Homeward Bound

In my original itinerary, I had planned for us to spend our last morning in one of the parks. But in my original itinerary, I hadn't really accounted for both of us getting SICK during our trip.

The last few days of our stay at Disney have been pretty uncomfortable, but I'm glad they came at the end of the trip, rather than the beginning.

Needless to say, we spent our last morning in bed, rather than in the parks. On top of our sinus problems, we were a bit leery of taking the buses into the parks and were worried about getting checked out and dropping the fridge of for the next Swap participant, and making sure we were back at POP in plenty of time to catch our Magical Express bus.

In retrospect, I wish I'd gone with Carrie's preference of leaving on an earlier flight (so we wouldn't get home at 9pm). But I honestly thought we'd have plenty of time to hang out before we left.

Check-out was at 11am and after leaving our room, we took our bags and the fridge to the front, then headed to the food court to write postcards and eat lunch. We used up the last of our counter service credits and found that we still had 4 snack credits to use. I wanted to get some more of the tasty gummy candies from Goofy's Candy Company but there weren't any available in the food court or gift shop, so we settled for some turkey jerky for me, a few boxes of cookies (for the kids back home), and some cookies for Carrie. Here is a picture of Carrie's lunch from the POP food court, some sort of mediterranean chicken flatbread and fruit:



I also had some money left on my Disney Rewards card, so I wandered around in the POP gift shop and settled on a few more souvenirs to take home.

We had a few minutes left before we were supposed to meet for the bus, so I ran outside and took some pictures of POP Century (which I had neglected to do before).

We got out to the bus stop and there were about four or five other families waiting. Luckily, we were able to snag a bench.



The bus was a little bit later than we thought it would be, but once we got on, it was straight to the airport. They showed another little movie on the way back which I thought was funny since it was talking about all the new upcoming rides they were working on like... "Expedition Everest."

It was just a little outdated... but still helped to pass the time and we were at the airport before we knew it.

Security is just crazy in Orlando and there were so many people trying to file through the security checkpoints that I was suddenly very glad that the ME bus got us to the airport so early. We still had a bit of a wait before we got on our short flight to Miami, and I enjoyed a pretzel with processed cheese while I waited. The flight to Miami was crowded and kind of sucky. I didn't have window to look out which made me kind of sick. My sinus problems didn't help and I felt incredibly ill.



In Miami, we had another long layover and we ate some gross Chinese food and passed the time with knitting and staring off into space. At one point, I attempted to sleep under Carrie's legs on the yucky carpeted floor of the airport but deemed it too sketchy and uncomfortable and moved back up into the chair.

The flight to St. Louis was better but a little more turbulent. We had another person sharing our row this time but thankfully he wasn't loud or smelly and didn't try to talk to us. We watched episodes of The Office on the laptop and the time passed pretty quickly. The next thing we knew, we were grabbing our bags off the luggage carousel, hopping on the MetroLink and homeward bound.