Welcome to the second post in our Disney World June 2021 Trip Report. This post covers our travel to Disney World and how we spent our arrival day, including quick stops at Disney Springs and Magic Kingdom.

That Thing I Do

I do this thing. I do it a lot of trips. And it’s a good lesson about not “overhacking” your trips.

Everyone knows that sometimes you book a “low cost” flight and then get suckered by the luggage costs and wind up spending more than if you flew another airline. Well, there’s another big way that saving money can wind up costing you money.

Our Spirit flight to MCO departed at 7:05AM. This meant boarding around 6:20AM, so we had to be at the airport no later than 6AM (with TSA PreCheck and a working knowledge of O’Hare airport we’d be comfortable with that time). Well, we don’t drive. So we have to either take the train (about an hour trip from home), Uber ($$$ and still about 30 minutes), or stay the night before with my parents near O’Hare (still have to get to them, though).

So, getting to the airport at 6AM was a challenge, and I did what I usually do in this situation—booked a runway view room at the O’Hare Hilton for $272.17. This allowed us to take an afternoon bus and train to the airport, spend the night in the hotel, and walk right into the airport from the hotel in the morning.

This particular mistake might not be likely to happen to everyone, but it comes in various forms. Are you driving to a farther airport? Or an airport with more expensive parking? The point is just that when you book a “cheap” flight, make sure those costs aren’t coming back to bite you in another way.

Zoe’s First Hotel

Hauling our luggage and Zoe to the hotel was a challenge. I’d offered to babywear Zoe, honestly believing that would be more of a hassle than hauling the bulk of the luggage. I was very wrong, and Emily had an awful time navigating some stairs at the train station with everything. The addition of Zoe, the car seat, the carry-on, and the diaper bag was a big departure from our past travels with one personal backpack each.

We wound up with me wearing Zoe and carrying a backpack or two, while Emily had a backpack, the carry-on with the car seat on top, and occasionally another bag. Zoe had a great trip and is a huge fan of trains (trip cost $5 for the two of us).

We were in the room at 3:47PM following a 2:20PM departure from our apartment downtown. Looking at the airport, traveling again, with Zoe, I honestly was on the verge of tears for a few minutes.

Zoe had a great time at the hotel. We’re in a climbing / highly mobile phase, so the excitement of a new space was great. We ordered food from the hotel restaurant ($80). Bedtime was tough because Zoe was so excited. We should have wound down sooner. Throughout the trip we tried to keep our home bedtime routine, but with the excitement and long days, Zoe was in no mood.

Luckily, Zoe slept well. We use a Pack ‘n’ Play at home and paid $5 for one at the hotel (not actually Graco brand, but similar). The hotel provided really ill-fitting sheets, which we opted against using, weighing that the hazard of those was greater than any disease hazard of the plain mattress once we gave it a wipe.

Emily and I sat on the other side of the curtains and drank beers and chatted, watching the airport. This was my favorite night of the trip.

We couldn’t get the Nanit, which we use for white noise, setup on the wifi network at the hotel (we worked around the issue a later night), so we had to use one of our phones for white noise.

ORD to MCO (Zoe’s First Flight)

We left the room at 5:15AM the next morning and were through security by 5:26. We’re pretty adept at getting through security efficiently, and adding a baby and carry-on didn’t change that. Emily was responsible for just her and Zoe, and I was responsible for myself and all the luggage. It turned out Emily could have worn Zoe through security (I’ve been told your experience may vary in this regard), but in any case we were all through smoothly.

We waited 20 minutes for Starbucks ($12.42 for two venti iced coffees), and I checked to make sure our bag actually fit inside Spirit’s box. I didn’t check the personal items, I knew they’d be tight but we could make it work.

This was our first time preboarding. In the past, we preferred to board nearly last to avoid the chaos at the gate, since we only had personal items. Boarding went okay, but I clearly didn’t know how to manage the luggage and I delayed things for a minute while I juggled the car seat and carry on. For future reference, the proper order is—put car seat in window seat, put carry on overhead, put personal item on seat/floor, slide into row.

Our Nuna Pipa RX car seat fit…okay…in the window seat of the Spirit airlines Airbus A321. The width was no issue, but the pitch (space between rows) was tight. Bringing the head of the car seat down from above didn’t work at all, I had to bring it up from under to get the seat at an okay angle, and even then it was imperfect.

There was nothing notable about the flight. Zoe handled it very well, getting upset on occasion when stuck in the car seat, but otherwise being easily entertained by the toys we’d brought. Zoe got a Zoe-standard 37-minute nap in toward the end of the flight with only a little screaming (Zoe can sleep in a Pack n Play, or in a carrier, but the car seat is a fight). Overall it was a very encouraging flight.

I paid $3 for streaming quality wifi on the flight, which is currently being tested on some of Spirit’s planes. I was able to get through an episode of Community, but it was generally spotty. Worth $3 on a 2-hour trip, I suppose, but that was an early promotional price.

Disney’s Magical Express

We opted to take Disney’s Magical Express service from MCO to Pop Century, our first Disney hotel for the trip. The service is ending this year and even though I’d seen reports of bad wait times I wanted Zoe to experience it.

We had good luck. Following a 10:45AM deplaning we were on our Magical Express bus 11:14AM, departed at 11:22AM, and at Pop Century, the second stop, at 11:57AM.

Lunch and Checking In

I had done online check-in, as is the norm at Disney World these days, and our room wasn’t yet ready. Check in is technically 3PM, so I can’t complain.

We had lunch at the Pop Century cafeteria, Everything Pop. I was disappointed (not judging the decision, just my reaction) to see mobile order was required and instead of going up to a stall and ordering you just picked up from a table when your order was done.

I love the energy of people running around the cafeteria. I get why they aren’t having that right now, and happily the seating area of the cafeteria was open and energetic. We waited about 15 minutes for our two beyond burgers. Zoe ate some of the avocado.

Emily got Zoe to fall asleep in the carrier in the business center (which at Pop is a small room without a door just off the lobby) and I organized all our stuff after a hectic travel day and in anticipation of our busy afternoon.

Once Zoe woke up and we were ready to head out, I decided to visit the front desk to see if a room was available (c/should have done that sooner). It turned out one was, so we were given a ground floor room in building 4. If it wasn’t a preferred location, it should have been because it was perfectly situated with the lobby, pool, and Skyliner all close.

We dropped off our luggage, put Zoe in Z’s Pop Century uniform, and gave Z some time to crawl around the room.

Pop Century Thoughts

My feelings on Pop Century remain mostly unchanged from previous visits. I love the hotel, I love the rooms. I hate having to rely on buses to Magic Kingdom, but I love the Skyliner to Epcot and Hollywood Studios (with caveat that it won’t always be best for rope drop).

I have two notes about Pop Century with a baby. First, it was tough at night. We weren’t quite tired when Zoe’s 8PM-8:30PM bedtime rolled around, which meant one of us stayed with Zoe while the other could be out, or we could both stay in and quietly watch something on the laptop.

Second, besides the bed there wasn’t much space for Zoe. At Grand Floridian we could let Zoe crawl laps back and forth and it was so cute to watch, but the Pop rooms quickly get cramped with the Pack ‘n’ Play.

Once Zoe is a little older I hope we can have better stays at Pop, but I’ll probably be keeping an open mind for things like the Art of Animation family suites or maybe a room at Caribbean Beach (because Skyliner) for future family trips. That said I’m not at all opposed to returning to Pop with Zoe soon, we’d just need to better mentally prepare for the evenings.

Finally, people often ask about noise at the value hotels. Noise is a problem at all Disney hotels, mostly because kids run through halls screaming, but also because adults can be quite loud. If you have a pool view, you’ll have noise from that, too. We had a kid running around above us every night.

But Zoe lives in downtown Chicago between a hospital, a fire station, and a drag racing hangout. With a white noise machine on, noise isn’t really a problem for Zoe, and it definitely keeps us up more than Z.

Annual Pass Recovery at Disney Springs

We kept an eye on bus times in the My Disney Experience app and caught a bus to Disney Springs right at the estimated time of 2:05PM.

I was at the Ticket Center at 2:25PM and out by 2:35PM with our new annual passes in hand, upgraded from our five-day park hoppers (I covered in the previous post why we were eligible for annual passes). The Ticket Center at Disney Springs really is that great. I was assisted by Ben, who quickly established we were eligible for passes and identified that we should upgrade our tickets for this trip. He even explained why we couldn’t use the six-day tickets for a later trip to upgrade (package tickets load into the system 3 days before the trip).

The upgrade cost us $1355 ($678 per person). My guess is the ticket portion of our trip package was around $1247, which means the passes came out to $1301 per person for the Disney World platinum annual pass. There was no platinum plus pass available since only one water park is open.

We regrouped at Starbucks ($12 for the two of us) because it was a scorcher of a day, with sunny skies and a high of 95 degrees. We had a small fan for Zoe (and us, somewhat), but we really leaned into air conditioning during the peak of the day.

Zoe’s First Theme Park

Getting from Disney Springs to the parks continues to be a pain. There’s no bus directly to the parks because the don’t want people evading parking costs, presumably.

Honestly, there’s no reason they shouldn’t have those buses running for Disney resort guests only. Equip a driver with an iPhone to scan magic bands and you solve your problem.

In any case, we decided to just take the bus to Grand Floridian, from which we could walk / bus / or monorail to Magic Kingdom, which again serves to show how dumb the no parks bus policy is. (The obviously bad anti-“solution” would be for Disney to check guests heading to the hotels for reservations…that would really grind my gears…) A bus to Contemporary would have been a fine alternative—we just picked the one that was already there.

Zoe napped at Grand Floridian (again with Emily, in the carrier) and on the monorail to Magic Kingdom, and for a few minutes in Town Square Theater. Right around 4:10PM Zoe woke up and we caught the end of one of the cavalcades and then took our first walk down Main Street USA!

We knew Zoe’s first ride had to be PeopleMover. After all, it is an amazing ride that tells you all the fun you’re going to have in Tomorrowland! It’s also just a personal favorite, and a classic.

We had only a short wait for it, boarding at 4:28PM. Zoe was not super impressed.

We wore Zoe on most of the rides we went on this week. The exceptions mostly involved nursing on the ride. With Zoe being in such a climbing phase (and having recently mastered getting down from heights, including our laps), the carrier was the easiest option.

There’s nothing particularly interesting about babywearing on the rides. As long as the lap bar can get down, you’ll both be under it. As long as the ride doesn’t have a height requirement, you’ll be able to babywear on it. (Time will tell us if this changes at all as Zoe gets bigger.)

With our most important ride done we headed for another important milestone—first dole whip! Our mobile order at Aloha Isle took 6 minutes, and we had a great time sitting in the shade splitting the dole whip at around 5PM.

Wanting to keep staying cool and keep visiting essentials, we next headed to Country Bear Jamboree at around 5:25PM. Zoe seemed to enjoy Z’s first look at animatronics, but honestly was probably more interested in playing with the spoon from the dole whip.

From there things sort of fell apart. This was probably the lowlight of our trip. We’d botched our nap times, with Zoe facing an extra-long awake window. We tried to get Zoe to fall asleep on a short awake, but it wasn’t happening. Then the rain came.

Rain has never bothered us as Disney World travelers. We know to expect it and we’ve always just dealt with it, without ponchos. Well, having Zoe really changed that because we weren’t just going to let Z get soaked to get to the bus.

So we did the thing we never thought we’d do—we bought Disney ponchos. And of course as soon as we bought them the rain stopped, and we were just chumps who didn’t know Florida summer rain is almost always on and off. Even Zoe was embarrassed to be with us.

Back to Pop Century and Our Sleep Problems

We were on a bus back to the hotel by 7PM, the rain and botched nap having eaten around 75 minutes of our day. Zoe did well until we were pulling up to the hotel, when the meltdown started.

At Pop Century, the Pack ‘n’ Play we’d requested earlier in the day hadn’t arrived (maybe we needed to be in the room for it). So I requested it again. It took about 20 minutes. This had been noted in our room request, so I’m not happy it took so much effort to get it, but we also could have given ourselves more time before bedtime to resolve it.

I wasn’t able to fix our nanit issues until the next night. The nanit refused to connect to an unsecure network, like the Disney wifi. The solution was to use a third cell phone we have (a work phone that we mostly use as to play lullabies) as a hotspot.

Zoe went to bed around 8PM, which was about 30 minutes earlier than usual (7:30PM Central Time). Zoe never really came around to bedtime, or we didn’t do enough to give Z an opportunity for a nice bedtime. The excitement and occasionally long awake windows definitely piled up.

Our division of labor at home is that I watch Zoe full-time during the week while Emily works, including daytime naps, and Emily takes evenings, including bed time. It was an unfortunate division this week because (1) she did more daytime naps than usual so I could do things like get blog content or we could do rider switch and (2) bed time was the most stressful part of the day.

By next trip we’ll be able to split bedtimes and maybe find a way to make them less horrible. Zoe’s sleep has been poor recently, after a few weeks of good sleep, so nighttime wake ups weren’t a shock. Unfortunately, Zoe also learned we’re a little less tolerant of screaming in hotel rooms on vacation and took advantage of it to force us into new bad habits like multiple overnight feedings.

The positive side of this is that we didn’t have any new problems. Zoe is used to the Pack ‘n’ Play and noise, so besides the predictable (but still super frustrating) wakeups, Zoe was more or less a fine traveler at night.

I visited Petals, which unfortunately didn’t have bar seating (so no good eavesdropping) and walked the grounds. Tangled was playing outside (the “movie in the park” schedule is posted in a few places and available at the front desk), and even at 10PM the pool was still bustling.

Some guests were even hanging out just watching another guest’s BB-8 droid outside one of the buildings.

It’s this energy I love about Pop. It’s a fun place, and the layout brings people together in these ways.

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