Our Orlando Trip Day 1: Disney's Magic Kingdom

Danny had a conference in Orlando this past week, so we decided to fly out there a few days before his conference started and have a family vacation. We decided to stay at La Quinta because they offered free breakfast and shuttle service to both Disney and Universal (the theme parks that we decided to go to.) It wasn't the nicest of hotels, but we didn't do much more than sleep in the hotel anyways, so it was sufficient for our needs. The shuttle service, however, could use some improvement but I'll save that story for later. Here the girls are waiting for the shuttle in the morning.
The Magic Kingdom only has two ways into the park from where we were. The monorail or the ferryboat. We decided to do the ferry in the morning and take the monorail back at the end of the day(we ended up doing the ferryboat at the end of the day because we were familiar with it and knew that we could walk onto it without folding our stroller up). Here are the girls on the ferry ready for a fun-filled day. (We have been talking about this trip since March so they were pretty excited to finally be at Disney World.)

Out of all the characters in the park, this was the only one that we actually waited in line to get a picture with. We actually tried to get one with the Little Mermaid too, but the line had closed already when we got there. We did the 45 minute wait to meet three princesses at Disneyland last year, so we didn't even give the girls that option. Danny had an app on his phone that gave us the wait times for all of the lines in the park and that one was consistantly 45 minutes or more. The girls do love the Peter Pan movie so they were excited about meeting him.

The first ride we went on was the cars in Tomorrowland. We ended up riding it twice because there was no wait. Here is Ashley driving her car.

The camera stayed in the bag most of the rest of the day as we were busy having fun. I did pull it out once in the afternoon to get a shot of each of the girls on the teacups.

We were inside of the gates when the park opened and got to watch the little street show that they must do at the beginning of every day. We chose to go on a day that the park was open until 9pm for the main street electrical parade followed with fireworks. The girls enjoyed every minute of the day(except the hot minutes where they had to walk). We did bring a stroller from home, but it was only a single stroller so there was always a fight between them about who go to ride. Danny and I usually ended up trading off carrying the other one. The favorite rides of the day were Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, and the Peter Pan Ride(that was Alyssa's). Our only regret of the day was relying on our Hotel shuttle to pick us up. We were at the shuttle stop 20 minutes before pick up time and were told two different times to wait "10 minutes" for the next shuttle. We didn't end up getting on a shuttle until at least an hour after our pick up time (2 1/2 hours after the park had closed). Oh, and did I mention that both girls were asleep before we even got out of the park. Needless to say, we opted to drive our rental car and pay for parking on the next two days at Universal. The $15 was well worth the convenience of leaving the park when we were ready to leave.