Over the years, Disney’s Old Key West has slowly become one of our most favorite resorts. We own some DVC and will staycation there a lot when my mom is in town. The rooms are huge and laid out more like condos with great big balconies, the staff is incredibly kind, even by Disney standards, and the whole vibe is just very chill. They have a great running trail if you’re into that sort of thing. The pools have sand beaches. Olivia’s is a great place for a meal; Gurgling Suitcase is a great place for a drink—especially their Bloody Mary. I even love their gift shop and community hall.
But my initial, completely uninformed, opinion was very different.
I talk a lot about our initial return to Disney—that week we came down 6 months after losing my dad because visiting the Happiest Place On Earth seemed like a decent idea at the time. I’ve shared countless times about how we stayed at Boardwalk that week and I unexpectedly fell in love with this place.
What I’ve talked less about is how we ended that trip with a visit to the little DVC office at Boardwalk and how my mom and I flew back a few weeks later for a quick overnight trip where we stayed at Pop Century and took resort transportation to each of the DVC resorts to see if anything competed with our already sentimental attachment to Boardwalk. We were used to traveling with a 4 year old and a 1 year old so we accomplished what felt like a superhuman amount in 36ish hours, hopping to every DVC resort with time to spare for a pop into Magic Kingdom. (They’d put up the dream lights during the few weeks we were gone.)
I say we visited every DVC resort, but there was one where we didn’t even get off the bus. We took Disney transportation to Old Key West, the original Disney Vacation Club resort. (In fact, it was originally just called just that: Disney’s Vacation Club Resort.) The bus started winding its way through the property and nothing looked like Disney. And it just kept driving and driving from one end to the other, making stops along the way. We didn’t think we needed to see any more. The time it took to make our way through alone made us write it off. I’m embarrassed to say we didn’t even get off the bus to walk around.
But in the words of Baby’s father in Dirty Dancing, when I’m wrong I say I’m wrong. And I was wrong. That’s not to say that we didn’t make the right move getting our own DVC points at Boardwalk. We have a special connection with that place. But this photograph is a love letter apology to the resort that I’ve since learned to love.
I wanted everything in the image to be crystal clear, so I dialed my aperture down to f/16. It was plenty bright outside so I left my shutter at 1/100 seconds and ISO settled at 100. The rest was done in edits.