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For our Walt Disney World leg of the trip, we spent four nights at Disney’s Port Orleans Riverside. It falls in the moderately priced resort category and we absolutely adored it. We will definitely stay here again!
The grounds are just gorgeous, indicative of the rural Louisiana bayou. We stayed in the Alligator Bend section, but loved strolling through the mansion side too!
We were in building 16, which overlooked one of the quiet pools.
We arrived very late Thursday night, so my pictures are quite dark. We loved the theming of the rooms and found them perfect for boys! There were so many cute details – the lights, the carpet that looked like wood planks, the pull out bed (sleeps 5, but our party of 4 loved that nobody had to sleep with the crazy baby), the wood shower tiles, the rope curtain rods, etc.
Of course, the lobby was just lovely all decorated for Christmas!
It was an easy walk to the Riverside Mill food court. We thought the ambiance was much nicer than some of the other food courts, and the food was pretty good as well.
A quick jaunt on the boat will take you to Port Orleans French Quarter or Downtown Disney. The parks all require a bus, but we found the busses to be amazingly fast! They even had a flat screen noting when the next bus for each park was due to arrive. We didn’t even see anything like that at Animal Kingdom Lodge in September!
Again, the grounds are really lovely. You cross a bridge to Ol’ Man Island, where you will find an old-fashioned swimmin’ hole and a sawmill slide. This is also where you’ll find hammocks, hot tubs, the campfire pit, a playground and a pool bar.
Inspired by the story of Tom Sawyer, Ol’ Man Island even features a catch-and-release cane pole fishing hole. We were eager to try it out, but the littles were crushed when they received nary a bob on their lines.
(Surely this didn’t scare all the fish away…)
We dined one night at Boatwrights Dining Hall – a rustic shipyard themed dining hall featuring N’awlins favorites – and had a lovely time! We had reservations and I was glad, because it was slammed. Our food was good and affordable and the littles were smitten with the make your own ice cream sundae desserts. They also did a precious “zippety doo dah” birthday song for John that was worth the dinner alone for this mama. If you’re staying here, I’d definitely recommend a dinner at Boatwright’s. I probably would not travel from another resort, however.
After dinner, we headed over to the River Roost Lounge for a delightful and memorable evening at the infamous Yehaa Bob cabaret-style show! We laid claim to our table around 7:30 for the 8:30 show time. We entertained ourselves with cocktails, hot chocolates and Go Fish.
The birthday boy was so excited when Bob came by the table to say hello!
Meanwhile, brother was underwhelmed.
The show was SUPER entertaining and the baby perked right up. Even Honey agreed that it was a must-do! At one point or another every one of us was out of our seat! If you are wondering, we did dinner at 6:30 at Boatwright’s and had no trouble grabbing a great table at 7:30 afterwards.
As mentioned, we enjoyed strolling through the fancy-pants mansion side of Riverside. The boys pointed out that it looked like somewhere for Mommy’s to stay. LOL.
On one of our mornings, we had so much fun meeting up with bestie M and her brood at Port Orleans French Quarter for a beignet breakfast and some time on the playground!!
Overall, we didn’t have a single negative thing to say about Riverside. There were tons of things to do, great food to be had, and the rooms were just as nice as in a deluxe, in our opinion. It doesn’t have the grand lobby that you will find in a deluxe, but it was awfully close. We will definitely be back :-)
xoxo
