Buckle down because this is a long one. As some of you may know, I spent the last week in the Happiest Place on Earth, Walt Disney World. My friend Victoria, who I met on a Disney Cruise 3 years ago, and I stayed at Disney’s All Star Music Resort in the Broadway section. This was Victoria’s first trip to Disney World in 10 years so the pressure was on to make it super extra magical. Instead of giving a play by play of the entire week, I have decided to just give an overview of each of the following topics: hotel, food, weather, crowds, free time, cast members, and Toy Story Land.

Hotel
As I already stated, we stayed at All Star Music. This was not our first choice, however. We were originally staying at Pop Century but that reservation was only for Sunday-Wednesday. When we told our TA that we wanted to add additional days, the best thing to do was stay at a different resort for the entire week, so AS Music it was.

We had several issues during check in, but once everything was taken care of, the cast member gave us 3 additional fastpasses for a park and day of our choice. Considering we weren’t really bothered by the extra time it took to check in, it was remarkable to be given something to make up for it.

Now onto our room. Yikes. First off, the broadway section of the resort is almost as far away from the main building as you can get. This was very inconvenient because we wanted to get our money’s worth on our resort mugs, but it was an 8 minute walk each way just to fill up a cup. Next, our room smelled funny, musty, almost like wet towels had been left and mold had began to grow. With that being said, we did opt out of house keeping at check in, but the smell was there when we arrived, so it wasn’t from us. Last negative, the drain in our shower was clogged. By just taking a quick 5 minute shower, it turned into more of a bath than a shower. By Tuesday we had had enough and finally went to the front desk to ask it to be fixed. The next morning, maintenance came in and fixed it good as new.

With all of the negatives out of the way, let’s move on to the positives. We are 2 fresh high school graduates about to enter our first year of college. This was the perfect resort for our budget. There weren’t any issue with our neighbors or any of the cast members. The pool was great on the days we were able to take advantage of it. There were plenty of resort activities to keep us busy on our “no park” days. Lots of amenities you wouldn’t find at an ordinary hotel.

 

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake a la mode at 50’s Prime Time Cafe in Disney’s Hollywood Studios

Food
Oh my. I had an entire week of amazing, delicious food. Whether it was breakfast, lunch dinner, quick service, table service, food cart, it was all great. Except when it wasn’t.
The only negative food experience I had throughout the entire week was at ESPN Zone at Disney’s Boardwalk Resort. Tori and I arrived around 8 and ordered almost immediately. At about 8:30, our food was brought out, but mine was wrong. I noticed right away but our waiter was already gone. I waited and waited and waited for him to come back to check on us. Eventually I had to get his attention as he just continued to walk by. I told him what I ordered and all he said was

Chocolate Cream and Crunch at Morimoto Asia in Disney Springs

“yeah” so i pointed out the fact that what I received was not that and THEN he realized and took it back so the mistake could be corrected. My burger was not brought out until 9, an hour after we ordered. Thankfully, though, my food was “on Mickey” so that was nice.

Other than this one meal, we had an all around wonderful experience with food at WDW.
Magic Kingdom: Pinocchio’s Village Haus, Casey’s Corner, Tony’s Town Square, and Main Street Bakery
Animal Kingdom: Tusker House (weird but DELICIOUS food), Satu’li Canteen, and Creature Comforts

Hollywood Studios: Trolly Car Cafe, 50s Prime Time Cafe, Hollywood Brown Derby, Woody’s Lunchbox
Epcot: Choza de Margarita, Joy of Tea, Sommerfest, and Yorkshire County Fish Shop
Disney Springs: Paradiso 37, and Morimoto Asia
If you have any questions about any of these restaurants, feel free to leave a comment below or email me!

Weather
We had some beautiful weather and some very ugly weather. If you’ve been to Orlando, you know it can go from beautiful sunny skies to torrential downpour in 0.2 seconds. Well that happened on a few occasions.

Radar for central Florida on Friday June 29th

Sunday at Magic Kingdom, causing our Seven Dwarfs fastpass to become useless. This also happened Tuesday in Epcot RIGHT after we got henna. We were stuck in the Japan gift shop for a good half hour. It rained ALL DAY on Friday. Then it stormed again on Saturday during the Toy Story Land opening, causing Slinky Dog to shut down on it’s first day of operation.

Other than these few occasional showers, we had wonderful weather, sunny skies and of course ALL the humidity. But we made it through. If you have little ones, I definitely recommend taking a mid-day break at your resort to relax and stay cool. It gets very hot during the summer and can cause irritability, meltdowns, even heat stroke. Always remember to stay hydrated as well. You can walk up to any quick service location and get free water.

Crowds
This was the first time I’ve been to the parks during the summer in a few years, and now I remember why. The crowds are pretty insane. If you want to ride rides without fastpasses, expect to wait in lines over an hour for almost every ride. Don’t expect to get much done. To avoid this, we booked our fastpasses for late morning/early afternoon so that we could make additional fastpasses and get on more rides without waits. We also took advantage of late nights and extra magic hours. At Magic Kingdom, the fireworks are over at 9:30, and then most people leave. This is when we really got to riding things. The lines are so much shorter at night and it’s not as hot either. The most crowded day, as predicted, was Saturday at Hollywood Studios. It was the grand opening of Toy Story Land so we knew it would be crowded. The line just to enter the land was 3 hours long. Slinky Dog’s line was 4 1/2 hours and Aliens was 2 hours. Even Voyage of the Little Mermaid had a stand by wait, which never happens. Although it was way more crowded than I’m used to, we still made the best of it. I’m pretty sure throughout our week, we rode everything we wanted to and even did some multiple times. Don’t let the crowds get you down, just make sure you plan accordingly to make the most of it.

Free Time
We gave ourselves two days that we didn’t plan ANYTHING. We just went with the flow on these days to relax. Both days we took advantage of the plan-free day and slept in.

One day we went to the Calypso pool at our resort. Then, we did Mickey Tie-Dye with the resort activities coordinators. It was cheap and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, my tie dyed socks did not turn out at all. Victoria chose to do a shirt instead and hers did turn out, although the colors look pretty faded. After tie dye, we cleaned up and headed to Disney’s Boardwalk Resort to check it out and get some dinner. It took us an hour to get there, though, because the boats from Hollywood Studios to the resorts in the area were not running at the time. Boardwalk is an adorable resort and we hope to stay there for the 50th anniversary of Magic Kingdom in 2021. We had fun walking around the boardwalk and checking out the shops and games. We ate at ESPN Zone (see food section for horrible review) and Ample Hills Creamery, which was amazing as always. After our ice cream, we headed to Disney Springs for some shopping and nightlife. There isn’t much available for people under 21 after dark, but there was a dance party between Boathouse and Paradiso 37 that was pretty fun, highly recommend. We were there until after 1.

The next day we rode the bus to Magic Kingdom and explored the MK area resorts. I have done this several times and spent a lot of times in these resorts, so I was able to show Victoria around. My favorite is the Polynesian Village Resort while hers is the Grand Floridian. We headed back to All Star Music to get ready for dinner then hopped on a bus to the Springs. We made a last minute reservation at Morimoto Asia. It was amazing, hands down the best meal I had all week. After dinner we went back to the dance party we hung out at the previous night.

Cast Members

Tiana wanted to know every detail about the cute waiter we had at dinner

Throughout our week at Walt Disney World, we met some AMAZING cast members. I wish I remembered all of their names because they were great. Tori and I both love taking the time to have real conversations with them and when you do that, they notice. They see that you’re treating them like real people and it can really make their day.

We talked to a couple wonderful gals at Animal Kingdom at the gift shop right by the safari. We were there talking to them for a good half hour AT LEAST. We talked about college, Greys Anatomy, the possibility of doing the Disney College Program, among other things. If you ever have free time within the parks, but not enough time to actually do something, find a bored cast member and strike up a conversation. You never know how much it could impact their day and yours as well.

Toy Story Land
We arrived at Hollywood Studios at the scheduled opening time on June 30th, however it had opened 2 hours early unannounced. The line for Toy Story Land was already 3 hours long and Slinky Dog Dash’s line was 4 1/2 hours. We didn’t even try yet. We entered the land around 1 with a fastpass for Toy Story Mania. We headed out of the land after our fastpass because it was pouring. We went back later that night when we could just walk right in and it wasn’t raining so we could actually enjoy it. The theming throughout the land is incredible. The imagineers went above and beyond paying attention to even the tiniest of details. All of the signs are pieces of paper that Andy wrote on and taped to objects like pencils and toothpicks. Christmas string lights illuminate the land at night. Tinker toy and Kinex towers are scattered throughout. There is so much attention to detail, you could spend hours, maybe days, looking at it all and still find new things. In my opinion, Toy Story Land is the most detail intense land Disney has ever created, and it was well worth the wait.

Overall, we had a wonderful time. In an ideal world, we would not have gone during June, since the weather is so unpredictable and it is so crowded. We also would stay at a different resort if we had the chance to redo this. We loved almost all of our food so few complaints there. The cast members were amazing. We had plenty of activities to do in our free time, so we were never bored. It was a great, magical week.

If you liked this trip report/review, let me know in the comments below! I love hearing from y’all!! Thank you for reading!