We arrived at Old Key West, and headed in to the main lobby to pick up our new Magicbands – blue for me, red for Luke. The cast member helping us let us know our room was not yet ready – not a huge surprise seeing as it was just a little past 11:30am by this point. While we were on the Magical Express I had received a text message from my boss asking for my help with something, so I sat down on a bench in the lobby and pulled out my work laptop which I had brought with me. Luke decided to go check out the little store and enjoy some of the free lemon water in the lobby. It didn’t take me too long to finish up what I had to do, and we went out to drop off our carry-ons with bell services. We called our first Lyft of the trip, and headed off to the Vineland Outlets. I’m not much of a shopper these days, but I do enjoy starting our vacation with a trip to the Disney Outlet there!

A trip to the Disney Outlet (I believe it’s actually called the Disney Character Warehouse) can be hit or miss – you never really know what you’ll find when you visit). We had decent luck on this trip, and I found a single Monsters University spirit jersey in my exact size for $20! Luke also found the Wall-E zip-up hoody he’d been looking at last year in his size for $20, and a Dark Wing Duck mug for $5. I also picked up an Epcot 35 ornament for $5, a Pascal baseball hat for $8 and a Minnie Mouse baseball hat for $5.

We were hungry, so we decided to just eat in the food court there. It was nothing exciting, but Luke had a burrito and I went to Charley’s Philly Cheesesteaks.

After eating, we called a Lyft to take us to our next stop – Walmart! So exciting, right?! We love browsing and seeing what is different than in Canada, and picking up a few supplies for our trip. Water is like $4/bottle in the parks, or a case of 40 bottles was $4 at Walmart. We picked up a few of the unique to the US items we love (like Garlic Butter Ritz, Big Chewy Nerds, Almond Joy chocolate bars, etc) and took our time going up and down each aisle. We always enjoy looking at the prices of alcohol, it’s so cheap compared to Canada! (For comparison, that same bottle of wine is $12-$15).

I always ask my coworkers if they’d like anything, and they always ask for unique candy. So I picked up these three kinds of Twizzlers that I’ve never seen up here for them (the orange ones are seriously amazing! The watermelon ones were gross, and the cherry and citrus ones were good).

Luke also ran to the liquor store next to Walmart and picked up a small bottle of Bailey’s – when on vacation why not start your day with a Bailey’s and coffee!

Once we finished up our shopping, we called an Uber XL to get back to OKW. We arrived back there around 3:45, but our room still wasn’t ready so we passed the time by chatting to some of the bell services people (check in for a DVC room is 4pm). I kept refreshing my email and at 3:57 I finally found out our room number! I was very excited to see we were in building 35, as that’s the same building we’ve been in every single time we’ve stayed at OKW. I love that Disney tries to keep it familiar when you do repeat stays at resorts, although I’m not sure if they just do that for DVC stays?

Our other luggage had arrived with the Magical Express tags, so one of the cast members from Bell Services drove us to our room in a golf cart with all of our luggage and Walmart purchases. Of course, once we arrived our Magicbands wouldn’t work – but he was able to open the door with his master key so we could at least drop off all our stuff (I showed him the My Disney Experience app to confirm we were at the correct room that had been assigned to us). He then drove us back to the main building so we could figure out our Magicband issue. Since we were there, we also took some time to walk around the main pool area since we’d never really checked it out before (all of our previous stays at OKW have been in January when it’s too cold for us to go swimming). We started walking the 7-8 minutes back to our building when the same bell services saw us and pulled over, motioning for us to hop back in his golf cart. I guess it was worth it to tip him generously when he dropped us off the first time!

Once we got back, I took obligatory room pictures before we made a huge mess by unpacking. Our room was 3526 and it had been recently renovated, so the beds were new. I prefer the new style, it’s nice to be able to shove a suitcase underneath the bed out of the way. The carpet looked like the same old stuff, but it was fine.

The bathrooms had been completely renovated, and were really nice! The flooring was nice, and the bathroom felt very big. It did now have the wall-attached shampoo/conditioner instead of the travel-sized ones from years past, but we don’t mind that.

We were on the second floor, and I loved our view from our balcony!

Luke took a shower while I unpacked a bit and changed into clean clothes for supper – including my new MU spirit jersey from the outlet. These were still being sold on property for full price, so I have no idea why this one was at the outlet, I haven’t been able to find anything wrong with it… but for $20 I’m very happy to have found it! For those interested, my leggings are from Silver Icing, which is one of the multi-level selling companies but they are some of the nicest leggings I own (I’d say comparable in price and quality to Lulu Lemon).

Our dining reservation was in Disney Springs, so we decided we wanted to take the boat (there is an option for a bus from OKW as well). The only place to catch the boat is from the main building, so we walked back out there. I enjoyed this Captain Marvel bus way too much, and had to take a picture of it…

We had perfect timing, and the boat pulled up to the dock about 90 seconds after we arrived.

Taking the boat from OKW to Disney Springs is such a nice, relaxing way to spend 20 minutes! We arrived and our first stop was the new ticket center. My annual pass had been active since December, but Luke had purchased a 10-day Park Hopper ticket with the Canadian discount for this trip. The next morning we had very specific plans so we made sure his tickets were active tonight.

We then headed off to our supper reservation at our favourite Disney restaurant – Chef Art Smith’s Homecomin’ (or Che Fartsmith if you will…).

After eating, we were exhausted so we hopped a bus back to OKW and went straight to bed after I took a shower. Tomorrow promised to be a very exciting day!

I also took screenshots of my Fitbit data for each day. I’m positive mine doesn’t read correctly, Luke will always have a few thousand more steps than I will in a day at Disney, but it’s not like he’s running laps around me …