See pre-trip below!

(A bit of a warning, today's report will end on a very sad note.)

June 8th
We were in the car by 4am to start the drive from NC to WDW. We ended up making really great time and arrived in WDW by 1pm. I had been furiously checking the app in hopes of our room being ready but hadn't received any updates.

We had a 3:45 reservation at Ohana but decided to swing by Saratoga Springs first to see if by any chance the room was ready. Surprisingly it was (I never did receive a text even though the front desk was convinced they had sent one). We were in the carrousel section and ended up with a nice view and being very close to the pool and two bus stops.

We unpacked, changed and then hopped in the car to the Poly. We were a little early for our reservation so we headed out back to the beach at which point we discovered my phone was dead and unable to be revived. This wasn't good since we're a party of two adults and a toddler and needed to keep in touch while doing ride swaps. DH got on the phone right away and we set up to have a replacement delivered to the hotel the next day.

We headed up to Ohana and we're seated right against the window which made DS happy. Food was plentiful as always. I was pleasantly surprised at how tender the beef and the chicken were. Maybe the secret is coming early?

Unfortunately at this point our trip took a very sad turn, very quickly. DH's sister called with the news that one of their young cousins, just 20, had been killed in a horrific accident while on vacation. To say this news was shocking is an understatement. DS being entirely too young to understand wanted on the monorail. We ended up riding through three full resort loops to keep him content while tracking down family to find out what had happened.

At this point we were both emotionally drained and scraped plans for resort shopping. We headed back to Saratoga for an early night. This would Admittedly have us holding our own son a bit closer all trip.