After a much needed nap in the afternoon, we decided to ride the monorail for a loop and pick a random place to get dinner. As monorail lovers, I must comment that there were SO MANY DELAYS on the monorail during our 3 days, it was such a bummer. Nothing egregious, but very noticeable. Twice we were on a monorail that had to stop for 10-15 minutes because “another monorail was making a line change.” I feel like when the trains aren’t busy, they are more open to doing things like that because they aren’t upsetting as many people. If people were being held up over and over for 10-15 minutes on the Skyliner, it would be non stop news. We also stopped at each resort for longer than necessary I felt. There obviously weren’t a ton of people boarding. I get that they have to take their time assigning parties to cars now, but sometimes I feel like we were just holding waiting to see if more people were coming because they train was so empty. Not a big deal though, we weren’t in a rush. My son is beyond obsessed with the monorail, so he was happy to sit there forever, but just thought I’d point it out in case anyone else notices it as well.
We opted to stop at the Contemporary and get quick service dinner at the Contempo Cafe, so that we could watch the monorails go by while we ate. This was perfect and we loved the monorail watching. The service was a bit of a fail though. They forgot to give us fries with both of our meals, which was like 50% of our food, and I heard another mom going up and saying that each of her kids’ meals were wrong. Seems like they were really struggling there that night for some reason. The garbage was also overflowing, which isn’t something you typically see in Disney. Anyway, good food, good monorail watching, happy kiddo and happy mommy.
When we got back to the Polynesian we decided to head to the pool. The heat had been unbearable all day, but was pretty pleasant in the late evening. We were not the only ones who felt this way though because the pool was semi crowded when we went at about 8:30pm (at least more crowded than I would have expected). There were tons of kids running around on the splash pad playground area and lots of adults and kids in the pool itself. We were at the large main pool at the Polynesian, i believe it is called the lava pool. The gate said it closed at 9pm. I noticed that families were out much later at the other pool, so the other pool must have had either a later closing time or potentially no hour restrictions because maybe no lifeguard (like a quiet pool). It felt a little weird to be close to other people in the pool without masks on (obviously no masks are required in the pool), but I tried to tell myself that chlorine kills viruses and we were surrounded by chlorine and yada yada. We did our best to keep adequate distance from everyone just to be safe. My nervous little kiddo dragged me up on the playground with him and then refused to go down any slides, but it is such a fun looking playground! I definitely think that pool looks like the best non-beach club pool that I’ve seen at Disney so far ! Obviously beach club is miles ahead of all other pools in my opinion, but this water playground thing definitely makes this one fun for little kids ! The big long slide seems fun for big kids too. I can see why it’s a no-pool-hopping pool (although all monorail resorts are automatically no pool hopping at this point to prevent people from just leaving the parks and taking the monorail to the resort to use the pool I guess).
The whole environment was great. I loved seeing all the families out late at night relaxing by the pool or on the beach eating dole whips. It felt like a different world where everyone wasn’t living in fear of a virus and everyone could just relax and act somewhat normal for a short bit of time. It really felt so nice. There was something about hearing kids laughing in a pool at 9:30 at night that just gave me an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and such a strong sense of “family vacation” that I really needed during such a weird terrible year.
