Weather: Overcast, 29° F
Song Playing on iTunes: Heart with no Companion, performed by Leonard Cohen
Current Book Being Read on my Kindle: see January 1
Up Next in the Kitchen: Taco Salad
Relative of the Day: Rubin De Jemet “Doc” Evans, 1875-1959 (husband of 1st cousin, 3 times removed, according to Ancestry.com)
It will take me a while to fall into a good rhythm of posts. I thought about doing something similar to what I’ve seen on Twitter and other blog sites. Different days can have different themes. Travel Tuesday. Writing Wednesday. It’s a great idea, but I’m just not sure my own ideas can fall into those neat categories on a weekly basis. So for today, I’m going with Travel Flashback Wednesday. That will probably change by next week, but no guarantees in which direction the posting will go.
I picked out today’s topic based on an email that I receive from a company that specializes in Disney travel services. One of the things upon which they touched in this issue was Disney’s Magical Express Service, the bus service that takes you to/from Orlando Airport and the Walt Disney World complex. (They may have something similar in California, but I’ve never tried that one.)
I did try out the Magical Express Service for the first time this past September. We flew into Orlando International on one of the airlines which participates in the Magical Express Service. (Not all the airlines take part in the program, so check first before you book your plane tickets.) Not being sure that our luggage would actually be picked up by the Magical Express people, we went down to the luggage carousel and watched as our fellow air passengers picked up their bags. Not seeing our suitcases anywhere, we headed for the area on the Disney-provided map where the busses were waiting.
We found the bus area without too much difficulty. We handed over our boarding pass for the bus and were allowed to go directly onto a bus and wait. The busses are quite nice and comfortable. The only down side to our wait before the bus left the terminal was the fact that another family was already on board the bus. They had two children, both of whom had already clearly hit their personal limits for how long they could sit still. It’s not something you can hold against small children, but I was really glad when the bus finally started moving. There are little movies (coming and going) which feature Disney characters so that you have something Disney-themed to prepare you for your arrival.
The bus dropped us off at our hotel’s front desk. Our luggage arrived within three hours of our arrival. The only luggage issue we had was that one of the suitcase locks was missing, but it’s impossible to say if that happend at the airport or while it was being transported by Disney. I choose to believe it was an airport/airline issue, but I didn’t follow up on the matter since nothing was missing from the suitcase in question.
On the return trip, it’s also a fairly simple procedure. Your return bus time is provided the night before you check out. If you are flying on an airline where you have to pay to check your bags, you will need to do that the day before you leave. I didn’t see that part of the directions until the morning we were leaving, but I still managed to get the fee paid and receive our confirmation number in return. We were horribly early to catch our bus. I had read in a guidebook that the times were fixed in stone, and I didn’t want to pay for a cab from WDW to the Orlando Airport. So we appeared early. The staff at the bus stop printed off our boarding passes for us (A nice touch, since the tickets featured a Mickey image.) and even put us on an earlier bus since we were already there. We arrived at the airport in plenty of time to make it through the extremely long lines at security and reach our terminal with time enough to spare.
Would I do the Disney bus again? Absolutely – as long as I was traveling off season, so to speak. We were there in September. The crowds were virtually nonexistent compared to some of the summer/holiday rushes. I can imagine that the lines for the busses are longer, and the passengers far more noisy during the summer months. Then again, I didn’t have to carry my own bags or arrange my transportation. Once I got off the plane, it was all in Disney’s hands. And I rather enjoyed the Mouse’s white glove treatment.
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