anniversary trip: part three

Day three - the last and best day of my trip. It was Magic Kingdom day. Magic Kingdom has always been my favorite of the Disney parks, and it's kind of embarrassing how excited I get over it.

Have you ever seen Kristen Bell's sloth meltdown? If not, you should.

This is me with Disney World. I am not kidding when I tell you that I started crying (although not hysterically like she did) when the characters showed up on the train before the gates opened.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's backup.

I wasn't able to order our park tickets until about 45 days out from our trip. With the new FastPass+ system, people who are staying in Disney resorts can reserve their fastpasses 60 days in advance. Everyone who had already bought their tickets had 15 days on me, and by the time I booked our FastPasses, there were no more for the new Seven Dwarfs Mine Train.

Josh and I knew that if we didn't want to wait 80+ minutes in line (and we didn't) we had to be on the first bus to Magic Kingdom. They're supposed to start running one hour before the park opens. So we were in line for the bus at 7:30 when the park opened at 9. 

There were about 5 people ahead of us, but because we were wearing our anniversary buttons, they let us on first! How sweet! There were a bunch of people at the park before we were, but I'd say we were definitely in the first 100.

When we got in, A LOT of people had the same idea we did. I think probably 80% of the people who were there were headed to the Mine Train. Luckily, we were pretty dang close to the front of the line, and we waited less than 15 minutes, even with the technical difficulties they were experiencing when we got in line. Somehow this is the only picture we got haha.

Next we had a FastPass for Peter Pan's Flight. Somehow I have never been on this ride, and we both loved it!! Then we went to Enchanted Tales with Belle. This is definitely for little kids, but we had to see the enchanted mirror. Sadly, it wasn't as cool in real life as it was on the internet. But I'm still glad we did it.

We didn't get an invitation for a FastPass for lunch at Be Our Guest, but we decided to get in line early before they opened. I'm glad we did because hundreds of people got in line behind us, and I don't even want to think about how long they waited.

It was very cool. The food was amazing, and I am glad we got to experience it. But it's not necessarily something I feel like I need to do again, you know?

After lunch, we did Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, Thunder Mountain, and Space Mountain. We tried really hard to stick to a route that made sense, but between FPs and wait times on the rides we didn't have them for, it just didn't work out that way.

When we got off Space Mountain, we decided to ride the train back over to Frontierland to get a good spot for the Festival of Fantasy parade. We got a really great spot, and then it started pouring. We waited anyway, and after sitting in the rain for 45 minutes, when it was time for the parade to start, they told us it was canceled. We were soaked and at that point annoyed. We'd already gotten pretty lucky with riding the rides we wanted, and we had Extra Magic Hours until 1am, so we decided to head back to the hotel for a bit to get dried off.

When we got back, we were able to check out all the fall/Halloween decorations on Main Street USA that we had missed in the morning due to the fact that we were focused on getting to Fantasyland as quickly as possible.

We decided to go take a nice ride on the steamboat, the Liberty Belle.

When we got done with that, we had enough time to head over to Buzz Lightyear before our dinner reservation.

It took less time than we expected, so we jumped on the People Mover.

We had reservations at the Plaza Restaurant on Main Street. So we went there, sat down, ordered drinks, ordered our food. We were sitting there having a nice conversation and enjoying the atmosphere, when the manager came out of the kitchen and said, "Everyone needs to get out of the dining room now." Everyone sort of stopped and looked at her, wondering if they'd really heard what they thought they heard. "Out! Get out! Now! Everyone out!" she yelled. Finally everyone realized that we were, in fact, being evacuated, so we all got up and walked outside. As soon as we got out, a bunch of security personnel ran in. We thought one of the cooks had killed someone or something, but then they came back outside, and they were all looking at the roof. We never figured out what happened, but they did write us a voucher for a free meal at a quick serve restaurant. We grabbed a bite at Cosmic Ray's. We even got free "cake" out of it!

Doesn't that thing look like it came out of an Easy Bake Oven or something?! It was pretty gross. When we were done there, we headed over to find a spot for Wishes.

I tried really hard to just watch the fireworks and not spend the whole time taking pictures, but I still took a lot. When the fireworks were over, we saw that Jungle Cruise had a 5 minute wait time. It was one of the few rides we hadn't gotten on that we wanted to, so we headed over there. Obviously everyone looked at the app after the fireworks and saw the 5 minute wait because by the time we got there, it was 45 minutes. Haha. We got in line anyway because we had the extra magic hours, and the only other thing we had missed was Splash Mountain. I'm not sure if it was even still open, but there was no way we were getting on it because it was starting to get chilly.

I've never been on Jungle Cruise at night/in the dark, and it was a totally different experience. It's almost less cheesy! Haha. We wandered over to Seven Dwarfs Mine Train to check the wait one last time. It was still over an hour, and we didn't feel like waiting for it. We went and got our souvenirs and then headed to the bus.

And that's it! We went home the next morning. I'm already counting down the days until we go back to Orlando for our family reunion next July! Haha. 

anniversary trip: part two

You thought I forgot, didn't you?

I didn't forget. I've been thinking about this post since I made the last one. I've just been avoiding it. Not because I don't want to share it. It's just so hard to choose what to share! Agh.

But guess what. I'm not even doing Magic Kingdom right now. Ha!

So on Friday, we decided to have a day to relax, and we didn't go to any of the parks. We had a late breakfast reservation at the Kona Cafe at the Polynesian. The food was so good, omg. I got an omelet and it was so huge, I couldn't even eat half of it!

From there we headed to Downtown Disney to do some shopping. It started raining on our way there, but we figured it wouldn't last long.

We couldn't have been more wrong. It poured and poured. I had a rain jacket and Josh had a small umbrella. It helped, but we still ended up getting drenched. The main reason I had wanted to go to DD was because the last time we were there, I saw a Disney phone case that I really liked. It was at a little kiosk, and all of the kiosks were closed up due to the weather. But then we found the Co-op and the D-Tech store inside. We both had cases made with designs that you can't get anywhere else, so that was pretty cool. It wasn't a lot of fun walking around in wet clothes in the rain, so we headed back to the hotel. Of course, when we got back, it stopped raining!

We were staying at the All-Star Music resort, which is situated between the All-Star Sports Resort and the All-Star Movies resort. Somehow, I managed to take zero pictures of Music, but we decided to visit the other resorts, and I took a bunch of pictures of them. >.<

When we got back to our room, we found that housekeeping had added another Mickey towel, along with my Minnie ears to our window! They sure know how to put a smile on your face.

Right after we got back to the room, it started pouring again, so we ended up just watching a movie until it was time to get ready for dinner.

We had reservations at the Maya Grill at Coronado Springs. It turned out to be really different than we expected, but the food was amazing!!

We had reservations for just about every meal on this trip. It may have been a little over-planned, but our previous trip wasn't planned at all. It was cool to have researched all of the restaurants and to know where we were eating each meal. It was something to look forward to every few hours, and it was exciting! That said, we spent A LOT of money on food. I didn't mind; you only live once, and that sort of ended up being the focus on of our trip. Last time we spent a good bit on souvenirs; this time we spent it on experiencing the food of Disney instead. But next time we'll probably shift our focus again and do more budget-friendly food.

We headed back to the hotel after dinner and then got on the bus to go back to Downtown Disney. We needed to pick up our phone cases, and then we went to have drinks at Paradiso 37.

I have been wanting to go to Paradiso 37 since the last time we were in Disney because I like the name and it looked pretty cool. It was a pretty cool place, but it didn't really live up to my (super high) expectations. haha.

We each only had one drink because the bus had taken forever to get us there. We wanted to get back and get to bed because we knew we'd be getting up early the next morning!