Back home - snacks and final thoughts
Thank you so much to everyone for reading along and leaving lovely comments. I've really enjoyed doing the report and will definitely aim to do one again, but it won't be until late 2019. We're going to have a break and hopefully catch the opening of Star Wars land and see Pandora. It will also be an 18th birthday surprise for Izzy, and her and Andy will go to the HHN at Universal, so we may look at a split stay. MNSSHP is more mine and Brodie's level
We're big fans of free dining and as a family do prefer the flexibility that the qsdp gives us. Don't get me wrong, we loved trying out all the restaurants we went to the times we had the DDP, but I was really bad at judging what time we might be hungry plus it was harder to change our plans on the day knowing that we had to be at X restaurant at a certain time. I know people worry about the variety on the qsdp, but there's plenty for us and some more interesting options if you hunt them out. The tricky for us sometimes was finding somewhere with interesting options plus something to still satisfy the children. However, it's getting easier as they get older and I was pleased at how willing they were to try things at the food booths at Epcot.
The QS highlight of the trip for us was definitely Blaze. The pizzas are so fresh and I love that you can pile them with toppings - especially vegetables. It's a shame that they didn't allow me to get a salad on the plan. Not quite sure why as they're the same price. If we weren't on a plan and paying oop, then we'd still definitely eat there as I thought it was great value - $9.95 for a build your own pizza, same for a salad including protein. A basic cheese and tomato pizza and salad without a protein was $7.95 I think. A pizza and salad for lunch between 2 people would be lovely
I was also pleased with our finds at Harambe Market, Tangierine Café and Fairfax Fair. I was over the moon to find that my favourite fruit tart from Starring Rolls was still available at HS and thoroughly enjoyed my Nutella and fruit waffle from Sleepy Hollow. Lunch at Be Our Guest is also a favourite of ours. Having the extra snack credit this year meant that we were really able to go to town at the garden festival food booths and we tried some lovely things. A special mention from Izzy for the chicken and crawfish dish from the French booth - she was quite fond of that
Lows included the really poor offerings at the CBR food court. It's the third moderate hotel we've stayed at and the offering and standard was well below what we've had at both POFQ and POR. It was so nice to pop back to POR for lunch one day. I'm hoping that the refurb work will bring a much improved food court as we really liked CBR as a resort, but wouldn't stay there again unless the food offerings improves, or the price difference was too much to ignore. This is something we all agreed on. Our worst meals of the holiday came from there and we enjoyed everything we tried elsewhere. Our other low was the 2 surly waiters that we had at Rainforest Café and Yak and Yeti. I've had an email from Landry's asking for feedback, so I'll be sure to do that.
We had 21 snack and 11 meal credits left at the end of our stay. We had 3 TS meals and breakfast in our room quite a lot, so without those I guess we'd have got through a lot more credits. We don't have breakfast in our room to save credits though, it's just something that we find suits us. We don't always want a cooked breakfast and like to be able to get up, get ready, have a quick breakfast and head straight to the parks. We're not big fans of muffins, cakes, pastries etc for breakfast (although with the amount of pain au chocolat and croissants we got, you may find that hard to believe, but most of them were eaten as snacks later in the day), so taking cereal suits us.
What did we get with the 54 snack credits we bad left? Well, I'm afraid that I don't have photos of a big stash of goodies as we got everything on the last day and it went straight in the cases as we didn't pack until the morning we checked out. We got a mixture of things to eat on the journey home and treats for home, friends and family. Looking out the receipts we got:
4 packs of pretzels
4 packed of salted Lays
4 dark chocolate and sea salt Kind bars
3 packs of plain M&Ms
1 pack of peanut M&Ms
2 Snickers bars
2 Twix bars
All of that was eaten on the journey home and at the Premier Inn.
We also got:
8 packs of Minnie cookies
2 packs of shortbread rounds
12 packs of chocolate coins
12 large chocolate coin packs in the shape of a Mickey head - these are a really good size and make a lovely gift. I've taken a photo of it on my hand to give you an idea of scale.
So, back home now and readjusting to reality - family favourite of spaghetti bolognese for dinner tonight. Is it just me or does anyone else find it hard to get in to the swing of meal planning and cooking again after 2 weeks of being catered for?
Thanks again for reading along and if anyone has any questions, I'll do my best to answer them