Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend Trip Day 1

Sharon (my bride), Mark (our younger son), and I headed to Walt Disney World on Monday, January 4, 2016 to participate in the Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend. Mark signed up for the 5K, Sharon signed up for the 5K & 10K, and I signed up for the marathon. We left for Detroit Metropolitan Airport at about 4:30pm for our 7:50pm flight, knowing we'd have to drive through Detroit at rush hour.

It's a good thing we left earlier than we thought we needed to. There was a multi-car accident on I-94 west that had it down to 1 lane. We made it to the airport with just enough time to eat dinner before boarding our Delta flight to Orlando International Airport.

We landed in Orlando around 10:40pm. We grabbed our checked bags, picked up a Jeep Patriot from Alamo, and drove to Port Orleans-Riverside. We arrived at Port Orleans-Riverside at about 11:30pm. We never received a text about our room so we had to go to the check-in counter. We had a room-only reservation and still needed to pay the remaining balance. We had one problem with our payment. I had 3 gift cards that I had applied to our balance, 2 of which were $10 Disney gift cards from Disney Movie Rewards. The cast member tells me the one had zero balance, which was funny since I had checked them all the day before to make sure they were good. While she was checking in, I pulled up the gift card on my phone and was able to show her that there had been a $10 balance and there were 3 attempts to use it (she tried 3 times). So, she had to work on getting that taken care of us. This wasn't the only problem we had resulting from check-in, but more on that on Day 2.

We drove to our room, #3536 in Alligator Bayou building 35. We got everything situated in the room and went to bed shortly after midnight.