We just returned from a fabulous trip to Universal Studios Orlando and the October 14, 2016 3 night Halloween on the High Seas cruise on the Disney Dream. We had so much fun and I can’t wait to share it with you!
I won’t bore you with details of our 3 day drive to Orlando. We broke the drive up so that we only had to drive about 4 hours each day. I barely took any pictures, but here is one from the road trip. This was right after we ate at Cracker Barrel and got some massive Twizzlers for the rest of the drive.
The 3 girls on the left belong to me, and the one on the right is my niece. She is a huge Harry Potter fan so we just had to bring her along so that she could experience the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios. This would also be her first cruise ever!
For this trip report, I am going to count Day 1 as the day that we arrived in Orlando and checked into our hotel, the Cabana Bay Beach Resort at Universal Orlando. We arrived at the hotel around 1:30 and decided to check and see if our room was ready early. We pulled up to the main entrance and the valet guys told us we could park our car there for a few minutes while we went to check in. This resort is fairly new and has a retro theme. This is what the lobby looks like:
Unfortunately our room wasn’t ready yet but they promised to text me when it was. While I was in line, my kids spotted the gift ship which is right next to the lobby and started going crazy over all of the Harry Potter merchandise. I have to admit that I was pretty excited to look at it as well.
I thought the gift shop was really large for a hotel. Here is a general view, minus the Harry Potter section which was to the right side in this photo:
There was a nice, large Starbucks, which we never ended up visiting during our stay.
After spending a few minutes in the gift shop, we decided to get some lunch while we waited for our room. We grabbed a quick bite at Chick-fil-A and then headed just across the street to the brand new Sapphire Falls Resort. It just opened in June and the public relations folks reached out to me about taking a tour for a feature on Kidtripster.com, which is a family travel website that I contribute to. I was supposed to meet them in the lobby at 3:00 for the tour. We walked into the lobby and let me tell you, it is stunning! I won’t go into too much detail here (I’ll let you check out the feature on Kidtripster once it is complete), but I’ll share a few photos. This is the lobby:
The resort has a tropical Caribbean theme. The pool looked amazing!
My kids were impressed by the water slide:
We got to take a peek inside one of the rooms, which I thought were really nice.
After we finished the tour, we headed back across the street to Cabana Bay. Our room was ready and we were excited to see it! The main reason I chose to stay at Cabana Bay is because it has a single room that sleeps 6 people. There are several separate buildings at the resort that house guest rooms, and our room was in the Castaway building and faced one of the 2 pools. Our section was set up like a motel, where the rooms open to the outdoors. My husband wasn’t crazy about this, but it didn’t bother me. I think I would have liked it less if our room had been on the other side facing the parking lot, but I kind of liked seeing the pool right outside our door. It appeared that the other section of the hotel, which surrounded the second pool, had interior hallways. Here is the walkway outside of our room:
This was our view of the pool area:
Our room was very retro and I thought the theming was tastefully done. There was a section with 2 queen beds:
There was a translucent wall with a pocket door dividing the bed area from the living area, which had a queen sofa bed. I forgot to take a picture of it with the bed pulled out.
We also had a kitchenette and a connecting door to the adjacent room:
The refrigerator was really nice for a hotel room. It was larger than a typical hotel room refrigerator, and had we been staying longer than 2 nights I think we would have appreciated it a lot more. As it was we never really needed it.
The bathroom had a really great configuration for 6 people. There was a vanity with a sink that was open to the bedroom area:
On one side of it was a room with a second sink and shower/tub, and on the other side was a room with the toilet. Having 2 sinks and the toilet separate from the shower really helped speed things up when we were all trying to get ready in the mornings.
Once in the room, we were eager to hit the pools. There are 2 pool areas at the resort – the Cabana Courtyard and the Lazy River Courtyard. Our room faced the Cabana Courtyard pool but we wanted to check out the Lazy River so we started walking across the resort. Right next to our building was this big sandy area that looked like a lot of fun or kids. At night the lights made it look really fun and festive.
We found out later that there was a shorter walkway between the 2 pool areas, but we ended up going back through the lobby to get there. I took some pictures along the way. This is a bar in the hotel lobby:
This is the food court seating area. We ate breakfast here twice and really enjoyed it (more on that later).
We finally arrived at the Lazy River Courtyard. This is the walkway from the lobby building towards the pool area. There was a lot of construction going on around this resort, but I never did ask what they were building. Also, as you can see, it looked like it might rain at any minute.
I’m not sure if it was from Hurricane Matthew the week before or if it is always like this, but there were some spots that looked a little messy:
We arrived at the Lazy River pool and I have to admit that we were a bit disappointed. It was much smaller than the Cabana Courtyard pool next to our room. But, it has a lazy river so that should make up for it, right? Not for us. First of all, the water in the lazy river was freezing. Much colder than the water in the pool (they do not connect) and way to cold for me, especially since it was overcast and breezy with the threat of rain. It didn’t take much convincing to talk my kids out of it. Plus, you have to purchase inner tubes to use. There is a stand that sells them and blows them up or you, but then you either have to trash them or deflate them & haul them around for the rest of your vacation. No thank you. I did take a picture of the prices:
They also had life jackets for kids which I though was nice:
A general view of the Lazy River pool:
We let the kids play for a while and then decided that we wanted to go check out the Cabana Courtyard pool next to our room which has a water slide. For some reason I totally forgot to take pictures of the pool and slide. This is the only one I took, and you can just see the end of the slide on the left side. You can also see our hotel room in the background.
Here is a photo from the hotel website that shows the whole thing.
My kids liked this pool, and especially the slide, much better and I wish we had just spent all of our time here. We let them play and slide for 30-45 minutes and then it was time to go back to the room to take showers and find some dinner.
We managed to get everyone showered fairly quickly and decided to go to the one table service restaurant at the resort which is inside the bowling alley, Galaxy Bowl. Yep, this resort has a bowling alley. While we didn’t have enough time to bowl (we were getting up really early the next morning so we couldn’t let the girls stay up very late), it looked like a lot of fun. This was the view from our table:
The food was good, service was great, but as expected at a resort, the prices were high.
After dinner we went to bed and tried to get some good sleep before our big VIP tour at Universal the next day.
Click here for Day 2: Universal Studios and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter!
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