We got around 6:00am and got the car packed up because our hotel offered free breakfast at 7:00am. I made sure to make lots of noise as we were leaving to get back at the mean college kids who were blaring music walking in front of our room at 2:00am. Breakfast was not very exciting. Biscuits and gravy with cinnamon toast sticks and watery eggs. I had a bit but none of the family wanted anything so we left right away to go find Starbucks and Burger King. We also stopped at a Walmart to get breakfast things and water so we could avoid buying breakfast in Disney World. Somehow we managed to forget the water though.
It was at this point where we realized we had missed out on the real Panama City Beach. Our hotel area was quite run down and there was even an abandoned amusement park nearby. As we were leaving though we realized there was a whole new area that included mini-golf with waterfalls and even the "Ripley's Believe it or Not" museum in a giant ship. Kerry now remembered that she knew about all of this from when we planned our trip three years earlier but had completely forgotten. My recommendation if you go to Panama City Beach is to not go where we went.
One of the things that I dislike about Google Maps is that sometimes it offers you the quickest route that might only be quickest for a short period of time and is really not the best overall pay. Case in point for our trip leaving Panama City Beach was the dirt road it took us on before getting us on to the I-10. We ended up on several back roads before we were comfortable that it was sending us in the right direction. Northern Florida was a very boring drive. Mostly just Forrests with relatively small pine trees. This is the part of the drive that we probably should have taken the older highway closer to the water.
Although our plan was to get to Disney World today we had one stop we wanted to get in on the way. There is a town called Crystal River that has a national park with wild manatees. They come into the inner channels at this time of year. We should have done more planning though as we had to get our car back by 6:00pm and forgot we were losing an hour with the time change. If the national park had parking we might have been okay but you have to park a ways out and get a shuttle. We walked around a bit but we struck out seeing wild manatees.
We dropped the car off at the Disney Car Care centre around 5:30pm and got a shuttle to the hotel. Check-in options are starting to change with hotels. If we had known we could have checked in remotely and used our phone to access our rooms. We checked in the old way, picked up our magic bands and started to explore on our way to the room. It was nice that we had done the real New Orleans before coming to Disney World. Callie picked up on things like fountains and architecture and the name of our gift shop was Jackson Square. Major difference was cleanliness and there were no holes in the side walks.
We had reservations at Planet Hollywood in Disney Springs at 7:00 and had just enough time to catch a boat to Disney Springs. Most of the hotels have a 'unique' way of getting to at least one or two key locations and ours was a boat. Others have things like the monorail or gondolas. Planet Hollywood was a bit much for me. Very noisy and lots of people. Even though I was hungry, the full rack of ribs was way more than I could handle. Presentation was nice. It came on a tiny picnic table. It was at this point that I realized these sit down dinners were going to be pricy. They averaged $175 for the three we went to.
We finished the evening off with dessert at Ghirardelli. It's not cheap but these are the best sundaes I've ever had. They put a big glob of sauce in the bottom before they put the ice cream in so you always get to end with the good stuff. I highly recommend. We also wandered around Disney Springs a bit. It was a Friday evening and it was St. Patrick's day so it was very busy. On our way to the restaurant we had to run past an Irish Pub and they had live music and it was packed. We took a bus back to the hotel and got rested for our first day at Magic Kingdom.
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