A couple of weekends ago, Rachel and I headed down to Disney for the Princess Half Marathon Weekend. Last year, when we originally planned this race, it was only going to be Rachel running the race. I had decided to go down to support her while spending the weekend enjoying the parks and friends. However, when the WDW Half Marathon in January was cancelled due to weather, I decided to find a race number and join the fun!

With our work schedules (especially mine) being a little crazy recently, we knew we would have to make this a quicker trip than normal. We decided to leave after work on Thursday afternoon and snag a hotel in Valdosta, which is over halfway to Orlando. 

Even with leaving during rush hour, we were able to navigate through the traffic with minor delays. After grabbing dinner along the way, we made it to our hotel with enough time to get into the room and fall asleep.

The next morning, we got off plenty early so we could get down to Disney before lunchtime. Our plan was to drop our luggage off at our friends Nick and Ciara’s place, before grabbing a quick bite to eat.

Then we were off to the expo to pick up our race numbers and shirts. We decided to knock this out a day early as to avoid the craziness of Saturday’s expo. This proved to be the right call, as the expo was not very crowded and allowed for a super laid-back experience.

After spending a few hours at the expo walking around the different vendors and running into a few friends, we made our way over to Epcot for the afternoon. Epcot had a pretty decent crowd, but honestly, we mainly wanted to walk around and hit up a few rides. We ended up getting a Fast Pass for the new Frozen ride in Norway, which had a massive 100-minute wait, so that was huge.

We ended up running into a former student of mine from Lawrenceville UMC days and his girlfriend, so that was a nice surprise for us. 

Later we hit up Disney Springs, where we met up with Nick and Ciara and our friends Chris and Meredith (and their daughter Caroline) for dinner at Blaze Pizza. After walking around for a little while, we called it a night and made our way back over to Nick and Ciara’s for the night.

Stay tuned for Part Two, which includes the #WeRunSocial meet-up, hitting up the Magic Kingdom, dinner at Vincenzo’s and staying on property at the Caribbean Beach Resort.