We had a super short 4th of July trip to Disney over the weekend! I didn’t take a ton of photos on my phone — we forget the power brick for recharging, so I was trying to save power, especially on Monday when we were at Magic Kingdom all day from 8am to midnight! And Sunday when we did Typhoon Lagoon… but I’ll get to all that.
Friday I had the day off, so I spent the morning running to the bank, packing and cleaning up the house before we left. Chase got off at 1 and as soon as he got home we headed out. We started listening to the Deathly Hallows and actually got very nearly through it all between both legs of the trip (Harry had just left the Ravenclaw common room with McGonagall as we got home.) Pretty good considering it has taken us 5 years to get through all the other books and 2 of those were almost completely slogging through Half Blood Prince.
I worked a bit on getting sequins sewn on this Elsa corset in the car:
I’m not going to finish my Elsa costume at this point — but I figured I had this started, had all the sequins, I might as well finish it up, I’m thinking about doing a giveaway for it when I’m done.
We got into WDW around 3AM.
Check-in was strange. Since it was a room only reservation we hadn’t prepaid like we do when we do a package, so we knew we had to pay when we got there… first the CM at the desk couldn’t get our check out date right. He thought we were staying Sat-Sat. I said no, we check out Tuesday and nudged my printed out confirmation to him with all of the info, he ignored it and looked at his computer and asked if we were checking out Friday? I said no, we check out July 5th. Then he asked if we wanted to use my card on file for incidentals, which I said yes to, we don’t use it for anything (we don’t charge to the room, and that’s my “travel only” card just for booking things). He then said we didn’t owe anything on the room and gave us the print out. We were like, uh ok and headed to our room because we were exhausted. In the car over I looked at it and he’d put the whole room on that card. So now I have to turn around and pay off that on the card, which isn’t a huge deal but the whole thing was just very strange, from him getting the wrong dates to the card thing.
We were in the 90s building this time!
So all we have left is the 60s building to stay in, we’ll request that for the Oct trip.
We slept til around 10, then got up and decided to head over to Disney Springs to see all the new stuff that has opened since last time we went over there. It was also opening day for the Coke store which was neat!
I wore my Rey shirt so I thought I’d take a stab at Rey hair. They ended up looking more like my Padme parade buns than Rey, but oh well.
Over at Disney Springs we tried out Morimoto Asia Street Food, which was good, and the Daily Poutine. I got the regular Poutine and it was really good! It was just much too hot out for Poutine LOL It’ll be much better when the weather cools off.
I got the classic, which was yummy. I had also wanted to try the Latin — next time maybe.
We also checked out the big Disney store and the Lego store before heading to Epcot for our Soarin’ fastpass.
After our May trip, we realized we needed to bring the cooling towels Chase had gotten for camping. He found one and we brought it with us, I went to open it in the car and it had molded. EW! So much for that.
Since we needed to go to Epcot and then Magic Kingdom for dinner, we parked at the TTC so we could just do the monorail back and forth. We got to Epcot and I asked to go meet Joy and Sadness before our Soarin FP.
Ended up waiting about 40 minutes for them but it was a fun meet. When we came out it was raining HARD! We’d expected that…but not so soon. We’d left our ponchos in the car! We had to buy new ones (ugh) and run through the rain to Soarin.
The new Soarin was neat. Glad we got to ride the California version one last time last trip though. After that we headed for the monorail… only to find it closed. We had to bus back over to the TTC, and then ferry to the Magic Kingdom. Glad we gave ourselves plenty of time to get where we were going.
Trip #3!
We had dinner reservations at Plaza for that night which we were super excited about! We had a really great dinner here last year. Unfortunately this time it was very disappointing.
I sound like I’m complaining about everything in this post! I’m really not, I swear… but last year at Plaza I had a fantastic burger, REALLY good fries (the big “chip” kind of fries, not quite steak fries-size, you know? like the ones I got above in the poutine), a really good coke and a really good burger. I decided I wanted to try the club this time around. The club’s proportions were all off… too much meat, not enough mayo or bacon, and each bite just tasted like lunchmeat. I finally had to just take half the meat off, and even then it was pretty tasteless. The coke was flat. But the most disappointing thing to me was when they set my plate down and instead of the big fries like last time, this time it was the thin shoe-string fries. Which were not anywhere near as good. We both ate it all… but it was just super disappointing after how good it was last year, to the point we are canceling our September reservation and going somewhere else.
Magic Kingdom was SO empty, it was crazy. Unfortunately we were both super tired so we just got some ice cream, walked around, and then headed back to the hotel for the night.
Sunday was our Typhoon Lagoon day!! I hadn’t been since 2000 and Chase had never been, so this was a lot of fun. Obviously I didn’t have my phone with me, so I have no photos. We did most of the big slides and the lazy river and the raft rides. Chase went far out in the wave pool while I sat waist deep at the shallow end and just people watched.
We decided we were done around 1, got changed, headed back to the hotel and I washed my hair and took a nap.
Our neighbors at Pop had some friends hanging out in their windows…
So we put my Lady pillow pet in our window, too.
Later in the afternoon we headed to Epcot, and we got ice cream in France:
Chase had the apple cinnamon apple something or another, I had the banana lime. We headed down to Epcot to do pick-a-pearl (getting one for each trip), and then came back to the International Gateway to walk to Beach Club for dinner. We got over there way too early and just ending up sitting in the lobby for a long time, because it was too hot to really go wander outside.
I’d heard Beaches and Cream was tiny but it was really… really… tiny!
It was our fav meal of the trip and definitely an upswing from Plaza the night before! I had the grilled cheese and tomato bisque:
OMG It was so good!
Chase had the Patty Melt:
(Also note the fries Plaza SHOULD have had!! Chase shared.)
Also our waitress let us have coloring pages and crayons. Yay.
I got 1 scoop of butter pecan and Chase got the banana split. I saw the waitress coming with this giant banana split and started laughing before she even got to our table, so when she sat it down in front of Chase she said, “I’m sorry!”
When we got done we had to rush back into Epcot and all the way around to Norway. We had 12 minutes to make it to our Frozen Ever After fastpass. Can you believe we made it??? We were seriously hot and sweaty and I had a migraine rearing its’ head by the time we got there and thus I did not have patience for the girl in front of us holding up her phone with the flash on for the first two scenes, so I snapped at her to turn the flash off. She did. The ride was very enjoyable, though not worth the insane standby times!
As soon as we got out we went right around the corner to the new Meet and Greet…. and were the only people in line for it. We were in and out in 5 minutes. The fireworks were going off, so we hoofed it on to our car to beat the crowd. I had really wanted to go to Magic Kingdom afterwards, since they had EMH til 3AM… but my head just hurt too much, I was just too tired. Boo.
Monday was the insane day!
We got to Magic Kingdom at opening, 8 AM. We stayed alllll day because we weren’t sure if there would be crowd closures — even though we are AP and had dinner reservations and probably could have gotten back in, we didn’t want to chance it. I used my phone sparingly to conserve power. We also rented a locker this day so we didn’t have to tote the bag around.
One our way in we got flag pins! The guy said take a handful, give some to your friends and family, give some to Belle! So I got a handful. We got breakfast at Starbucks (:P) and then went to Guest Services to get Kevin’s AP stuff finished up. Yay!
We met Mickey, then headed over to Tomorrowland and did the Laugh Floor, Peoplemover, and Carousel of Progress. Then we made our way over to have lunch at Peco’s Bill. (I had nachos, Chase had tacos.). Then we got stuck by Festival of Fantasy so we watched that, then had a Splash Mountain FP. To escape the heat we hit up Country Bears and Hall of Presidents.
Then we had a Haunted Mansion fastpass, then did Philharmagic before heading to our Rapunzel/Tiana fastpass. Then it was time to check in for dinner – Liberty Tree Tavern! – but they were running 45 minutes behind schedule. We poked around in stores for a bit, but it was just too hot, so we ended up back in the lobby of Liberty Tree sitting on the floor. They called us back pretty much 45 minutes on the dot after our reservation time.
We were in the Washington room!
The food was good. Pretty much the same as when we went in 2014. I’d heard they no longer had mac and cheese — and it wasn’t on the menu — so I was surprised when we got mac and cheese!
(My other picture of the turkey and ham is missing apparently.)
After that we ran to go try to charge our phones by the Tangled bathrooms for 10 minutes… then went to find spots for the 4th of July fireworks. Dinner being an hour behind really messed up our plans, as we were shuffled all the way around Tomorrowland, through the bypass and back onto main street. We found an “ok” spot by the flagpole though we couldn’t see the castle.
And then right as the fireworks started, this family crammed in right in front of us, shoving our neighbors’ strollers into people’s legs and then the dad put his kid up on his shoulder… ugh. But I was able to periscope most of it so my parents could see it.
After that we fought the crowd back over to Adventureland, got some water, rested a bit, then did the Tiki Room, Jungle Cruise, and the Flying Carpets of Aladdin. I wanted to stay a bit later so the crowd would disperse a bit more, but Chase thought we should go ahead and leave since we had a long drive the next day. Of course the monorail and ferry lines were INSANE. We headed over to the bus line which was a bit more manageable. It was miserably hot waiting for the bus, my fan’s batteries died. As we were walking through the taped off switchbacks of the line, I noticed this family behind us trying to cut the line by just turning and walking the other direction into the next switchback. Somebody called them out on it and they got back in their place. As Chase and I were rounding the last taped off switchback heading into the metal ones, there was that family and they were attempting to push their way in front of us. I held out my arm and said No! The dad yelled at me not to point at his daughter. I turned around and said “Then don’t cut the line!” He started to say something else but I just turned around and waved over the cast member and told them what was happening. The CM made them get back where they were. Victory, but it was a sour note to the end of the trip. We got back to the TTC, tried to go through a mcdonald’s but it was crazy slow, so we just went back to the hotel and went to bed.
Tuesday was all day driving and we got home around 8:30. I went straight to bed! I think I have a little cold today, felt a sore throat coming on last night so I took some Nyquil and slept HARD. Back at work today… boo.
Going to download our photopass pictures tonight, so yay for that at least!