Last Morning on the Magic

The occupants of rooms 7618 and 7627 are awakened for the last time by their friend, Mickey Mouse. Somehow, Mickey's cheerful banter just doesn't seem as cheerful as the thought of leaving the Magic and returning to the cold Midwest awaited the castaways. We packed the last of our items, did a quick check of the staterooms, closets, drawers and bathrooms and trudged reluctantly down to Animator's Palate for our final Disney Magic meal. Steve and Johnathan greeted us for the last time and served us our coffee, juice and soft drinks. It appeared Disney was preparing us for our return to Chicago as the temperature in the restaurant was freezing and even colder than the night before. We ordered our breakfasts and ate our last dose of Magic food. We said goodbye to "Tink&Cinderella" and family, gathered our bags and headed off to the lobby. They weren't letting anyone off the boat yet, so we sat down up on deck four and waited. Once the gangway was down, we headed downstairs, waved final goodbyes to Brent and the crew and stepped off the Magic back into the terminal.

It took a while to find our bags as they were scattered on both sides of one of the tables, then we had to wait for a porter to help us with the seven pieces of luggage. But finally we had everyone and everything and joined the customs line. After a short wait, we were off to the American Airlines check-in. They had our boarding passes printed, tagged our luggage and we were on the first bus out to the airport. Alexander and J. R. were upgraded again and they gave their tickets to Janie and Thomas so they could have first class on the way back. The bus driver kindly skipped showing us the DVC hard-sell video and instead showed us a Christmas 'House of Mouse' video. (If only he hadn't kept interrupting it to ask us to look for alligators or dolphins on the side of the road, which no one saw.)

Forty-five minutes later, we were rolling into the airport. It was only 9AM and we had six hours to kill before our flight home. (We had been booked on a much earlier flight that AA cancelled, so we ended up with a later departure than planned.) We looked around the shops for awhile, had some lunch at Chili's and then boarded our plane and returned home to Chicago.