Our original plan for the last two days of our spring break vacation was to get off the ship, grab a rental car, and head down to the Florida Keys before returning to Miami that night and staying at the InterContinental Miami.  That plan changed after we got Walt Disney World annual passes.  We saw that the Epcot International Flower and Garden Festival was going on during our Spring Break.  We decided that if we could get off the ship early on Friday, we could head up to Orlando and spend two partial days in the parks before returning to Miami later Saturday night in time to catch our flight home.

We decided to do Express Walk-Off, which allows you to be one of the first groups off the ship.  Instead of putting your luggage outside of your stateroom the night before you disembark, you keep it in your room.  As soon as the ship is cleared by Customs, you can walk off the ship with your luggage.  There is no help for you if you do this, but we didn’t need any.  We walked off the ship once it was announced the ship was cleared and made our way through Customs.  Once we spoke to the US Customs officer, we grabbed a taxi to the airport, picked up our rental car, and took off for Orlando.

We made it into the Magic Kingdom a little after 1:00 PM, with the drive taking about four hours.  We already had our FastPass selections setup for the day, along with dinner reservations at Be Our Guest.  The park was super crowded because of Spring Break, but it didn’t really bother us.  We had been to Disney World a lot this year with our annual passes, so we just really wanted to soak up the atmosphere of the parks.

We didn’t get into too many lines this time since all of them were long.  We walked around and enjoyed some snacks as well as using our FastPasses for our rides.  Moving around was difficult at times.  We did manage to make it over to Sleepy Hollow to grab one of our favorite snacks, the Nutella and Fruit waffle sandwich.  It is so good!

We thought we would duck out of the crowd and enjoy one of our favorite rides, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover.   There was a 20 minute line for it.  We had seen this before at Christmas, but it was still long.  We waited anyway though, it is one of our “must do” rides.

We eventually made our way towards Be Our Guest for our dinner.  We were pretty wiped out from getting up early and the long drive up from Miami.  Dinner was very good, but a struggle to get through because we were so tired.  We had moved our hotel reservation from Miami to the Holiday Inn Orlando Disney Springs Area.  The hotel is on the same street as Disney Springs and wasn’t very far from the Magic Kingdom.  We got to the room and went right to sleep.  The next day was going to be long, considering we wanted to go to the Flower and Garden Festival, then head back to Miami to catch our flight.

Our plan on the final day was to see as much of the Flower and Garden Festival as we could before leaving around 1:00 PM.  Our flight from Miami left at 6:50 PM, so we needed to get to the airport at 5:00 PM or so.  We have TSA Precheck, so we don’t spend very much time in the security lines.  I figured if we got delayed, we had an hour or so to play with.  I had also prepaid for fuel for the rental car, something I almost never do.  I didn’t want to have to look around for a gas station and I knew that we would probably return the car almost empty.

Since the food booths wouldn’t open till around 11:00 AM, we knew we had some time before then to do a few rides and see the festival center.  We couldn’t get a FastPass for Test Track since they were all gone 30 days in advance, and Soarin’ was closed for refurbishment.  We ultimately did Living with the Land (cause we always do), then headed towards the Festival Center.  We didn’t ride Figment at all, despite our FastPass.  We stopped several times to look at the gardens and topiaries that were spread out everywhere.

This was the second time this year that we got to go into Horizons.  It was the Festival Center for the Food and Wine Festival we attended in the fall.  I really wish they would do something with this pavilion other than use it as a festival center twice a year.  They could move that function to the empty Innoventions.

As we made our way around the world showcase, we stopped into a number of the food booths and sampled the food.  We loved this portion of the visit the most.  We were moving really quickly though, since we knew we needed to be in the car and headed towards Miami by 1:00 PM.

We got all the way around World Showcase and back to the front of Epcot by 1:00 PM.  We did hop on Spaceship Earth right before we left, so we really didn’t get going from the parking lot until almost 1:30 PM.  Luckily, we didn’t hit much traffic the entire way back down to Miami.  At one of our bathroom breaks, I put 2 gallons of fuel in the car because I was worried about running out if we did hit traffic.  We dropped the car off a little after 5:00 PM and had no trouble with the flight home.

In hindsight, I wish I’d redone our flights home to give us more time at Disney World.  The main reason I didn’t was because we hadn’t really considered that we would have annual passes at that point.  We booked the flights about a month or so before we really looked at buying annual passes.  Even so, we really had a great time on this trip.  The best parts were the cabana on Castaway Cay as well at the Flower and Garden Festival.   The girls made new friends in the kids clubs and we got to see some of our favorite cruise staff on board.

Planning | Travel | Boarding | Sea Day | Cozumel | Sea Day | Castaway Cay | Disembarkation

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