Day 9 of our trip was upon us, and it was a bittersweet morning. Relaxing, but a little sad because our trip was coming to a close. We had had such a wonderful time, we didn’t want to go home. Ah, well.

We started the morning off with a takeout breakfast from Gasparilla’s Grill back in the room. After bacon, eggs, sausage, fruit and more, we started the process of packing. We packed. And we packed. I have no idea how we had brought that much stuff in the first place, but somehow it all had to go back on the plane.

After getting our things in order, I phoned down to the front desk to request a late checkout time, which they granted. Our plane wasn’t schedule to depart until 5:30, so we had some time to kill. We would catch the Magical Express bus back to the airport around 2:30, so we decided to go over to Downtown Disney to do a little last minute souvenir shopping.

After calling bell service to come get our bags and store them, we caught a bus to Downtown Disney. One of the primary goals was to visit the Lego store, which we located fairly quickly. They had remodeled it since we had been there last, it was larger and had some new features. One new feature was an area were they had just about every different basic lego piece you could think of individually categorized in little bins. The way things worked is you chose either a small cup for $7.99 or a large cup for $12.99 and filled it up with as many pieces as you could. Pretty cool.

The kids each picked out a Lego set and we made our purchases. Right outside of the store was a McDonald’s, so we took a break and got some fries and drinks. After that we spent a considerable amount of time wandering around in the largest Disney Store there is. Of course, we located a few souvenirs.

It was time to catch the bus back to the hotel, so we did, and made it back just in time to retrieve our bags from bell services and catch our Magical Express bus to the airport. We did have a few minutes to snap a few pictures in the garden area in front of the hotel lobby, and by the horse-drawn carriage and ’38 cadillac they had parked out front. Our bus arrived and we loaded up and made the trip to the airport.

Once there, we checked in with the airline, went through security and hunted around to find something to eat. Turns out we didn’t need to rush, though… Our plane ended up being delayed just over 3 hours. During the long wait, the kids played with their new lego sets, and made some new friends with some other kids waiting for the same plane.

Finally we were allowed to board, and the flight back was uneventful. Once we had landed (around 10:30 Central time), we retrieved our bags and rode the shuttle to the parking lot, where we located the truck and headed home. We finally arrived, very sleepily, around midnight.

In retrospect, we had a tremendously enjoyable time. The kids loved the trip, and collectively we made some memories we will have for years to come. One of the neat things about WDW is you can go back at regular intervals, and still have a great balance of classic memorable things from the past and plenty of new things to experience. And while it is expensive as far as things go, I can’t think of many places where you get quite the bang for your buck, on the whole.

So all I have now is to edit some video together…