2014 Disney World Star Wars Weekend 4-day Trip (Part 1)

Welcome to part 1 of my Disney World Star Wars Weekend trip report.  This is my first trip to Walt Disney World, so I was super excited.  Due to limited amount of vacation days we had, we were only able to stay for 4 days and 3 nights, which mean, we really had to pick and choose what we do or see.  We decided to stay at one of the Disney resort to save time from traveling back and forth between hotel and the parks, and take advantage of the extra magic hours to do as much as possible in our short trip.  All of the Disney resorts looks great, we decided to pick Disney's Port Orleans Resort - Riverside because the deluxe resorts were out of our price range and the moderate resorts like Port Orleans Resort offer more dining options and recreations options than value resorts. 

I booked our vacation thru Disney World's website and took advantage of one of the special offers at that time (I think it was 25 or 30% off for stay of 3 nights or more).  It was a simple and easy process to book everything on their website, including hotel room, tickets, dining plan, and magical express (airport shuttle).  For the dining plan, we got the regular dining plan with 1 table service, 1 quick-service, and 1 snack per day for 3 days.   We decided to do the dining plan since majority of our time would be spend in the park and resort.  With the purchase of the dining plan, we also received resort refillable mug for unlimited refills during our stay at the resort, including soda, tea, water, and coffee.  We used all of our table service meal for character dining, 2 for Star Wars Character Dining for dinner and 1 for The Crystal Palace for lunch.  The dining plan is very flexible to use that you can spend all your meals in 1 day if you want.  With the whole vacation package, you will also get some additional perks (arcade card at the resort, admission to DisneyQuest, discount on select Disney World tours, etc.).

About 3 weeks before our trip, we received our welcome booklet and personalized magic bands.  The booklet gave an overview of each park and the use of FastPass+.  The magic band served as our ticket to the parks, key to our resort room, dining plan meals, and credit card for purchase at Disney World.  I also made our FastPass+ selections ahead of time which could be change at anytime during the trip.  You can pick up to 3 FastPass+ each day.  I also downloaded the My Disney Experience app on my iPhone ahead of time, which actually turned out to be quite useful.  On the app, it provides you the park hours, real-time wait time for each ride, show times, and park map.  Due to the length of our trip, we decided to skip Animal Kingdom and do Hollywood Studio (which was where all the Star Wars events and attractions are at), Magic Kingdom, and Epcot.  We are planning to go to Animal Kingdom in our next trip when we are in Orlando again for conference.

On day 1, we arrived at our resort around 5pm.  We spend rest of the evening at Downtown Disney.  Here is a short slide show on our resort - Disney World Port Orleans Resort - Riverside.

In general, it is a very beautiful resort to stay at.  The only little complain that we had was the wait time for the boat to Downtown Disney.  The line for the boat were usually long during dinner time.  We wished they have more boats for peak hours.

Thank you for visiting and reading my post!  My Disney World Star Wars Weekend trip report will continue in part 2 and 3!