If you have never ridden on the Auto Train, I highly recommend this as a means of travel to Orlando. Costwise, it is not much different than any other method of travel. Driving is a little less money, but not much with gas at an all time high. Flying is just a little more and you need to rent a car. So this is now my preferred method of travel to Disney.
Yesterday, I wrote a short post from the train, so I will highlight a bit more here. As I said yesterday we got there at about 12:30. Check in was very smooth. We were in an SUV and because of the extra height and length we had to pay about $100 more for our car. We were told that we would have to take the roof carrier off and we fully expected to unload it, put everything inside and then do the reverse when we went home. Well, they let us sign a waiver and leave it on top. There were no issues with it when it came off, so we saved about an hour of time with that.
The train was 39 cars long, with 248 autos on board!
We went inside to get our boarding pass and we were asked to pick a dinner seating (5:00, 7:00 or 9:00). We chose 7:00 but on the way home will be take 5:00. They did not call the 5:00 seating until 5:30 and the kids were off the wall hungry (no matter how much snack they had consumed). Luckily for us, they had room for us at the earlier seating anyway.
The kids were pretty well behaved, thank God, so the ride was pretty easy. Our coach seats were wide and roomy, like first class seats on an airplane. They were showing Kung Foo Panda in the lounge car, but neither of my boys wanted to go see it.
We had a difficult time getting the boys to sleep, but they did eventually. My biggest problem with sleeping was “snore lady” who was a few rows back. I have never in my life heard snoring like that, and when I told a crew member about it in the morning, they told me that I should have told one of them and they would have dealt with it (if she could not stop, that would have meant they would have asked her to go to the lounge car for the night). I’m not sure if I would have been happy with their doing something, but I will keep that in mind for next time.
We arrived in Orlando about 30 minutes early and luckily for us (again) our car came off pretty early. We took a quick stop at Amira’s Kosher store in Altamonte Springs on the way down to get food for Shabbat and then got to our resort.
We own our timeshare week at this resort (albeit a different week) so we know the place well. After we unloaded, mkm and her mom went shopping for supplies while I took the kids swimming. Her parents are with us and they have a unit across the street from us.
When they got back we all went to Downtown Disney for dinner and some shopping. We spent a lot of time in the giant Disney store there and I took the boys to the lego store also. We had dinner at Wolfgang Puck Express. This is probably the best bang for your buck quality restaurant at Disney. The food is the same as at the main Wolfgang Puck place but it is semi fast food and a fraction of the cost. Yummy! Unfortunately it rained a bit, so I have no photos from today, but I hope to post some tomorrow from our day at Epcot!
glad it worked out!