stops in some shops along the way.

Here they decided to pretend to fight with swords and shields in one of the shops in Fantasyland. Eric even posed with a pink shield and sword at one point, until he saw this "cool" metal-looking one. Natalie put on one of the crowns on display in the background. They were having fun trying everything out.

When we saw this water feature, Eric really wanted to play in the water. It was so hot that I agreed to let him. He got soaking wet and loved every minute of it. Thankfully I remembered to make him take his shoes off first or that would have made the evening difficult with wet shoes. Interestingly, I noted to Natalie that, as small as Eric is compared to other nine-year-olds, he was one of the "big" kids playing in this water feature. Most of the other kids were much younger than him.

After that brief visit to the Magic Kingdom, I let the kids play in the hotel pool. They were in the pool less than five minutes when one of the lifeguards announced that they had a cleaning emergency and needed everyone to get out of the pool. At that point they started playing in the sand. Eric really wanted Natalie to bury him in the sand, but she didn't have a shovel and didn't want to sit in the sand because the sand would end up in her swimsuit. She actually lay out instead while Eric played with a bucket in the sand. Meanwhile, I took a really long walk to get some exercise on this day of long plane flights and bus rides.

After my walk, I went to our room  to get some water, and to rest for a bit. I had a clear view of the kids as they played in the pool. Natalie said that she also saw me on our balcony watching them at one point. After the kids had been playing outside for a couple of hours, I went down to get them out of the sun. They had gone back to playing in the sand again. Natalie was still laying out and Eric decided to bury HER in some sand. They could have played there the rest of the day, but I convinced them that we should figure out what we wanted to do for dinner.

Natalie decided that she wanted either Asian food or Italian food. That's when we found out that most of the Disney restaurants only serve "American" food. We ended up making a reservation at one of the restaurants in "Tokyo" at Epcot tomorrow, but for today, we finally ended up just eating at the Contempo Cafe at our hotel. Natalie and I shared a grilled salmon, and I ended up eating all of the green beans and much of the wild rice that were in the entree because she only wanted salmon. Eric had the kids' cheese flatbread because I must have messed up and didn't say pepperoni.

After dinner, we did a little shopping at our hotel, then headed to Magic Kingdom to get ice cream for dessert. Eric had a Kids' raspberry sorbet, which included chocolate wafers to made to look like Mickey ears. Natalie just had chocolate ice cream, and I had the root beer float.

We did a little more shopping after dessert, and Natalie ended up buying this cute hat including her name embroidered on the back in dark pink thread. We went back to the hotel, took our showers, and watched tonight's episode of Agents of SHIELD on TV. The kids didn't want to miss the show, so we had to watch it live since there is no way to record shows here. After the show, we watched the little light show parade they have nightly on the lake then went to sleep. We had a very long but very fun day.

Tomorrow the forecast says rain all day, so we're planning on going to Epcot since it's close and much of what we want to see there is indoors.