Disney World Trip Report

My family vacation to Disney World can be summed up pretty much exactly the same way as my Ironman Lake Placid 2008 race report:

It rained. A lot. The end.

Ok, surely there was more to it than that. But that was the gist. Now for the long-winded version:

We had a direct flight to Orlando at 7:40 on Saturday morning. Living 10 minutes from the airport makes this kind of thing pretty easy. The flight was less than 3 hours and we actually landed early. Since we were staying at a Disney resort we took advantage of what they call Disney's Magical Express. They could've just called it Disney's airport shuttle or something, but no, it needed to be "magical". I'll tell you though, waiting in that ridiculously long line while bus after bus got filled up was anything but magical. That's my least favorite part of traveling, when you're there but you're not really there because you still have to get to the hotel and check in and everything.

We checked into the Yacht Club where we would be spending the week. My older sister, her husband, my niece and nephew had one room, my younger brother and I shared another and my parents were in the third. We had a quick lunch by the hotel pool and headed over to Disney's Hollywood Studios, formerly MGM, for a few quick rides since it was only about 2:00 in the afternoon at that point. That's my favorite park, and we easily got on Tower of Terror and the Aerosmith roller coaster.

The great thing about Disney is the free transportation which makes it easy for everyone in a relatively large group to do their own thing. So when my niece and nephew had had enough, my sister could take them back to the hotel and we could stay and continue our afternoon of fun. So after a few more hours, my brother and I, the last two remaining, made it back to the hotel. Now, the thing I suppose is "magical" about that Disney's magical express is that your luggage magically appears in your hotel room and you don't have to go and get it. Except in this case, once again, "magically" my bike was not among the items delivered. Seriously? Again? I knew that whole magical thing seemed like a bad idea, but my mom is usually the paranoid one about the bike getting where it's supposed to go, and she didn't seem concerned.

Needless to say, this was far less stressful given that I did not have a race to do the next day, and here on the mainland there are people who will do whatever they can to fix things like that for you. In fact, my mother had been talking to a guy at the hotel who assumed I was doing the Disney 70.3 which happened to be the next day, and mom decided that she should tell him I was, in fact, racing so that maybe we could find it quicker. That I did not like so much. I hate lying. For starters, I'm terrible at it on the rare occasion I try it. And second, there is nothing worse than getting caught in a lie. And in this case, we were talking to someone who worked in a hotel we were going to be staying at for the next week and who would at least on occasion be visible in the lobby. What are the chances do you suppose that sometime over the following 7 days I'd run into him and get the inevitable, "how did the race go?"

Anyway, I tried not to think about it too much and had dinner with the family and then picked up a couple of snacks for before what was supposed to be a 6-hour bike ride the next morning. I figured if the bike was going to show up, I should be prepared, although at that point I was convinced it had been stolen from the airport. I was down in the lobby picking up a 24-hour access card to the hotel gym in case I needed to get VERY well-acquainted with the stationary bike, when I ran into the guy who had been frantically trying to find my bike so that I could "race." Apparently it was just sitting at another hotel, and it had made it back to my room. Phew! Another crisis averted! However, I am extraordinarily happy to know that this is the last time my bike has to get on an airplane for at least the next 6 months. This was 9pm, and I still had to put it together to be ready to ride. Wake-up time for Sunday morning? 3:30am. Ouch.

Before I left I had done some research on where to ride in Florida. I printed out some maps and even considered riding the official 70.3 course since the race just happened to be that day. I got some lights since I knew I'd be riding a lot in the dark (the sun doesn't come up down there until about 6:30, where at home it is more like 5:15) I didn't have a set plan when I got on my bike at 3:45am that morning because I had been too distracted the night before about whether or not I'd even have a bike to ride. So I kind of just started riding. At first I went out some road towards the Magic Kingdom, but of course the morning of a local 70.3 race is the only morning you're ever going to hit traffic at 4am, as all of the racers were headed in that general direction. The good thing was that the streets were well-lit, so my little lights and headlamp served much more as a way for people to see me rather than a way for me to see where I was going.

That road seemed to dead-end so I headed back towards where my hotel was. A little more investigating and I discovered there was a nice little loop right around where my hotel was that only involved 2 hard right-hand turns and was very low-traffic with the exception of one very small stretch of main road. It was well-lit, it even had 2 "hills" in the form of one overpass and one tunnel. The downside? It was about 2.4 miles. I thought about it for a bit. I could either go off and try to find some route to ride and possibly get lost, fight what would likely be a lot more traffic, but maybe ride some different roads. Or I could ride around in circles, knowing that if something happened I could always walk back to the hotel, which was important given that we hadn't rented a car and I had no idea what I'd do if I found myself 40 miles away and had nobody to call to come get me. I couldn't get lost. I could see everything. I had an easy bathroom/water stop. Given the fact that it was going to be dark most of the ride, I wasn't going to lose out on any scenery. And I've been through central Florida, so I know that there is not much to see besides Waffle Houses and Red Lobster. So the decision was made. I was going to ride in a circle about 45 times. Yahoo.

There is a surprising number of people heading to work at Disney between 4 and 5am. I passed many of them crossing the street from the employee parking lot. Other than that, at that time of the morning there wasn't much to see. The Epcot ball around the corner, the Tower of Terror glowing in blue for the night, the Eiffel Tower in "France". At about 7am I took my water stop, or went back to the hotel room. The family was going to go to the Magic Kingdom that morning for a few rides and then some princess lunch for my niece. My father was not attending said princess lunch (somehow my brother still had to go) and instead would come back to meet me for lunch after my ride and run. It was nice to ditch the lights and reflective vest, and off I went for the rest of the ride. The traffic increased quite a bit and the buses were out in full-force, but somehow before I knew it, the ride was actually over. I had finally finished riding around in circles. I didn't figure out until late in the ride that the loop only took me about 7 minutes to complete each time. It's not something I'd like to do forever, but for a week of knowing I'd be safe and not have to worry about anything, I dealt with it. But I still had to run.

It was awfully hot at that point, even starting at about 10am. And of course the humidity was no help. I felt surprisingly good. The running was better than the biking. The hotel is in between Epcot and Hollywood Studios, and there is a boardwalk and some paths connecting everything along the "river" so I got to run all along there. Again this required multiple loops, but we're talking maybe 3 and not 45, so it was much more tolerable. I finished up my 7-hour workout at 11am. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you get up early enough. Again, I definitely wouldn't make a habit of it, but I wanted to get everything done as early as possible since we only had a week down there and I wanted to get in as much Disney fun as possible. Riding around in circles at 3:45am is not the craziest thing I've heard of, by far. My teammate Mark rides his trainer at like 2am to be done by 8. THAT is crazy. At least I was outside!

I had lunch on the boardwalk with my dad and we walked over to Epcot to do a few rides over there. After a few hours in the park I was making my way back when I heard the thunder in the distance. This was the beginning of what the rest of the week would be like. Rain, rain and more rain. Although we had lunch outside in the sun, that was the last we'd see of it literally for the entire week. It was incredible, and not in a good way. Although somehow I managed to escape the rain for almost all of my workouts. I got up at about 3:45 every morning and except for the first 7-hour day, and a 2-hour reprieve on Tuesday, each training day was 4 or so hours, and I got it all done without getting rained on. I don't know how that worked out. Tuesday, the easy day, was the only morning it was raining that early, so I did my hour-long easy ride on the stationary bike in the gym, and conveniently did my swim in the hotel pool where it doesn't really matter if it's raining since you still get just as wet.

Each day was a rain waiting game. On Monday we made it until about 11am before it started torrentially downpouring, which offered up the perfect opportunity to go around the corner to the INDOOR Muppetvision 3D. My mom, still being a mom, had packed ponchos for all of us before we even left New Hampshire. I just never realized that I'd be wearing it almost all day every day. It was just a sea of ponchos. Unfortunately, this does not help your feet. Of course an old pair of running shoes seemed like the perfect footwear to get through several miles of theme park walking every day after my workouts. Not so perfect when it is pouring every day. So, maybe the flip-flops. These work great... for a while. Then they just start rubbing in all the wrong places. My brother had resorted to carrying his around much of the time due to some truly incredible blisters. But his sneakers were soaked. None of us realized in our packing that we'd need so many pairs of shoes, or at least two changes of clothes for each day, or as my brother pointed out on the second day, 14 pairs of underwear. This is supposed to be a simple vacation with minimal packing. And considering the dampness in the air, nothing would dry when you hung it out.

Early in the week though, we thought we had some hope given the forecast. Like I said, on Tuesday it rained all day. Never hard, but just constant. We had gone to Animal Kingdom to fight no crowds and walk on all kinds of rides. After lunch everyone had left but me and my brother, who wanted to go on Expedition Everest and a few other things. We hadn't done the river rapids ride and figured that we couldn't possibly get any more wet than we already were. Oh wow, were we ever wrong about that. So very, very wrong. I'd been on that ride before on another trip and probably not gotten any more wet than I would on say, Splash Mountain. You know, a few soaked through spots on your t-shirt, maybe a bit on your shorts, but not much more than that. Well, a bit more than halfway through the ride the circular raft goes down a big hill and splashes down at the bottom. My brother and I were sitting with our backs to the edge of the boat that hit the bottom first, and a tidal wave came up over our heads and made us feel as though we might as well have gone swimming in our clothes. Heck, I had my poncho on and I still got drenched as water snuck its way under my collar and soaked my shorts and sneakers. Johnny, my brother, was wearing a rain jacket and just wound up with completely soaked through shorts. Although we had plans to do a few other things before heading back to the hotel, we decided that that would be the end of our visit to Animal Kingdom for the day, and we were off for hot showers and dry underwear.

The 3:45 wake-up calls continued and I somehow made it through all of my workouts, riding around in lots of circles on my little route. It certainly could've been worse, because all I really needed to do was get my rides in, even if it was on the same, short stretch of road over and over again. And it was nice to be done my training for the day usually by 8am. Again, not something I'd want to do all of the time, but I was only in Disney for a week. On Wednesday the rain actually held out for a while. It almost got sunny there in the middle of the day, if only for a brief time. My sister took the kids back to the hotel to get in some pool time since my niece loves to swim, and I think they made it in the water for about 10 minutes before they closed the pool due to an approaching thunderstorm. I was having lunch in Mexico (or Epcot's version) with my brother and my parents, and we heard the thunder approaching for a good 30 minutes before it actually started storming, thankfully just after we found our way back to the hotel, conveniently within walking distance of where we were. That was some torrential rain, and it sucked up the rest of the afternoon. Actually, later that night my sister and I walked back over to Epcot so she could do one ride without the kids, and it was absurd how hard it was raining and how deserted everything looked through our umbrella.

On Thursday the rain held off the longest. Again the sun came very close to coming out. I was still wearing the same sweatshirt I had to wear every day while I was there. I wasn't even going to have one with me, but I figured the plane would be cold. I didn't anticipate needing it every single day we were down there because it was unseasonably cold. Not only was it unseasonably cold, but we actually got to be there for record-setting rainfall. I am not sure of the exact total (in the Orlando area I think I saw it was at least 15", although over by the coast they got as much as 28"!) We're talking more rain in a week than they've had since they started keeping records, which also means more than any hurricane. Aren't we lucky? We haven't gone on a family vacation like that in 13 years and that's what happened.

That day I met up with one of my friends from college, Heather, and her husband, son and parents. Her husband works at ESPN (Heather did too, before she became a stay-at-home mom) so they get into the parks for free. Also, they knew someone over at Hollywood Studios who could get us some priority seating for the Fantasmic show that night. Apparently this is something you normally have to line up for hours in advance, so this was a good deal. I'd never seen the show and had no intention of battling crowds and staying up late for it, but given the circumstances, I decided to go for it. It hadn't rained all day, by some miracle. And at 8:00 that night we went over to meet Heather and her family for a 9:00 show. And guess what happened? It started raining. I had been carrying my poncho around all day long only to not use it, and had looked at the radar online and seen no approaching rain and decided not to bother bringing it. Well, there was a mistake. I learned towards the end of the week that whenever they said it was going to rain a lot either on the internet or the local news, it didn't. And whenever they said it was going to let up, it would rain even harder. So we sat in the rain for an hour or so, hearing the announcement that they show could possibly be canceled due to inclement weather as the rain kept coming down harder. Then it was delayed for about 10 minutes, but thankfully it finally did start and we got to see it. Had I spent the night sitting there in the rain for nothing I would not have been happy. It was a good show though, I'd recommend it. Just don't try and bring an umbrella because they don't let you use those in there.

Somehow I made it through my last 3:45 wake-up call on Friday. I was even finished with my swim, bike and run workouts in time to go out to breakfast with my parents and have myself a nice roasted vegetable omelet. It also marked the last time I'd have to ride in circles and adorned like a Christmas tree. Also on that morning while out on my run I got an up close and personal view of some hard-core Star Wars geeks. Apparently Memorial Day weekend, as was approaching, marked the beginning of the Star Wars weekends at Hollywood Studios. The entrance gate over there was the end of an out-and-back portion of my run route. And that morning at about 5:30 I came across quite a few of them all lined up and ready to go in for whatever festivities occur during a Star Wars weekend. I was over there myself a bit later and am unsure as to what exactly required them being lined up outside the gate at that hour of the morning. I went in just after the park opened and I didn't have to wait in any lines and still got to see the Stormtroopers guarding the entrance. I guess I could've gotten to meet Wicket the Ewok or waited in another ridiculously long line to purchase some collectible pins, but neither of those things seemed that important to me. I did, however, get to see a lot of costumed people wandering through the park that day. Now, many of them were young children, but many of them were, well, not. I also saw one dad walking with his two young boys, one dressed as Boba Fett and another as an X-Wing pilot, and a couple of times I heard him say, "Anakin, come on." At first I thought maybe this was just an in-character kind of thing. But I quickly came to realize that no, that actually probably was his real name. Yikes.

Anyway, I used that opportunity to ride the Aerosmith rollercoaster and Tower of Terror over and over again with no lines. These are arguably my two favorite rides down there, which makes it all the more convenient that they are right next to each other. Unfortunately, one of my other favorites, Space Mountain is currently down for refurbishment. In between rides I would sometimes almost see the sun trying to come out again. It almost looked like it was going to be a nice day... almost. Somewhere around noon I took my Fastpass back to the Tower of Terror to get a quick ride in. If you've never been on this ride, it is supposed to be an old hotel and you get on an "elevator" and sit with about 20 people before it brings you to the 13th floor and drops you and brings you back up to drop you again a few times. To add to the fun, you're in total darkness until you get to the top and these doors open so that you can see out over the entire park, and even over to Blizzard Beach on a good day. Well, on this particular occasion the doors opened to reveal more torrential rain. It was raining so hard I almost couldn't see anything at all. Not so fun on a day that started out looking promising.

There is only so much rain you can handle before it really starts to get to you, and I had finally had enough. I was tired of walking around in it, and decided to go back to the hotel. At that point the rain was coming down in buckets and people were just hiding out under any kind of shelter along the "streets". I didn't care anymore, I just wanted to get out of it. And I could tell there was no use trying to wait it out. I had also just soaked my airplane shoes for the next day. Nice. It absolutely poured the rest of that afternoon. The hotel pool lifeguards had been redesignated to toweling off the water seeping into the walkways around the hotel restaurants. I just couldn't believe that it wouldn't stop the entire time we were there. I hadn't used a drop of sunscreen all week, had spent probably 14 hours a day outside in Florida, and I had no hint of a tan.

After dinner that night it miraculously had stopped raining. This was the first night that it hadn't been raining the entire time we were there. I took this unique opportunity to go to the pool at 8:45 at night. Not to work out, but just to be in the water and enjoy it. That hotel has a really nice pool with sand on the bottom, so I floated around a little, went in the hot tub, and even went down the waterslide with the other 10-year olds. They were finally able to show a movie on the beach in front of the hotel like they should have every night while all of the kids made s'mores. People were out and about. It all just made me kind of upset that that was how every night was supposed to be, and I just felt cheated.

On Saturday morning I got to "sleep in" until 4:30 so I could do my long run before we left. Our flight wasn't until 1:30 or so, so we had some time. My parents have to do everything inexplicably early though, so we were leaving the hotel almost 4 hours before the flight, even though it only takes 30 minutes to get to the airport. It was almost nice out that morning so I took a magazine out to sit on a bench after my run, but after about 5 minutes of course it started raining again, and I officially gave up.

So what did I learn on this trip? I learned that I will probably never again have worse weather on a trip such as that one in Disney, if only because we set all-time records for rainfall and I would hope it'll be a while before that happens again. I learned that I can ride in circles for 6 hours and still not go crazy, and maybe even still get a decent workout in. I learned that I can in fact get in 27 hours of training during a week at Disney World, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it and I'm not sure I'd want to try it again. I learned that there are a lot of overweight, lazy people in this country. The best example of this were the people who had obviously rented wheelchairs not because they actually had some sort of disability that required them, but because they were just too lazy to walk around the parks. I learned that my niece and nephew are real troopers in the rain, and I hope that they get to experience Disney without it sometime in the near future. I learned that I can in fact handle a week of only getting 5 hours of sleep a night, but I wouldn't want to do it all the time. I learned that I do like hanging out with my family, and I hope that we can try this again sometime soon when the weather is better. But I will say that I managed to have a good time anyway, and we almost never had to wait in line for anything.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that I did get caught in the lie? I blamed my mother, because I never actually lied to anyone, but of course I ran into the guy on like Tuesday and he asked me how the race went and I decided to tell him the truth rather than make up some story. We all know you can look up those things online anyway. Of course I felt bad and I could tell he just felt stupid, but he was a mountain biker so then just changed the subject to bike talk for a bit. But still, this is why I hate lying!

What has happened since then? Mostly I've been pining for a vacation redo. But also a long ride in which I got to go more than a mile from my start point, my first open-water swim of the season in 57-degree wind-swept water, and guess what I got back in time for? That's right, more rain! Only this time it's been a cold rain, as in it was in the 40's and 50's these last few days. Seriously, it's almost June. I've had enough!