Disney Trip January 2019 - Part 1

We've been home for a week plus at this point, and I'm batting a migraine, snots, etc., yet here I am, sharing Part of 1 of the Disney January 2019 trip review with all of you.

The Farrells went to the Walt Disney World Resort from January 10-15, 2019, and we stayed at Caribbean Beach Resort - which is in Disney's moderate resort category. From the outside, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Christmas decorations were still up around the resort. The main building, Old Port Royale, has recently been refurbished and has lots of comfy places to relax for both adults and kiddos. The main / feature pool, located adjacent to Old Port Royale, has two water slides and a good-sized splash pad for kiddos 48" and shorter. Note - his royal highness is actually a smidge OVER that height restriction, but he had a great time and didn't get kicked out the way obviously older kids did.

A note about the weather - we got pretty lucky! Two days that were worthy of pool time even if the breeze made us a bit chilly one of those days. But you'll see from the photos that there were some temperature swings between pool weather, jacket weather and sweatshirt weather.

Our room was a standard room, located in one of the Aruba buildings (#51). At first glance, I thought we were a million miles away from the main pool / building. But on the next to the last day of the trip, we had time to explore the grounds a bit more and realized that via a shortcut and some winding paths, it was only about a 5-minute walk.

Each of the building 'clusters' has their own, smaller pool (we didn't bother with ours) and there's a guest laundry facility located by each of these. I ended up doing a load of laundry one morning when HRH woke up at a stupid hour (which always happens on vacation, SMH). We also used that early morning to explore the resort, found the playground (locked) and the connection over to the 'heart' of the resort.

The buildings themselves aren't much to look at - only two stories tall and painted very bright colors, I wasn't all that impressed. Also, no elevator. Our room had been recently refurbished, which was nice, and having the pull-down twin bed for HRH was great. I noticed that Disney took the clock radio out of the room (no big deal considering nobody uses them). For the three of us, the room was was fairly tight quarters and there were only two large and three small drawers for storage. I'm the type of person who NEEDS to unpack but on this trip, I ended up leaving a lot of stuff in the suitcase because there wasn't anywhere else to put it. We could also hear the BOOMS from the Epcot fireworks each night at 9pm, but it didn't wake up HRH as we sleep with a pretty loud white noise machine.

I will say that we had two less-than-magical experiences related to the resort. First, on Saturday, hubby went to the counter service place near the pool to get us some lunch. Of course, that includes asking about ingredients for our egg-allergic kiddo. Well, it took the CMs at the restaurant 20 minutes to get a chef to come and talk to him (not necessary) and then, I kid you not, another 35 minutes to get the food. At least he finally spoke up and got the food for free, because it was TERRIBLE. Oh my goodness, the salad I had was terrible and the grilled cheese for HRH - you could have hammered nails with the thing. YUCK.

The second 'thing' that happened was that it took a trip to the front desk and two separate phone calls to have the playground unlocked so that HRH could plan and burn off some energy. The sign said that it would be open at sunrise. Well, the first time we went, the sun was definitely up, hence the trip to the front desk. 20 minutes later, still not unlocked, so a phone call. Another 10 minutes, another phone call, and it was unlocked. I expect better from Disney, and no, I don't think my expectations are too high.

All in all, I don't know if we'd stay at CBR again, but it suited our needs for this trip as any other moderate resort likely would have done. For the price and for just a few nights, it was fine.

This photo was taken on Jan. 15 in the Magic Kingdom - the holiday decorations were still up and Ronan was very much taken in by the over-sized toys under the tree.