The Log Dog Blog: WDW January 2024

We had a great long weekend at WDW and enjoyed my favorite Epcot festival while we were there! The weather was pretty chilly and it rained part of the time, but I will take that weather over 95 degrees and humid any day of the week!

For this trip, we stayed at Caribbean Beach, which is definitely tied to so many happy memories over the years. Not only have C and I stayed there countless times, but my family has stayed there together, and my mom and I have stayed there together, too. We love it so much!

We flew down on Saturday morning and spent part of the day at MK and then took the monorail over to Epcot for our first look at the Festival of the Arts offerings. I adore this festival because it's so colorful and there are rainbows all over! We went back to Epcot on Sunday and spent most of the day there, with lunch at Via Napoli. The nice thing about the festival is that there are artist signings and I purchased a Brave print that has Elinor and Merida on it and the artist, Dylan Bonner, signed it for me. Those two characters were very special to my mom and me, so I absolutely love it and can't wait to hang it up. We stayed to watch the Luminous fireworks show and then we had a late dinner at Beaches and Cream and we can't really believe how lucky we've been the last few trips with securing a reservation there! We spent part of Monday at Hollywood Studios and then did a little resort hopping before heading to airport.

Our journey home is the more interesting part of this story. Throughout the day, we kept checking the status of our flight and while it was listed as leaving ten minutes later than scheduled at one point, by the time we took an uber to the airport, it was once again listed as being on time (7:50 pm). Around 6:30, i received a text message about school being closed the following due due to snow, which brought a sense of relief concerning how late we'd be getting home, but also a sense of foreboding about what conditions would be like when we landed in D.C. Boarding began around 7:30 and we pushed back from the gate around 8:15, but then we ended up sitting on the runway until 9:20. When we finally took off, they announced that it would be about a one hour and thirty minute flight, and as usual, I went to sleep, only be be woken up around 10:30 with the announcement that the conditions at DCA were not safe, so we were being diverted to Baltimore. We landed at BWI at 11:00 and ended up just sitting on the tarmac for over an hour before we pulled into a gate. During that time, they announced that they would be refueling and then they'd be flying us to DCA. However, as we were finally pulling up to the gate, they announced they they would not be flying us to DCA, that the trip was over, and that everyone needed to deplane. That was it. No conversation about hotels or transportation options or anything. Obviously, this made a lot of people very angry. C and I were not particularly surprised because we saw there was a ground stop at DCA, so we'd already been discussing our options. B1 and S1 live not too far from BWI, but they were also out of town for the long weekend; we considered taking an uber to their house to spend the night as a last resort if nothing else worked out. Obviously our concern was that we were in Baltimore, our car was at DCA, and Avalanche was at his dog hotel at home. We first went to the taxi stand and that was pure chaos, so we decided to try our luck with uber, and thankfully we had someone accept the job. We got picked up a little before 1:00 am and considered ourselves very fortunate because other travelers were saying they had an uber, but the driver ended up canceling the ride. We really lucked out. It took about an hour to get to DCA, and our uber driver was amazing. The roads were absolutely terrible, with hardly any visibility and countless cars in the ditch, so we were beyond relieved to arrive at DCA safely. When we walked through the terminal, there were so many stranded travelers - school groups, sports teams, elderly folks, families with babies and young kids...I felt so badly for all of them. We got to our car, which, for the first time in two decades of flying in and out of DCA, we'd had to park on the roof of the garage, and started the drive home. Thankfully, the roads improved the closer we got to home and we arrived just before 3:00 am.

The best part of the crazy ordeal was when we landed in Baltimore and I turned on my phone, I happened into the best conversation: two of my best friends were worried and had been tracking our flight and then stayed up to keep me company and endure my frazzled updates. I love them so much!