On the 18th we decided to leave our house around 10 and start the trek down to Orlando. We figured it would be like a Vegas drive from SLC. It was pretty close, around 6.5 hours, but a much prettier drive, no deserts.
We arrived at our not-as-nice-as-anticipated timeshare swap the Marriott Sabal Palms. The way the Marriott resort was laid out, you felt like you were headed back to the dumps and then came upon the Sabal Palms "Villas". Honestly, I don't know why I ever trust pictures that resorts post. Oh well, it was sufficiently sized and provided us with our needs, not necessarily our wants. When we checked in we learned that they did not offer shuttle service to the parks (during our last experience, the resort had buses that would drive you to and from Universal and Disney). We were very disappointed by this news because we were told they did offer free shuttles, they only offered a pay shuttle service for $15 per person! to take you to the park. We decided that we would just drive to the parks and pay the $12 parking fee.
After unloading the car we decided to make the most of our week and went to Downtown Disney. I wish we had gone to previous time because Disney is revamping Pleasure Island, and all of the fun clubs were closed for renovations; it looked like The Explorers Club would have been a lot of fun, but alas, we were too late to see it. For the most part Downtown Disney is shopping and eating, but Disney style. They had fun looking restaurants, like the T-Rex one, or the huge paddle boat turned fancy seafood restaurant. There was also the biggest Disney store I've experienced, along with an awesome Lego store (where I wanted all of the legos) and a large pin trading store. It was fun to walk around and get ready for a week full of Disney!
Here's Joe with some Lego men, along with a wall with over 4,000! The Lego Loch Ness in the water was totally awesome. And I really enjoyed the city scapes, I took a picture of Lego Paris and Lego London.
