A Week in Wet Disney World, Day 1 - Bonnet Creek Resort, Shades of Green, and Hollywood Studios

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted... well, I can't say I haven't been busy. I spent last week on vacation in Florida with my family. We were supposed to spend a couple of days at Disney World, travel to the beach for a day or so, and spend the rest of the time relaxing at the resort. Yeah, that plan didn't last long. Mom and Dad got a great deal on tickets to Disney World - we bought 5 days at the main parks + 5 water park visits for the same price we would normally pay for 1 day at Disney + 1 water park. Wow! And let me tell you, we used all of our visits to the main parks and 2 of our water park visits. It was a long but very fun week. I'm going to blog it in phases because there's so much to tell and so many pics to share.

I guess the first thing I should say is that the weather decided it did NOT want to cooperate with us. Orlando received record rainfall over the week that we were there, 7.84 inches! Holy cow! Most every day started out nice, sometimes even sunny. But most often, by the time we got to the park, it would start clouding up, and the rain would start soon after. We sat out some major storms at the parks, and never did get to see Hollywood Studios' Fantasmic show because it got rained out every time we tried. We had fun regardless of the rain, but I will say that it definitely put a damper on our vacation (pun intended). It's probably a good thing it rained so much, though, because if it was sunny I likely would have ended up with 3x as many pics!

Saturday was a very long day of traveling to Orlando, including a 2-hour delay in DFW resulting in me missing my connection, an extremely rude Delta worker causing me (and several other perturbed passengers) to miss the next flight to Orlando, and me literally running through the Atlanta airport to a different terminal carrying my flipflops to make the third flight. I was worn out by the time my flight arrived close to 10:00 that night.

On Sunday morning Mom and Dad went to a timeshare meeting, so Ben, Papa, and I slept in, relaxed, and wandered around the resort checking the place out. It was nice and sunny that morning, so we had high hopes for a great day weatherwise (little did we know!). The resort is brand new, right on the Disney property, and fabulous - three pools, including a lazy river, game rooms, putt-putt, gorgeous landscaping, and great views of Epcot and the nightly fireworks at the various parks. After Mom and Dad finished their meeting, we headed over to Shades of Green to pick up our fabulously priced Disney tickets and eat lunch. Of course, even for such a simple task, I couldn't leave the camera behind, and Ben and I got our picture taken with a very patriotic Mickey Mouse!With such a gorgeous day, and knowing that the rest of the week was going to be rainy, we decided not to waste time, and to go ahead and hit Hollywood Studios that afternoon. So we arrived at our first Disney park at around 3:00, ready to ride rides and see shows, and of course see Fantasmic. We had an hour or so of good weather, in which Ben, Dad and I rode the Tower of Terror and the Aerosmith Rock'n Roller Coaster (both great rides). It started raining during the Beauty and the Beast show, but we were under cover, so it was okay, and it stopped before the show ended (one of my favorite shows of the week, by the way), so did at least get to see the Indiana Jones stunt show. But around 7:00 the skies opened and the rain settled in for the night. We stayed for a while, hoping it would end and we could see Fantasmic. But we finally realized it was hopeless, so we headed out of the park disappointed but hoping for less rain the next day - yeah right!