The hotel.

We start at, well, the beginning. After literally almost a year of planning, we shipped off for the sacred Disney World vacation. I was a bit nervous about the kids in the airport and on the plane ride, but they did great. A bit restless while waiting to board, but otherwise good. We dragged the car seats along, only to find out at the last minute that the airline won’t let the kids use them in their seats, because they’re ‘dangerous’. When the attendant informed me of this, I actually chuckled out loud, because if our plane is on fire and going down, hurtling towards the earth at 500 miles per hour, the last thing I’m worried about is getting bonked in the noggin by a flying car seat.

We arrived, got our car at the most professional Enterprise location I’ve ever seen, and headed to Disney. During the 30-minute or so drive from the airport to the hotel, we saw a ton of billboards for all of the area theme parks, and, seeing as though we don’t have billboards where we are, Sal & I joked that we could have just looked at all of them, then turned around and come home, as excited as the kids were to see each one.

I had suspected, from all of my reading and preparation, that the Disney hotels would be over the top, and yet, somehow, I underestimated the level of surrealism we encountered. We stayed at the All Star Movies resort, which has a couple of buildings for each of a few different movies. I requested the Herbie building, but we also checked out the Fantasia and Toy Story buildings, which had huge brooms and a four-storey Buzz and Woody, respectively. The Herbie buildings had a monstrous Herbie front and rear sticking out over the entrances. The kids loved the whole setting, including the humongous pool, with Mickey shooting water high into the center. We could have just stayed seven days and swam, and they would have been just as happy.