We left the airport around 8pm after having an early dinner with my parents and landed in Orlando around 11:30. We quickly hopped on the train to get our luggage only to find that the Disney shuttle service doesn’t do luggage trips after 10pm. No worries, my wife is 5 months pregnant and teaches at the gym 20 nights a week and I’m a former athlete. I quickly found out that, though my wife was “fine”, I seemed more like a beaten mule than the thoroughbred I once was. Incidentally, my poor performance in the Airport inspired a 3 mile run today at a blistering 8 minutes and 12 seconds per mile. I digress.

So, after taking the Magical Express, we arrived at the hotel and checked in. Simple process except that the Caribbean Beach is huge and there was only one person on duty to bring us to our hotel. No worries, Ryan had a blast dancing in his pajamas to the sound of Jimmy Buffet on steel drums. After about 40 minutes of waiting and it getting close to 2am, our van arrived. This poor driver insisted on dollying 150 pounds of luggage upstairs to our room. Regretfully, I only had two dollars within arms reach when he left. To this day, I’ll list this as one of my greatest failings of the human race. I’ll strive to pay that forward somehow.

Day 1 has been great though. Jenn and I were very, very smart. Knowing the limitations of ourselves and, more importantly, our young adventurer, we knew we couldn’t push things. This morning we went to the Animal Kingdom Cafe and had lunch with the quasi creepy animitronic animals and then returned for a long nap. After spending most of the afternoon sleeping, we hit dinner and EPCOT. It was a good feeling to be refreshed and walking in toward a crowd of people who’d been beaten down all day by the effort it takes to really enjoy this magical place. We missed a lot at EPCOT but enjoyed every minute of what we saw.

We’ll embark on a two day effort to see what we can see at the Magic Kingdom but we’ll do it with some major nap time scheduled. This is the key to survival.