Hi folks! We are back from our extended Disney World stay following the Walt Disney World Marathon and I am going to start on my race / trip report.
Our first day started way early getting the kids up before 2:30 am – I think I got about an hour sleep but at least they slept well!
I did the final load of the vehicle and we drove to the airport, parked, got all bags checked, confirmed a few things about our connecting flight (travelling through Toronto on our way down and have to do US Immigration checks there in Toronto so we wanted to make sure we knew how that would all work – especially since it seems to be different there each time we go) and then we head through security.
Nice and easy boarding onto the flight and a good flight to Toronto.
When we got to Toronto though things went downhill fast. We only had about 1.25 hours between flights and had to do US Immigration, so time was tight but things got worse because when we got there, there was another plane sitting at our gate…
After what seemed like an eternity (but probably 15-20 minutes) we were finally assigned a new gate but ground crews had to reposition and things were going to be delayed for the luggage…Yay! Clock is ticking.
We got off the plane and made our way over to the US Immigration area to wait for our bags to pass through so that we could see a US agent and get to our flight. And we waited, and waited, and waited…we could see that our flight was starting to board and we were still stuck and couldn’t do anything.
We tried to talk to an airline agent about our flight but he was aggressively unhelpful…finally after our plane was scheduled to leave we see the flight now listed as delayed and the airline agent announces that the flight has been delayed by 20 minutes…but the times he was quoting made it sound more like 10 minutes. So now we have hope but not necessarily a lot.
Another 10 minutes later and we are finally able to pass into the line for US Immigration and relatively quickly made it through there and bolted for our flight. When we got there the skyway was already closed up but the plane was still there so they let us on, thankfully.
After a short delay the plane then took off.
There wasn’t another flight to Orlando scheduled that day that I could see on our carrier – if we didn’t make the connection we didn’t get to race kit pick up and we didn’t get to do the 5k race together the next morning. But we made it!
From there a relatively uneventful flight and an easy Magical Express ride to our resort for the race weekend and then onto the event bus to go get our race kits.
We could see when the bus pulled up that things were a circus – yay!
First up was getting the 5k race kits for Heather and the kids and then the 10k kit for our son before heading in to get my Dopey Challenge kit.
After grabbing the kit I had to ask 3 different volunteers how to get the area for the pre-purchased merchandise area – once we got there we started to see just how crazy the runDisney merchandise area was and after getting my pre-purchased race pins we decided that we just couldn’t stand in the line to even go look at the gear. It was getting too late at this point and the kids were starving.
We did take a quick look in the building for the rest of the race expo and decided not to go down to the show floor as it just looked like a madhouse.
So basically, we bought no merchandise – that’s just crazy. They really need to do something to cut down the crowds on that first day…I hate to say it but I think the Dopey Challenge is the real issue here and I don’t think runDisney can fix the crowds on that first race expo day unless they get rid of this challenge. There are just too many people trying to get in there in such a short period of time.
Anyway – we headed back to the resort, ate some supper and then headed to Epcot to do some modifications to our annual passes before heading back to the room to crash.
Somehow in this short period our daughter managed to lose her 5k race shirt…still not sure how but at least she didn’t lose the race bib!
Next up – 5k race and some park fun!
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