Florida Travel with Holiday Inn Club Vacations

This post is sponsored by Holiday Inn Club Vacations. All opinions are my own.

Ahhhh. Travel with kids. It can hardly be considered vacation, right?! Well that’s what we thought… until we stayed at Holiday Inn Club Vacations Orange Lake Resort. With all the comforts of home, entertainment for our toddlers around every corner and swimming pools for days- for the first time since having kids, we truly felt like we were on vacation.

There were SO many things we loved about staying at Orange Lake Resort, but the activities and entertainment have to be at the top of our list. We were blown away by just how much this one resort had to offer! There are four different villages within the resort, and each one is equipped with its own style, amenities and of course pools!

We went to five of the seven pools at Holiday Inn Club Vacations Orange Lake Resort. Each of them has something different to offer including a splash pad, water slides, zero entry pools and, my personal favorite, the lazy river!

I will never forget floating along their pool’s Lazy River in the big orange inner tube trying to dodge the spraying water and avoid the water cannon! Try as we might, we all ended up sprayed (one of us soaked) and laughed about that for days! The kids of course found such delight in seeing all of this.

I was truly impressed by the amount of activities Holiday Inn Club Vacations Orange Lake Resort had to offer for kids. There was so much to do at the resort, we could have easily stayed on property for a week straight just to experience it all!

One of kids’ favorite activities was definitely in Swampy’s Adventure Club! They had arts and crafts, games, treats and even a build-your-own-stuffed-animal experience (similar to a Build-A-Bear Workshop) which was an instant success. They loved stuffing the animals and placing the little hearts of “love” and “kindness” inside them. Such a special keepsake that will remind them of our trip for years to come!

The second favorite for the kids was definitely the arcade. Surprisingly, even at only three years old, our kids found age appropriate activities and games and truthfully would have stayed in there all night had we let them haha!!

I really appreciated that Orange Lake Resort had these special areas for kids. To have access to things like this at our own resort seemed to make life just so much easier!

It’s always a little tricky traveling as a vegan. You never know what food options restaurants are going to offer and usually your left piecing together a bunch of sides to make a meal. We were able to find great options at Paisan Pizzeria, which was a perfect post-pool snack.

We also really enjoyed having a FULL-sized kitchen in our villa that was completely stocked with everything we could possibly need- yes, even a high-powered blender! We went to Publix right down the street and stocked up on all our kids’ favorite foods. It was invaluable having these things in our room at our fingertips at any time and really made the kids feel like we were at a home away from home.

It particularly made mornings so much easier! We opted to have breakfast every morning in the villa so we could relax a little and weren’t rushing out the door hungry. I think the kids appreciated having this morning time to do their thing as well!

We stayed in a two-bedroom villa and that ended up being perfect for our family of five! Micaela’s mom traveled with us and it was great that we could all be together so easily.

Although we probably would have been happy staying at the resort the entire time, we decided to go to Walt Disney World for one day with the kids. After all, we did fly all the way across the country! It was a quick 30-minute drive from our villa’s front door to the Disney parking lot.

We went to both Epcot and Magic Kingdom and found it easier than expected to get between parks! The Frozen and Finding Nemo rides at Epcot were a hit!

And Magic Kingdom was nothing short of magical!

We truly had such an amazing vacation and can’t wait to head back to Orlando to do it all again one day. Hopefully sooner rather than later! But with 29 (and counting!) different resorts around the country to pick from- who knows? Maybe next time we will try some place new!