The new DVC Villas at the Grand Californian have been open less than three weeks, and this is our second stay here. 🙂

On opening weekend we stayed one night in a studio. The room we were given was 1516, which is an accessible room on the first floor. I thought that all of the DVC Villas would have either a park or a pool view…but there are three rooms on each floor on the end of the building, and so the rooms on the first and second floors (and probably the third) have no view at all. And 1516 was one of those. Sigh. I was rather disappointed in that.

Because of the accessible features the room layout is a little different than the standard studios. The bed is right next to the window (and there’s very little room between the bed and the wall), as compared to a standard studio.

The living area is in the center of the room, and the closet has no doors.

The kitchenette area is also a little different, since the area under the sink is cut back to allow wheelchair access.

The bathroom is all one room, instead of the toilet and bathtub being separate from the vanity.

The sink is built to curve out a bit to accommodate a wheelchair – I think it’s a very attractive look.

The tub has a fold-down seat and a hand-held shower attachment in addition to the regular shower head.

Since it was opening weekend there were a few glitches…our room keys did not operate the gates to the pool or the gates to the parking lot. There is wireless internet throughout the resort, but my reception from our room was rather spotty – though that might have been location, since it’s fine as I type this from a different room. Our room keys also did not identify us as DVC members.

So now it’s two weeks later, and I’m happy to say that a lot of those problems have apparently been addressed. Our room keys say “DVC Member”, and when I mentioned the access problems we had, the Cast Member who checked us in assured me that those opening weekend glitches have been fixed. Though I haven’t tried the key in anything other than the door yet. 🙂

This time we are in a one-bedroom villa on the 5th floor – but guess what, it’s one of the rooms on the end of the building!!! There are only 18 of those in the entire resort – what are the odds? But at least we’re up high enough that we have a view of Grizzly Peak and the Tower of Terror in the distance – though the main view is of Redwood Creek Challenge Trail.

Looking to the left we can also see the Redwood Pool area.

It seems pretty decadent to have this huge villa (it has two full bathrooms!) to ourselves…but we’ll deal with it. 🙂 It’s really beautiful – I could *so* live here!!!

White Water Snacks has been remodeled to put in a small (and I do mean small) grocery section. Unfortunately it’s not a very large space to begin with, so there’s even less of a selection than there was before for those who want to eat there.. The grocery supply is limited to things like eggs, cheese, lunch meat, and bread – there are a couple of frozen selections like pizza. But if you’re staying at the Villas and planning to cook you’ll really have to do your grocery shopping elsewhere.

Something new that they’ve added at the Mariposa Pool is four cabanas. These covered areas have a table, a couple of chairs, and a couple of chaise lounges that go with them. They also have a flat screen TV and an attendant who will assist with things like drink/food orders, providing towels, etc. They can either be rented for half a day (morning or afternoon) for $120, or all day for $180.

I find parking to be a bit of an issue here. In the hotel expansion they added a parking garage underneath, but that’s for valet parking only. Which is NOT free to DVC members like it is at the other DVC resorts – it’s $17/day. And when they added all these rooms they didn’t expand the self-parking lot at all – it was really tight the first weekend we were here, and people were getting a bit creative in parking. There is an overflow lot available, but it’s back behind the Paradise Pier near the Wonder Tower of the Disneyland Hotel. As far as I’ve been able to tell your best chance of getting parking in the regular lot is to arrive after the 11:00 check-out time but before 2:00.

It’s really a very nice resort – and it’s terrific to finally have a DVC resort that’s close to us! Though I have a feeling that once they sell out it will be difficult to stay here unless you own points here. But we’ll enjoy it in the meantime – I already have a reservation for the first weekend of next year’s California Food and Wine Festival (dates for that are April 16-May 31, 2010).

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