On this vacation, I traveled with my youngest brother, Noah, who's a senior in high school. We left our home in NE Iowa about 12:30 on Sunday afternoon, to catch our flight in Moline, IL. We chose Moline as it had a direct flight to the Sanford, FL airport (on the North side of Orlando, about 45 minutes from Disney). It was a pretty uneventful trip to the airport, we boarded on time and got to Orlando right about 9:30PM.
We hired a car service to take us to Disney, as it was cheaper than renting a car. The Orlando International Airport has the Magical Express service, which takes you from the airport to your resort, but as the Sanford airport doesn't currently offer that service, we took care of our own transportation to Pop. Our driver was very fun and nice to talk to; we had a good conversation with him on the way to Pop Century.
As we drove through the Disney sign, the nightly fireworks started! What a great welcome to Disney! That was a pretty cool coincidence.
We then arrived at Pop Century resort about 10:45PM, and checked in, which was also pretty seamless. When we drove into Pop, the gate attendant scanned our Magic Bands, which told them we were checking in. (I will devote a whole post this week to explaining Magic Bands, and what they're all about. In brief, they're a bracelet-type device that you wear on your wrist that is your room key, charging privileges, Fast Pass holder, and more! Pretty cool stuff.)
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| The check-in area at Pop; it was pretty quiet & deserted at 11PM! |
Pop Century is a value-level resort that is divided into sections and themed by pop culture icons and images from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In an upcoming post, I'll share lots of pictures and more information about Pop!
I had requested a room in either the 90s or 50s sections of Pop Century, as those areas were closest to the main building. Disney always takes room requests and they're not able to honor those 100%, but this time we lucked out! Our check-in gal handed us our information, and a map to our room location, and we were ready to go! The resorts and parks were still semi-decorated for Christmas, and so we passed the giant tree in the lobby on our way to the room.
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| HUGE tree! |
As we made the walk towards the 50s section, we were greeted by this friendly pup!
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| Hello, Tramp! |
The resort is pretty large, but it was only about a 5 minute walk from the main check-in building to our room in the 50s section. We made our way to Room #2304!
We used our Magic Bands to get into our room, our home for the next 3 nights!
Coming up in the next Trip Report post...pictures from our room!
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