Amazingly, Julie and I were both awake before either of the kids. Eventually, Jacqueline came in and found her Little Mermaid playset. When her brother finally joined us, I “found” the DVD under the tree and acted all surprised, wondering what could be on it. I put it in the DVD and pressed play. Here is their reaction: http://youtu.be/DoRASOz3fZ8
Not the wild reaction we were expecting, but you can see in the little girl’s face that she is thrilled. Apparently, my son has inherited my poker face. If you saw my wedding photos, you might never know it was the happiest day of my life, though it truly was. But over time, the reality sunk in that we were going to Disney, and they seemed eager to go. I strongly feel that if there were an unforeseen cancellation and we had to tell them we couldn’t go, THEN we would have seen a reaction from the kids.
I think it really hit Jordan about the time I was explaining about the Magic Bands.
On December 30, with just 2 days to go, we saw weather reports of a possible ice storm hitting the DFW area very early on New Year’s morning. This was when we were planning on making our drive to Love Field. Julie suggested finding a hotel near Love Field and spending the night of the 31st , not only to avoid the possible bad weather, but also to make it less of a rush to get going and only a short drive to the airport. Burleson is about an hour away. The more I thought about this idea, the better it sounded. So that’s what we did. We spent New Year’s Eve doing laundry and packing, then just before supper time, we drove to the Wyndham Love Field.
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The hotel was lovely, and the room was nice and big, but there were no good restaurants nearby. Looking online, Julie discovered GrubHub, a service that provides delivery for restaurants that normally do not offer delivery. Chili’s was on their list, so we ordered from there. We tried to get some sleep that night, but it was hard because of excitement about going to Disney, my allergies, and a noisy, inebriated New Year’s partier in the next room.
Oddly, the Wyndham was replaced by a Doubletree later the same year.
It was the next morning that Julie discovered she had left her driver’s license at home, an hour away with no time to go get it. She called the airport to ask what, if anything, could be done to gain entry without identification. They told her to come on ahead but just expect a thorough shakedown. I of course had to drive to the parking facility, from where we caught a shuttle bus to the airport. We used the self-service stations to check in, print our boarding passes, and tag our luggage. When Julie told the TSA employee that she didn’t have her license, they took her off somewhere else while the rest of us went through the line. She said that they questioned her intensely and went all through her carry-on bag, even confiscating some of her toiletries. The bitter irony, however, is that it took the rest of us even longer to get through the security line via standard procedure! Later, we called and asked my parents to get Julie’s license and mail it to our resort, which they did.
At length, we finally got on the plane. We were going to leave behind us some icy weather which was fortunately not bad enough to delay our flight in any way. Because the plane was full, we had to split up into pairs. Jordan sat with mom, and Jacqueline sat with me. She was very quiet during this, her first flight. She wasn’t scared or feeling ill; she was just taking it all in like a sponge.
Upon landing, we entered one of the airside terminals of MCO. I located the monorail, explaining that it will not take us all the way to Disney. It is a short ride to the main terminal, where we crossed over to side B and followed the signs to the Disney Magical Express station. There were a couple of CMs there wearing oversized Mickey waving gloves. I was already wearing my magic band, so I scanned us in at two different stations. A short wait later, we were aboard the DME bus. They have TV monitors that play videos of the parks and offer helpful advice, some of which was given by a hostess who introduced herself as Carissa. I silently told myself that Carissa was explaining it all. Even if anyone would have remembered the old Nickelodeon show to which my joke was referring, they probably wouldn’t have laughed. While waiting for the bus to get moving, I surfed the web on my phone, taking advantage of MCO’s free Wifi, which was still accessible.
The bus stopped at Port Orleans French Quarter first. Only a couple of people got off. Next was our resort, Port Orleans Riverside. As we stepped off the bus, we were just starting to cope with the fact that we were finally here, after all the planning and anticipation, when we ran into something entirely unexpected. Two CMs, one of whom was Wade (from New Zealand, according to his name tag,) were holding balloons and a sign saying, “Welcome Schriver family!” There were other families getting off the bus, but only one sign with a name on it being held by CMs – ours! Smiling, I approached the CMs and asked if they somehow knew we were coming. Wade asked me to confirm that we were in fact the Schrivers, then proceeded to inform us that we were chosen as the Royal Family of the Day! One of them handed the balloons to Jacqueline. We each got a 1st Visit button. They also got our picture in front of the Christmas tree which was still standing in the lobby.
