How Many Days In A Row Will We Wear Tie Dye (or Disney 2009 review): Part 12featured

Last part! Woo hoo! Yeah, I know. This review took SIX FLIPPING MONTHS to finish. I’m really sorry LOL. I really intended to finish this two weeks ago, but our plans took a massive curve and…well…if you plan on reading my next review, it’ll all be explained there.

Anyways, thank you SO much for reading (and for the comments, too :o)) and I hope it was helpful to someone somewhere! I’m going to start the next review this weekend while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Onto the review!

It’s an odd juxtaposition of emotions when you wake up on the last morning of a trip. On one hand, there’s sadness that the trip is over, disappointment for things you wanted to do and didn’t (and there were MANY on this trip), but on the other, there’s some relief in going home and getting back to life as usual. And for me, getting home meant getting some REST. I swear, I’d never experienced such fatigue at the end of a vacation. There’s something about Disney that inherently makes you want to just go-go-go. And I did. And by the end of the trip, I wanted to go-go-go straight to my big, comfy bed at home and hibernate for a month.

So while I was sad to leave Disney World the morning we left, I was very much ready to get out of the Disney bubble, get home and finally get some sleep. Oddly enough, the morning we left was the morning we actually slept in a bit. I woke up around the time the room service Mom had ordered the night before arrived (8:30 am-ish).

Since grandma (and Mom to a much lesser degree) had trouble with the heat, she ended up eating a lot of her meals at counter service places or in the room and we ended up with a surplus of credits. We had enough credits at the end of our stay to order a nice, hearty room service breakfast to fuel us up for the long drive home. Stephanie and I both had the Monorail Express breakfast, which was a plate of regular breakfast fare (eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes and a biscuit), and I had cranberry juice and milk and Stephanie ordered an orange juice and a diet coke (because breakfasts come with two drinks). Grandma ordered the florentine omelette with wheat toast and a cranberry juice and an apple juice , and Mom ordered a fruit plate with strawberry yogurt and had cranberry juice and an iced tea.

Monorail Express

Florentine Omelette

Fruit Plate

The total came to $89.58 and we used our remaining eight credits. The food was good on the overall (certainly better than the food down at Chef Mickey’s) and was served nice and hot (except for Mom’s fruit and yogurt, which came nice and cool). The fruit was fresh and varied in selection, which was nice. I thought the biscuit with my breakfast may as well have been a hockey puck, though, since it was so hard and dry.

We weren’t in much of a hurry after breakfast so I went around a bit taking pictures while everyone else got themselves ready.

While I was getting every possible picture that I didn’t already get, Stephanie had gone and done some shopping at the Contemporary and redeemed the last of our snack credits on some pecan turtles and other confectionaries from BVG. It wasn’t long before Mom was calling bell services and a porter was carting our luggage away to the car. We bid adieu to our home for the past week and after we loaded up the car, Stephanie popped in the new CD she bought and we drove away to the ending theme of the Mickey Mouse Club (I kid you not…you could have made a movie of us driving away to the ending march, as Magic Kingdom got smaller and smaller in the rearview window).

We hit rain while we were still in Florida, and the rain continued for most of Georgia. With nothing much to stare at but wet pavement, we were left to reflect on our week. About how much we loved the BLT and how we doubt we could ever stay anywhere else if we’re staying for more than a few days. About how the deluxe dining plan was entirely too much food and how we failed to maximize it again (as we had the last time), but how much we enjoyed getting to try so many different things. About how flipping hot it had been (hotter than I can remember it being in August). About how we wished we had rode Soarin’ more or gotten on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and how while we wished we could have stayed to see fireworks once that week at any park, it was so nice to be able to see Illuminations from our room and experience Wishes from the bridge and not have to deal with the crowds. About how stupid it was of me to forget my gym shoes AND my swim suit (a mistake I vow to NEVER make again).

It was a long ride to Atlanta…about eight hours (it took us more than nine). We stopped somewhere after the Florida/Georgia border for a quick bite at a Checkers (because we used to have one by us when we were little and it folded while we were still little and Stephanie had fond memories), but the food was kind of gross so I held off for the peach farm. We hit Lane’s Packing Company in the late afternoon and we grabbed some produce, some homemade peach ice cream (for everyone else…I had strawberry…yum!), some hot candied walnuts and a grilled cheese for me. I almost always get a grilled cheese on the drive home when we stop at Lane’s. Why? Because after a week of heavy fare (some of which was fairly gourmet), nothing tastes better than the most plain thing on earth: two slices of Kraft cheese melted into two slices of Wonder bread, a pickle spear and a bag of Lay’s.

We finally made it to the JW Marriott in Buckhead around 7:00 pm. I booked the room off Hotwire for around $100. The hotel was okay. I mean, the public areas were very formal, elegant and beautiful, but the rooms were small and the beds were TINY and uncomfortable. And Mom thought the room smelled musty and old. We much prefer the Intercontinental or the Westin.

We rested in the room for awhile before we started getting hungry for dinner. Too tired to get dressed up to go out to dinner, we instead ordered carryout from the Maggianos down the street. Mom and grandma stayed in the room and rested and Stephanie and I stopped at the Target and Publix to grab snacks and drinks for the drive the next day before getting the food at Maggianos (and on a side note, we go to the Maggianos in Buckhead nearly every time we’re in Atlanta and the parking situation is HORRENDOUS. There’s just not enough parking, the lot is tiny and the valet is often very backed up). We ordered the Maggiano’s salad (a family favorite), chicken piccata, penne with meat sauce and some lemon cookies and the carryout staff included flatware and plates for us to take back to the hotel.

We ate and watched some TV before we finally crashed for the night. It wasn’t a restful night for me because the bed was TINY and Stephanie and I were fighting for space. I’d push her over, she’d get close to me and breathe in my ear to annoy me, she’d push me over, I’d grab more of the blanket. It went on all night LOL.

And when we woke up the next morning? Stephanie and I were cranky and exhausted from our bed battle and Mom felt sick to her stomach. She didn’t actually get sick, she just felt sick. She was contemplating extending our stay in Atlanta, but we all just really wanted to get home and we soldiered on. Mom continued to feel really sick until well after we stopped for a quick breakfast at McDonalds a few hours later and she was feeling much better by the time we were entering Tennessee.

We made a quick stop at our usual place (the Pelham Stuckey’s) for some pecan logs and Vitamin Waters before getting back on the road so we could get home as quickly as possible.

It’s a really fast drive through Tennessee and Kentucky, which almost makes it seem like the drive is shorter than it is. I mean, it doesn’t seem like it would take all that long to get through Indiana, but it ALWAYS does. Hours upon hours of NOTHINGNESS. There is NOTHING to look at while driving through Indiana. There are no rest stops (certainly not any nice ones like they had in Ohio when we went to NYC last May). There’s cornfields. There’s gas stations. There’s the open road. As we got closer and closer to the Indiana/Illinois border, I *really* had to go to the bathroom. I had, like, at least three bottles of Vitamin Water in me…and we were stuck in this:

And then it started to just DOWNPOUR. Traffic, construction, torrential rain…and I *really* had to pee. I was going to burst when we finally got to the exit ramp and made our way to this gas station with a really large (and pretty clean) rest stop. And when we left? The rain had stopped and a rainbow came out. And this might be, quite possibly, the only nice thing I’ve ever seen driving through Indiana 😉

Not long after, we were finally at the border and heading into Chicago. It was a super long drive and we were exhausted by the time we got home. We got grandma settled into her room, unloaded the luggage, cleaned the car a bit (because we did two 20-hour drives in it and while they’ll clean the car at the rental agency, we didn’t want to make their jobs any harder. Whatever mess was there was ours and so we tidied up what we could) and returned it to O’Hare. It was late so we ended up at the Cheesecake Factory for some dinner and cheesecake (yummy yummy red velvet cheesecake!) and so ended our Disney trip 🙂

And….FIN! Took me long enough, huh? If anyone has any questions, I’ll do my best to answer! If not…onto the next review!