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13 Feb 17, 04:45 PM
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And When Did You Last See Your Father? - Day 13 (Disney Quest, Noble Sandwiches and Citricos)
We are a family of three - me (April), DH (R.C.) and DS (Poot, who turned ten on this holiday). We visited Orlando and Sanibel Island, travelling from Gatwick on BA.  DH has his own business and could only join us for part of the holiday (hence the title of this trippie). He's not much for theme parks, but always enjoys our time on Sanibel. For our week on the Gulf Coast, we were joined by my lovely DM (Judybat) and her husband (Hans).  Trippie Index Here Day 12 (Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party, 1900 Park Fare and Be Our Guest) Here Disney Quest Day! The Best Day? We were at the Christmas Party until midnight last night - so we hadn’t gotten back to our room until nearly 1:00 AM. I was glad that a late start was planned for this morning! If you read my (weird) Boston shopping report, you might remember that I bought “Flags of the Revolution” t-shirts for Poot and me at the Faneuil Hall National Park Shop.   And since the election had been yesterday, we decided to wear them today. By the time we were ready to go it was nearly 10:00 AM, so we decided to skip breakfast and make our way over to Disney Springs for an early lunch at the Earl of Sandwich. Disney Quest (R.I.P.) didn’t open until 12:00 PM, so our plan was to head down there for some state of the art (  ) gaming after our tasty lunch. We took a couple of snaps of Disney Springs across the water -  - the volcano at Rainforest Cafe was erupting - Poot really dug this.  I wish some of the money that goes into the pyrotechnics at Rainforest would be redirected towards the food…  Standing next to us and snapping away were some fellow Saratogans. They were sporting their Trump t-shirts and their smiles could have lit up Disney Springs. I had a little chat with the lady of the house - she had stayed up until 3:00 AM to watch the election called. I had not, and indeed had been VERY surprised this morning when I popped on the telly and saw the results!  Poot, whose perspective is always...interesting...wanted to know if we’d see lots of people wearing those Disney “I’m Celebrating” badges for Trump.  Hmm... We arrived in Disney Springs a few minutes before the Earl opened for the day, so took some snaps in a pretty empty Marketplace:   It was a real treat not to have to wait in a massive queue at EoS - we were soon tucking into our lunches. Now normally we share all our QS meals, but we were so “behind” with our credits that today we each ordered our own (we were also pretty hungry, having not eaten since our “prevening” dinner yesterday).  Knowing that I didn’t have to share, I picked a sandwich that Poot doesn’t like:  The Full Montagu - roasted beef, turkey, cheddar, Swiss, lettuce, roma tomato and mustard sauce $7.45 This was delicious, though I definitely prefer the Original 1762. I was determined, however, to try DIFFERENT sandwiches, and not just have the same thing over and over. Yay, me!  Poot’s favourite Earl of Sandwich sandwich is the Italian - salami, capicola, ham, mortadella, mozzarella, roma tomato, Italian seasoning, and Italian dressing $6.99  This is a tasty sandwich, but wow! that’s a lot of processed meat…  On the dining plan LAST YEAR , you could get either a side OR a dessert at the EoS, plus your drink. I don’t know how the dining plan changes for 2017 have shaken out here, I’d love to know if anyone has been to the Earl since the switch. Poot got a bottle of water and the vilest side there is, salt and vinegar crisps (gag!), while I picked a fountain soda and a pot...of brownie bites. The bites are very more-ish, and pretty moist (for purchased brownies). We couldn’t finish them all, so I put the rest in my handbag for later. The lid seemed pretty secure, but it turned out that...it wasn’t. Later in the day the bottom of my bag looked like this:  Sigh, that bag still smells of chocolate. Because we didn’t have to wait in the usual queue at the Earl, we had plenty of time to wander down to Disney Quest and indeed we arrived right before (the noon) opening time. We took a few more snaps along the way:    I had only been to Disney Quest once before (with my brother, in 2007) - but very little had changed (Boy Howdy). It had been very busy the night that my brother and I were there - so we hadn’t gotten to try the dodgem game (Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters) or the live-action pinball-thing (is this called Mighty Ducks Pinball Slam?). Because the queues for these had been so long when I was there last, I assumed they must be good, so we made them our first two stops. They were both REALLY FUN! The Astro Blasters are just dodgems - but dodgems that “fire” balls at other cars.  In the pinball game you stand on these wobbly platform thingies and move your body in order to move the ball on a giant pinball table (?) that you see as a huge screen in front of you.  Per usual - Hello! if these are your families.  Poot preferred the Astro Blasters, but I really liked the Pinball Slam (probably because I couldn’t figure out how to make my bumper car fire its ammunition ).DQ was really quiet - so we knocked out pretty much everything in the building in about two and a half hours. We do not have a video game machine thing (?) at our house so all this was new to Poot. We tried lots of the arcade games - here’s Poot playing “Fix-it Felix Jr.” -  - and then designed (and rode) a roller coaster on Cyber Space Mountain (I wanted to call it “The Jolly Trolley” - but wasn’t allowed to).  DQ also has Skee-ball, which I LOVE - and which Poot had never tried before.  A great big French-Canadian family came along and needed all the “lanes”, or I could have happily played this all afternoon... I became quite the skee-ball boss when I used to have to take my little brother and his friends to Chuck E. Cheese…who else remembers Chuck E. Cheese?  We finished up our afternoon at Disney Quest with a go on the Pirates of the Caribbean game. If your kids like “Horrible Histories: Gory Games”,  they will like this. You try and sink as many pirate ships as possible - it’s really fun!  I know that most of the games are rather dated, and tech has come on (!) in the years since DQ was built/updated - but we really had a good time at Disney Quest. If you have younger kids and are looking for a fun way to spend a few hours (before it closes in July) AND you have UK Ultimate tickets (or the APs that include DQ), I’d recommend it. We walked up to the new Welcome Center (Poot had heard rumours of PINS there) -  - and Poot put his name down on the list. This is really fun for kids - they called out Poot’s name, and a “plaid” took him over to the pin book. They were all scrappers the day we looked, but it’s another fun thing for kids to do at Disney Springs - especially if you don’t have park tickets. I really do think that you can easily spend a whole day there with kids - without having to spend much cash.  I’m sure that you can guess how we spent the rest of the afternoon…  After our swim, we decided to see what dinner reservations were available for tonight. Ooh, Citricos! That’s supposed to be good! We put on our Sunday-go-to-meeting-clothes (I even put on some mascara! ) and headed over to the Grand Floridian. There was a Photopass photographer stationed near where the “GF” motif is set into the floor. I was pretty excited to get our picture here. But I had to cut Poot’s hands out of the picture (and there went the GF motif!) because in every photo he’s making “Egyptian hands”.   I had to laugh, this photographer was a woman - and she was so petite that she was even shooting up at Poot. No wonder we both have double chins!   Not only did I gain a chin in this photo, the backlighting also turned me ginger! I don’t think it suits me...lol. We didn’t have a long wait for our table at Citricos - the restaurant was busy, though not complet, by any means. A woman and a child...and...yep, we were taken to the worst table in the restaurant (though I didn’t know it yet). There are tables with good views here -  - some overlook the GF courtyard and some let you peek into the kitchen. But ours was next to the cutlery station - and the servers made no effort to be quiet as the fished around in the bins… Our waitress tonight was another long-time Disney employee and she was professional and civil (truthfully, she reminded me of servers in France). She took our drink orders (I had sparkling water, Poot had...tap) and soon a runner brought some bread and butter.  The bread was fresh and savoury; it was served with unsalted butter sprinkled with salt crystals. We limited ourselves to one slice each, but I could have gobbled all of it up. A good start! While we ate our bread I began to notice the VERY irritating and practically non-stop clatter clatter clatter clatter clatter from the cutlery station. I told Poot that it was really bothering me and… Mother, don’t complain… Oh, all right (grumble, grumble). But I knew it would make me nuts. Our waitress came back to check on us and I just couldn’t help myself. I had to say something about the clatter. But just as I started to, our mains came. Sod’s law! I had chosen the steak (never!):  Oak-grilled Beef Filet potato purée, baby carrots, cipollini jam, Bordelaise $49.00 This was succulent. It was the best steak I had in Florida, and the best filet I’ve had in a long time. The accompaniments complemented the meat perfectly - If I had been alone in the room, I’d have licked the plate. That sauce...mmm...  Poot went for chicken tonight:  Not that kind!  Bell & Evans Chicken fregula pasta, mushrooms, spinach, sun-dried tomato pesto, chicken jus $37 If you are wondering what “fregula” is, I didn’t know either - here’s what Wikipedia had to say: Fregula (also fregola) is a type of pasta from Sardinia. It is similar to North African berkoukes and Israeli couscous. The fregula was a really good partner for the chicken. In fact, this whole dish was DELISH. Poot picked it because he has a weird pesto obsession, but he hoovered up every bite. The chicken I had at Cinderella’s the other night was very good indeed, but this was better. Yum. While we were eating our mains, we had a visit from the restaurant manager - our waitress had obviously caught enough of what I had started to say to alert him to my minor dissatisfaction (I swear it was like they were staging bleeding Stomp! six feet from my head).  The restaurant manager looked seventeen (!) and he was desperately earnest, bless him. Would I like a glass of champagne? He'll move us to another table right now, blah blah blah. But by now, we had our mains and I really didn’t want the hassle of changing tables. The manager was a personable young man and not long in his position - we ended up having an interesting conversation about who gets what table and why...let’s just say it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know…  Still, he was a sweet chap, recently married to a French lass (and struggling to improve his French - aren’t we all?). Looking back I should have let him move us! Next time I’ll just wait for a table by the window, lol. The waitress came back to take our dessert orders. There is a cheese plate on the starter menu, but I asked if Poot could have it as his dessert instead. The answer was yes:   Citricos Cheese Board Experience - four artisanal cheese pairings with seasonal compote, Medjool dates, Savannah bee honeycomb, and almond praline $18 I couldn’t resist THE Florida dessert:  Florida Key Lime Pie - baked in a graham cracker tart shell served with fresh strawberries and a quenelle of sweet mandarin sorbet $10.00 I pushed the pie to one side and we shared the cheese as a little cheese course. This was very nice indeed.  We’ve both had Fourme d'Ambert many times, but les fromages d’Auvergne ( ) are some of my absolute favourite cheeses. I also really like trying the artisanal cheeses from America - it’s fun to taste things we can’t get here (or in France). I was a bit disappointed that one of the cheeses was a Cabot cheddar - you can get that ANYWHERE in America - but the other two were new to us.Poot’s favourite was definitely the Humbolt Fog - he loves a bit of goat. I thought it was good, but not spectacular. Neither of us were particularly keen on the Red Hawk (probably because neither of us really like triple cream Bries), but I know if R.C. had been there he would have liked it very much. Despite its ubiquity, the Cabot cheddar was good, and of course the French cheese was as tasty as always. The little accoutrements were well-chosen. More of them would have been welcome...but it was still a more generous offering than the two (2) blackberries that came with the charcuterie at Be Our Guest! Poot was VERY keen on the honeycomb - it was the first time he had ever had honey from the comb. We left a bit of the Red Hawk on the plateau (it just wasn’t for us) and moved on to PIE. This was GORGEOUS. So many of the Disney desserts smack you in the face with SWEET, but this little pie was mostly tart, just a little bit sweet and so, so good. I don’t really think the sorbet was a particularly good garnish/partner for key lime pie - but as a sorbet on its own it was very nice - more citrus flavour, though... We paid the bill (around $120) using 4 table service credits and I left a 20% tip. Our waitress hadn’t given us the crappy table, and she tried to fix things when she knew I was a little bit unhappy. She was more businesslike than friendly, but that was OK with me. Worth it on the dining plan? Well, for us - yes. By this point I had determined that the 2 credit TS restaurants suited my expectations of a sit-down meal better than the 1 credit ones. I decided to cancel our Turf Club rezzie and try and swap it for a reservation at a Signature. So before we left, I asked our waitress and the restaurant manager what restaurant (other than Victoria and Albert’s and Citricos, obviously) they thought was the best on property - and they both said Artist Point - so I filed that away for future reference and we made for the monorail. Oh, and one more thing about the manager - he had actually started with Disney seven or eight years earlier - as a custodian. I liked him even more for that, I hope he goes far. Oh, and one more thing about Citricos - I loved the chairs, they were so comfortable! I hate the metal chairs that seem to be in every new/renovated restaurant (they’re like something out of a Danish “love dungeon”  ) - but these were proper wood, very sturdy and soft under the old caboose. Tiny whine here… I REALLY wish that there was a footpath from the G-Flo to Magic Kingdom! You can walk from the Poly to the GF - and I wish the path connected all the way… Anyway, we got a very busy monorail over to Magic Kingdom - on the way everyone in our carriage got to listen to an American LOUD TALKER tell his pals all about how in London there are people employed to shove passengers into carriages until they can’t move. “I’VE BEEN TO LONDON THREE TIMES, YOU KNOW,”. It never fails, whenever you are in a carriage with someone extra loud (or smelly) something happens with the train and sure enough, we were “held” at the G-Flo for like ten minutes! I gave Poot “the look” -  - you know, the one that says “It’s rude to contradict others in public, even if said others are WRONG”, but he was champing at the bit - I could see him biting his lip! Happily we were soon disembarking at MK and we heard LOUD TALKER no more. Seriously, Dude…  I was wearing heels, so I wasn’t up for a long visit to a park, but I promised Poot that since we were already at the GF, we could duck over to Magic Kingdom and (you guessed it) get some Sorcerers cards. Of course, with all the extra security now, you can’t really do much “ducking in” - unless you’re an annual passholder with no bags! As we walked out from under the train station into MK, I spotted that there was only a five minute wait to meet (talking) Mickey. This would be a new one for us, and Poot didn’t know that he talked (I knew...the Dibb, of course ). I know it would make the wait longer, but I do wish they only brought one family at a time into the room where Mickey meets - it would make the “reveal” so awesome. The man in front of us got to help Mickey with a magic trick, and Poot was really hoping that he would get to do the same - but I was pretty sure that he would “get” something else from Mickey.   And yep, he was asked to help Mickey roar like a lion…  Which he dutifully did. But as we walked out, Poot said to me, “Mother, did Mickey think I was FOUR?” Oh, dear. Me: Well, Poot, maybe Mickey has a set number of things that he says, and he just says them in order and whoever gets them gets them… Poot: I don’t think so, Mother… Me: Hmm...shall we go and get some Sorcerers cards?  Cards collected, we made for the Saratoga bus stop. Before long we were back in Room 1812. And so to bed. Day 14 (Typhoon Lagoon and Hoop-Dee-Doo Revue) Here Edited at 12:02 AM. |
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13 Feb 17, 05:11 PM
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VIP Dibber
 
Join Date: Apr 04
Location: Rugby
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A nice relaxing day after your busy day yesterday
 Joan 
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13 Feb 17, 05:47 PM
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Guest
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Another great day .
Totally with you on the parenting front . Some people think I'm strict but I just don't agree with letting your kids run riot in a restaurant whether they're 2 or 12 . It's just a no no . I've taken them out to restaurants since they were tiny so they have just grown up knowing that you behave yourself ! Maybe some of these kids don't get taken out much and I can see why! Lovely photo of you both at the GF ❤ |
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14 Feb 17, 09:43 AM
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VIP Dibber
Join Date: May 13
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Thats a really lovely photo of you and Poot at Citricos!
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 Our trip reports - 1st trip to Florida - April 2014 - 'Are we nearly Bankrupt yet?!' The Kuna Mahuna Croatia Holiday 2016 Bankrupt again Florida 2017 New York & RCL Anthem of Seas 2018 https://dibb.in/13476718 And now it’s time for Wine Wine Wine! Rome + Celebrity Cruise May 2022 https://dibb.in/15427816 |
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14 Feb 17, 11:30 AM
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Thanks for sticking with me! 
I think living in France for part of every year has helped Poot with his restaurant etiquette. When you see other children sitting properly at table and participating in the conversation it helps! If all you ever see is kids running around or stuck in front of screens... glad to know your kids are also helping to set a better example - Go, Dibb kids! Thanks for commenting (and for the attagirl, those never get old!  ).
Sigh. Thanks for coming along to the G-Flo with us!
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14 Feb 17, 12:43 PM
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Imagineer
Join Date: Oct 11
Location: Dundee
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The Full Montagu is my favourite!
We really liked Disney Quest for a 'rest' day, it's a pity it will be gone by the next time we visit. We are planning Citricos for this year and you don't see many reviews of it so I enjoyed reading yours! I love the manager's backstory. Cancelling Turf Club was probably a wise move! One of our most underwhelming Disney meals ever. |
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14 Feb 17, 01:29 PM
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I hope you like Citricos - it is definitely a restaurant we'll go back to. And as for the manager - I think ALL businesses would be better and stronger if everybody had to start in/do a stint in Custodial Services. I don't think cleaning a few commodes would do Bob Iger any harm! Good to know about the Turf Club - I booked it knowing my DH's love of "just going down to the hotel restaurant". That is one of the great things about AKL and the G-Flo, there are so many great choices RIGHT IN THE HOTEL. Thanks for the advice - keep it coming. But you're wrong about the Full Montagu, it's the Original 1762 all the way (Horseradish... )!
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27 Feb 17, 10:57 PM
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Disney Dreaming :)
Join Date: Jan 09
Location: Aberdeenshire
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Fab morning at DS! And an empty EoS! Heaven!
Aww I think that's a lovely photo of you both at GF! Glad you enjoyed your meal. It looked great. Except for the cheese board... that just looks like my worst nightmare Lol @ Poot with Mickey! He seems very grown up for his age x |
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28 Feb 17, 12:36 AM
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That meal at Citricos was our best dinner on property. Yum. But no cheese for you? I am feeling very nosy as to why... ...'cause it was very nice indeed! Hmm...grown up for his age - I suppose he is in some ways. But he isn't in others...hence the "Egyptian hands" in what were meant to be our special "posh" photos.  BOYS! Thanks for your lovely comments!
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7 Mar 17, 08:13 PM
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VIP Dibber
Join Date: Sep 14
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Yay you got a good steak! Nice start to the day with Earl of Sandwich, Disney Quest sounds a lot of fun. I could just eat that cheeseboard-yummy!
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