Crowd Control
Well, DD#1's ninth birthday was coming up, and she has been getting into Star Wars, especially with The Clone Wars having come out. So I had this thought - what about as a birthday present I took her down for just a weekend for one of the Star Wars Weekends? Of course I had to pass it by DW, as we really couldn't afford a full family trip again so soon - the plane tickets for the last trip were expensive, and the final bill was horrendous...but I could get a little more mileage out of my AP and Tables In Wonderland card, and only had to secretly upgrade DD#1's MYW ticket to an AP on the April trip.Crowd Control
I called and asked what room rates were available for June 5th-7th. I have never received any sort of PIN codes, AP rates weren't out yet and generally didn't include weekends, and I didn't want to use any more points (saving for 2010). The CM asked if I had any discount code, and I said no but I was a DVC member/AP holder/etc., so if there were any discounts for that I'd like to hear them - especially since we were looking to go cheap. He "found" a 40% code that worked, and we got Pop Century (which we have never stayed at before) for $75/night.
We totally surprised DD#1 on her birthday. We "told" her by giving her a custom made T-shirt (thanks to the kind folks at the Creative DISigns forum on the DISboards - we got many good comments about the shirts - including from Lou Mongello of WDW Radio and even from a Cast Member asking "Did we design that?") that said "Star Wars Weekends With My Daddy". It was so unexpected she wasn't sure what to make of it for a bit...
Of course it killed us not to spill the beans ahead of time...
If you are going to a Star Wars Weekend, you best do a little homework on what is going on, and how you should do each thing you want to do. For instance, for the guest stars of the weekend, if you want their autograph, you need to get a Fastpass first thing in the morning - and people line up REALLY early for that. Someone told me that they had lined up at 10pm the night before for David Prowse and Jeremy Bulloch! We didn't plan on those autographs so we weren't too concerned with it. But we wanted to see all the shows, and get pics/autographs with the characters at least.
Best part of the travel this time - no checked bags! I won't have to deal with the chaos of checked bags, overweight bags, etc. at Orlando (the only thing I really don't like about MCO - that and the JetBlue area is FAR TOO SMALL to deal with it). I was able to do online check-in for the flight down as well, so we could head straight to the gate. We left at 6am, even though our flight was at 9:35am - wait too long and traffic into Boston on a Friday can be horrible. Even though there was a bit of a snag in traffic for some reason, we got there in plenty of time. Had I known, we could have made the 8:15am flight, but we didn't want to be in a rush. Grabbed a bit of breakfast from Burger King - they have these sort of breakfast "sliders" - little breakfast sandwiches in little hamburger buns, two or four to a pack. I asked for the ones with bacon...wait...wait...got them, sat down and opened them to see they were sausage instead. I brought them back to the counter, and said that I asked for the bacon ones, and I looked at the receipt, which seemed to refer to something completely different that had both bacon and sausage. I pointed that out on the receipt, and the person looked at me puzzled, and then said she'd ask the manager. They actually seemed to have a little conference for a time, and then she came back to me and said that they couldn't put more than one meat on them!!! I wasn't asking for more meat, I was asking for what I ordered! She then got the idea, and got me the right order.
Eventually we head to the gate for our flight, with the plane waiting for us - "Blues Brothers" was the name on it. There was a bit of rain moving in, so they got us boarded quickly and even took off a few minutes early. The flight was uneventful and we got in early, although we had to wait 10-15 minutes for our gate to clear because of it.Chewie on a stroll in DHS
No bags to pick up, so we headed straight to the Alamo rental counter. I went with Alamo this time because Payless, who we rented from several times now, did not have rates posted - unless the rates really were $500/day for all car classes, plus we had several coupon codes for Alamo and figured out which ones worked for us. The bonus is that the cars are right at the airport, in the garage, and we could go right out to the south exit and take route 417 straight to Disney, which would take us closer to where POP was. I didn't realize that it is actually a shorter trip as well, although the tolls are double from the Beach Line road.
For the car I went Economy class, since it was just two of us with carry-ons. They confirmed that a "Chevrolet Aveo or similar" was enough (trying to upsell), which it was. With Alamo, they tell you where the cars are, and you just pick from what is in that class. There were no Aveos, but there were a bunch of Toyota Yarises, so we took a nice grey one. It is definitely an economy car - nothing special about it, but no issues either - except the trunk didn't like to close on the first try, instead it would just bounce right back up. And the instrument panel is in the center of the console, and I decided I really didn't like that as I'd have to look down and to the right to check my speed, etc. I also hit my head several times as I couldn't figure out a way to lower the seat.
