Wed 18 Travel Day

Pick up by AXB car service, always great service. Fly QANTAS (partner with AA), arrive Port Orleans 11p, unpack and sleeep until 9am.

Qantas was awesome, but it’s a long flight. As usual they changed the times and routes in the build up. I hate them for this. On the 17 hour flight home my seat wouldn’t recline, which was infuriating.

Smooth transfers through the airports, Sydney and Dallas. Makes things easier.

Delayed on tarmac with American Airlines for 40 minutes in Texas. We were so tired and keen to finally arrive.

Port Orleans 15 nights 5th sleeper (167cm ) cost $5,798.27 USD Midnight staff were awesome, we felt so welcome!

Lucky to be in the 5th sleeper near first bus stop ‘west’ which is awesome for getting a seat every time, but it takes 7-15 mins to get on the road to the park after stopping at every other stop at the hotel, on the flip side it is so good being first off after a long day in the parks. I thought I would hate the buses, and had a budget to get Ubers home each night, but it was really easy, they come really frequently, only once did we wait a very long time. Just make sure you check your stop number so you know how to get home! Port Orleans was almost always the furthest bus stop.

Cute ferry to Disney springs from Port Orleans.

Little 24 hour pool next to our block, but it was only open once and our last day. We did use Ol Man Island a few times, the kids loved it, very upbeat pool!

With laundry near each pool. Laundry is about $8 for detergent and the machine. There is a QR code where you can see what time your load is finishing, that was pretty good.

Use instacart for water bottles, soda, snacks etc to the room, meet at bell services or pay $6 to have delivered to your room. We ordered a lot of fruit and none of it taste sweet, costly and disappointing.

Early park benefit 30 mins early, we only used this the last two days! We were all exhausted, didn’t want an alarm to wake us up. No one wants to be tired and grumpy in the parks, early arrival wasn’t worth that trade.

River mill food court was well below average.

Mobile order missed something or two things EVERY time, and we ate there a lot. I was so desperate for tasty and fresh food. This was not it, but worked when we were all starving.

Florida has a looooong hurricane season. The hurricanes don’t often affect Orlando, but it is something to keep in mind as it looks like every year there are more of them. We were there for Helene. We kept our eyes on the weather app and the Disney app and got one day of significant rain and another day of quite heavy rain. Seeing how badly it hit other parts of the country, we were so lucky.

IF there is another hurricane or just very wet weather and you have tickets to Mickey’s Not So Scary Party go to guest services to check whether you can get tickets to another Halloween party. The night of Helene it was cancelled and refunded.