For the first full day of this trip, which was Wednesday, November 2nd, I planned for us all to just take it easy. Besides going to get some groceries, I wanted to go to Disney Springs. After the long drive from Texas, it felt really great to sleep late on Wednesday morning. After I woke up and got dressed, my mom and I decided we’d rather place a grocery pick up order at Walmart instead of going inside the store like we usually do. There was a pickup time a few hours away at a close Walmart location so we put in an order and got something for breakfast in the meantime.

We had a beautiful view from our patio and I had planned to eat my breakfast out there. At that time of morning, the sun was in a position where it was shining right in my face when I was sitting at the patio table, and I was only able to take it for a few minutes because I couldn’t really see with the sun in my eyes and I was getting hot and sweaty. I ended up standing up instead and only stayed out there about 10 minutes. I would wait until the sun was higher in the sky so I could sit and enjoy the view for longer, later in the day. I went back inside and we all just sat around enjoying the two bedroom villa at Old Key West.

After I went to get the grocery pickup, I decided I was ready to go to Disney Springs. My oldest son was the only one who wanted to go with me, so the two of us headed there. We parked in one of the parking lots across the street from Cirque du Soleil. I didn’t even realize that this parking lot was an option, to be honest, and I questioned whether or not I was even supposed to be parking there because it was so empty. But a handful of other people parked nearby at the same time so I stayed. The security line was super short and that’s probably the fastest I’ve ever gotten into Disney Springs.

It wasn’t super busy on this day and I stopped into several different stores to look at merchandise while making our way to World of Disney. I was in search of a tin of the 50th Anniversary mints for my friend Marci, and since I wasn’t going to be visiting Magic Kingdom, I figured World of Disney or the Old Key West gift shop would have them. If not, I was going to check as many shops in Epcot as I could on Saturday. Anyway, even though it didn’t seem like there were that many people walking about outside of the shops, every shop we went into had a lot of people crammed inside. A lot of the smaller shops felt very hot once we got inside them and started looking around. It was weird because we could feel the air conditioning when we first went into shops, but once we were inside further, it wasn’t so cool. I don’t know if it was because of the number of people inside or they only had certain vents blowing the cold air, but every single shop was like this. I get hot very easily so I hated this. Some shops, I just looked quickly so I could go back outside (to the 83 degree Florida heat) where it felt cooler.

Once we finally got to World of Disney, we looked all over the store for the tin of mints. I finally asked a Cast Member if they knew if there were any in the store and I was told they’d either be on a specific shelf in the 50th Anniversary section of the store, which we’d already checked, or at the checkout line area. We searched all of the checkout lines but sadly, there were no mints to be found at all. I wanted to keep looking at several other shops all the way to the other end of Disney Springs, and I hoped maybe Goofy’s Candy Company or the Marketplace Co-Op might have the mints. But after visiting Basin and the Crystal Arts shop, we started feeling sprinkles of rain.

I looked up at the sky and saw rain clouds that were probably heading our way. I know that rain storms in Florida can be brief, and if I was at a park we would just put on our ponchos and keep on going. But I didn’t bother to look at the weather forecast before we left the room and it turns out this was supposed to last more than a few minutes, and we didn’t bother to bring our ponchos. So rather than try to cram into shops with people when the rain got harder, we decided to head back to the van. I still had Thursday and Friday to come back and go to the rest of the shops that I wanted to visit. By some magic of Disney, it stayed at a very light sprinkle all the way until we got back to the parking lot. It started to rain harder just after we were on our way back to Old Key West and it rained pretty steadily for a couple of hours after that. It cut my Disney Springs visit short, but it made for a nice relaxing sit on the patio.

With food, drinks, and snacks in the room, we all just spent the rest of the day and evening chilling in the room and just enjoying doing a whole lot of nothing. It was great.

Once again, I’ll be back next Tuesday with the next part of my trip report! I hope to see you here! °O°