Lazy Day…and a few more Disney observations
We’ve had a lovely lazy day so far, we got up late, got lunch at the snack bar and lazed by the pool in the sun. In about an hour we’re headed off in search of a mini-golf course where you can feed the alligators! Then it’s off to a fun looking themed diner for dinner.
Tomorrow we’re toying with heading for Kennedy Space center- as we figure it’ll be less crowded then any of the theme parks on New Year’s Eve! Then it’ll be back to the resort where they’re doing s’mores on the beach followed by a movie on an inflatable screen that you watch while relaxing in the (heated) pool 🙂 Then we’ll probably just come back to our suite and see if Dick Clark looks any less animatronic than all the figures we saw at Disney World 😉
Speaking of Disney World, we really did have a good time. It was absolutely packed (apparently this is traditionally the busiest week of the entire year) but we managed to do pretty much all of the rides we wanted to do (and a couple of them twice).
When we arrived at the park the first thing we did was arrange a place to meet, and while Jake and Crisp went to get some breakfast I ran off to Space Mountain to get us FastPass tickets for it. This is a Disney system where you feed your admission tickets into a machine at the ride and it gives you tickets with an hours time window when you can come back and skip the queue and walk right onto the ride, for example, at 8:40am I got us tickets with a window of 10-11am for Space Mountain. You can only get FastPass tickets every 2 hours, but we used this all through the day to our advantage- when we came off Space Mountain Crisp had enjoyed it so much we got another set of FastPass tickets for it, and after lunch I left them finishing up while I dashed off to get FastPasses for the Jungle Cruise. It helps to have someone like me who can run off to the other side of the park, grab the FastPasses and then dash back to the group.
The rides/attractions we did:
Stitch’s Great Escape
the People Mover
Space Mountain
the Astro Orbiter
the Carousel of Progress
Monsters Inc.
Snow White’s Scary Adventure
Lunch at Tony’s Town Square Restaurant
Space Mountain (again)
Buzz Lightyear (twice- one of the park employees gave Jake a free FastPass for us)
the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House
the Haunted Mansion
the Jungle Cruise
Pirates of the Caribbean
the Country Bear Jamboree
Dinner at the Liberty Square Tavern
the Finale and Fireworks at Cinderella’s Castle
A full day!
For someone who has to deal with logistics (albeit on a much smaller scale!), I was very impressed with the whole set up- the stories about the tunnels under the park linking everything together must be true 🙂
And, most impressive of all, when we left after the fireworks at 10:30pm with thousands of other people (although the park stays open ’til 1am!) we only had to wait for about 5 minutes to get on the monorail back to the parking tram, got straight onto a tram to the parking lot, and didn’t have to stop the car once as we left the parking lot- we were home in 20 mins!
What an amazing contrast to our lousy day yesterday at Epcot. Our advice to anyone else who comes down here would be to skip Epcot and do 2 days at the Magic Kingdom!