January 2010 trip report.

cdub;
No not just the crab. I have had the King Crab legs there, and they are excellent. But I love the atmosphere and have always thought all the food was excellent. This time, I was the only one in the group that even eats seafood. Scrappy does not like sea food, and Del, our friend is allergic to it do to medication. Her husband does not eat it. I had the Prince Edward Island Mussels and Native Florida Littleneck Clams - Sauteed with garlic, shallots, white wine and Fulton's own seafood stock, and then the Fillet of Beef Oscar - charcoal grilled 8 ounce center cut of Angus beef, with blue lump crabmeat, bearnaise sauce, and asparagus. It was delicious. For dessert we all split the Classic Tollhouse Cookie Sundae - Jumbo warm chocolate chip cookie topped with 2 scoops of vanilla bean ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipped cream, served in a warm iron skillet.

Now back our week;

I have to jump to Thursday because I think that was our most exciting day of the trip.

We had decided a while ago to celebrate our friend Del's birthday on Thursday (it was really Saturday, but that was the day we were leaving). We started out by giving her a new " Tink" sweat shirt & a "Tink" Christmas Tree ornament. (she loves Tink)

and we gave her some Disney Dollars, which she had never heard of or seen before, so she could buy something special just for herself.

We then went to the Cape May Cafe for the Character breakfast. We had a blast there with the characters and the staff!

That is Dorothy & Minnie. The were both a riot! Dorothy was our waitress.

After breakfast, we headed to Downtown Disney. I had seen the Flights of Wonder balloon in the air from our balcony in the morning so I knew it was flying and I had told scrappy that I wanted to do it. They all thought I was crazy, but we headed over anyway. Well I cant tell you how "WONDERFUL" it was.

Once I came down and went on and on about how great it was and I would do it again in a minute, I decided to do it again!. Well I don't know what brought it on, but scrappy said she wanted to do it too!, Then Del & Tom both said they would go up too, so before they changed thier minds, I got 4 more tickets and up we all went!

Continuing:

After DTD, we headed to Epcot & the World Showcase. We headed straight to SOARIN' and got a fast pass, did several other rides and walked around some of the World Showcase that we had not done yet and then had dinner at Le Cellier Steakhouse.

To top of the night, after dinner we headed to our Illuminations Cruise and to meet up with Vettelover and his DW. These are two amazing people and it is our pleasure to be able to have met them and to call them our friends.

To top that off, only Vettelover & his DW and only in WDW could they have just happen to have found the gift they brought us.

two personalized pens with our names on them (Mrhub & Scrappy).
Thank you again Vettelover, It was great meeting up with you and your wife.
Maybe we can do it again next Jan and we can ask for Colleen! Ha Ha ha! I think we should show up with life preservers on thought!.

Okay Spaceace, here we go!
Well, we got done dinner at Le Cellier, and I said I wanted to go back to the car for a moment to get my SLR camera and video and and our sweatshirts (which we left in the car intentionally) before we went to find a seat for the fireworks. Now the birthday girl "Del" had no idea that we were doing the cruise, and she had been hinting that she would like to go back to Canada to catch the Celtic Band before the fireworks started. We had parked in the Beach Club Villa parking lot, so we went and got the stuff out of the car and unknowing to Del, headed headed over towards the dock at the Yacht Club to find the boat for our Illuminations Cruise. I mentioned I wanted to see the Yacht Club & wanted to show then the "Kitchen Sink" at Beaches & Cream so we walked towards there. In the mean time I missed a cell call from Vettelover, so I told them my work called and I had to call them back. I snuck off for a minute, called Vettelover and found out him and DW were waiting out by the docks, we told each other what we were wearing so we could find each other, and I told them we would be there shortly.

We were rather early, didn't have to be at the dock till 8pm, and I was trying to burn time so I just started taking photo's of everything.

As we made our way up towards the dock, I spotted VL and his DW sitting on the bench on the board walk. I strolled over, struck up a casual conversation without anyone noticing, and told them we were early and had to blow some time. They were very understanding and said they would play along and slowly follow us as we got closer to the dock. No one else noticed, Del was getting nervous, thinking we should be getting back to the park, but finally 8pm came around and I said I wanted to check one more thing and walked over to the dock building were you get you cruise info and meet your Cruise guide.

I checked in and had to call for scrappy because I thought she had pre paid, well I called her over and thats when we sprung the whole thing on Del. Our Cruise Captain Colleen was there waiting, with a cake and our info. I introduced everyone to VL & his DW, explained how we knew them and Colleen directed us to our boat.





more later, got to get ready for work............

Okay! This is Colleen! She was our tour guide or captain or CM Host, I don't know what you would call her. She is a very nice girl, very polite, informative , had a nice personality and would answer any question she could.

She started out our cruise by taking us down the channel past from Yacht Club dock to DHS. It was a very nice ride and the weather was great.

it was rather difficult to get really good pictures on the boat since it was moving so much, and the "Breathless" kept going by and causing wakes. Anyway, after we went by DHS, we headed back towards the Epcot to set up to see Illuminations. Well, you know the bridges that are all around, the bigger boats blow their horns to let another boat know they are coming through, and we sort of think they blow them a little more when they know Colleen is operating a pontoon boat!. (Just joking around Colleen).

This was a big beach party for Sherwin Williams on the Beach Clubs beach.
So anyway, we get over to the bridge that crosses into France and there is another pontoon boat tied up for the fireworks on the right and the Breathless was tied up to the middle pier under the bridge. Well Colleen goes for the middle and did we get a wake-up call! Boom! We hit the other Pontoon boat and almost take out the Breathless. nobody got hurt, & I don't think there was much if any damage to the other pontoon boat, and the the skipper of the Breathless saw us coming and had this leg out to push us away before we hit. Colleen was a little embarrassed, but we all laughed it off and got ready for the fireworks.

Colleen brought out the cake we had ordered for Del's birthday,

then we watched the fireworks. They were great, you just can't catch the real feeling in pictures.

After the fireworks, Colleen headed us back to the dock were she proceeded to run into it also. We said our good byes to VL and his DW and stood on the dock for about 15 minutes talking and laughing about our adventure and then headed back to SSR after another exhausting day in the parks.

Oh yeah, forgot about all the random people that started singing happy birthday when they saw our boat!

Sorry it took so long for me to respond, works been busy since getting back and I'm working on several computers at home for work & then we got the snow on top of that and they are calling for possibly 1 to 2 more feet!.

dsoup, that was a chocolate cake from the Yacht Club. It was deeeeelicious!

I'll get back to the trip report as soon as I can.

Okay , back to my trip report.
Monday:

Got up and went to the Kona Cafe for breakfast at 8:00. Needed my fix of Kona coffee. We showed our friends around the Poly for a while and jumped on the boat at the Poly dock and headed over to the MK. Short lines and not a lot of people going in. Our Annual passes didn't work going through the gate with the finger scan (only worked a few times all week) but when they scanned them they worked.

Got in just in time to see the Street Party Parade coming out by the Firehouse. We did some window shopping as we walked down main street and headed right for Peter Pans Flight. We didn't get to do this last year with our friends because it was always too busy. Came out of Peter Pan and right into Mickey's PhilharMagic. That's always a must see.

After Peter Pan we walked around and took some pictures, the girls went into "Tinker Bell's Fairy Treasures" and did some shopping while us men were taking pictures and then it was time to head to lunch. Went to Pecos Bill Cafe which was pretty good. The Taco salads where great, build your own! The coffee there didn't taste like the standard Nescafe' either.

After lunch we went into Mickey's "Ye Old Christmas Store". We hit this several times on each trip. Then headed over too the Haunted Mansion. Got our ghostly haunt for the day and then did the "Hall of Presidents" just to do it, just as boring as I remember it. Won't do that for a few more years. I think it was 15 years since I did it last, that's enough!. Headed straight for "Thunder Mountain" to wake us up. That's a ride I could ride all day! We were in the second car but we still got pretty good "air time" on the hill.

Will continue tomorrow!

Sorry its taking me so long to get this done, but my shifts at work have not aloud me much time on the computer when I get done work, and I've been working on some computers for work.

Tuesday:
We woke up to a beautiful sunrise over DTD! After getting our act together we headed over to AK for our 8:30 ADR at the Tusker House for the character breakfast. It's wonderful walking through AK that early in the morning and being able to enjoy stopping to look at everything, with no one else around. It's a totally different experience. Our day started there by being introduced to the infamous "Brazilian tour groups" that Vettelover's DW had mentioned in their trip report. Although the food was rather good at Tusker House, the "tour group" definitely took a lot away from the experience. Imagine 170 teenagers with maybe 3 chaperones. The wait staff tried their best to keep them all seated together, but groups of 2 and 3 teenagers would just go sit at any open table they saw which was driving the wait staff crazy when trying to seat other guests. Also when the characters would come around, rather than waiting for the character to come to their table, they would just all get up and gang around the character were every they were and start taking pictures, blocking the other guests the characters were interacting with. I give the wait staff a lot of credit for handling the whole experience the way they did. We are hoping our next time there better!

After our "relaxing breakfast" we started threw the park. We did "It"s a Bugs Life & Dinosaur", walked through some shops and finally got to "Everest". We got there and it had a 5 minute wait time showing. Del & I got in line and walked straight through with no stopping. We got right off and went right back in line again. Didn't even really get time to stop and look at the exhibits really because the line moved so fast!. After our second ride on Everest we came out to see the wait time of 20 minutes and the infamous "Tour group's" outside. It must have been tour group day in AK! We headed towards the front of the park, hitting the shops on the way and decided to go to DTD.

We stopped at Wolfgang Pucks Express for light bite to eat after getting to DTD. We spent several hours just window shopping and walking around.
About 3:30 we loaded up and ran down to the grocery store to get some bottled water, Pepsi and other necessities and then stopped back at SSR to freshen up and unload everything we had bought.

By 5:00 we headed to the Poly for our 6:00 reservations at Ohana. Dinner was very good which included Pork fried dumplings, Corriander chicken wings, and mixed greens with honey-lime dressing. Skewers: marinated sirloin steak, asian BBQ pork loin, mesquite grilled turkey, and non-peeled shrimp. Also broccoli and green peas and pad Thai noodles with peanut, chimichurri and sweet-and-sour sauces. For dessert: 'Ohana bread pudding a la mode with Banana Foster sauce.

By now we were totally stuffed and took a nice slow leisurely walk around the Poly, a walk to the beach and then headed back to DTD to see Cirque Du Soleil. It was like just a remarkable as the last time we saw it. If you have never seen this show I would recommend trying to the next time you are there. The amount of stuff going on at one time is too hard to explain, but it is a fabulous show. We only see it every couple of years so it is always different.

After the show we headed back to SSR to end another perfect day in the "Happiest Place on Earth"

Here is one of the video's I made about our trip. If your hungry, don't watch, the last part will really make you want disney food!

Thanks Spaceace, that chocolate ball was an "Ice Cream Bomb" at Tony's Town Square. Its filled with chocolate & vanilla ice cream and some sort of thin pound cake on the bottom with an almond cream of some sort all wrapped in dark chocolate. It was goooooooooood!

Thanks Admin, and I warned you Brad!

Admin, we had been at Tony's before and the first time we were not very impressed, that was a number of years ago. We went again last Sept for our aniversary trip and it was really good and the service we got was out of this world, we had two waitresses and they were a blast.

It was just a good this time and I would recommend I Tony's as a definite YES!.