Day 3 - Disney World - 24th September
Yayyyyy, things are back to normal - it's a new day &
all is right with the universe - well it has to be when there are attractions
like Walt's Carousel of Progress & the Great Movie Ride to visit.
Both as corny as you like with dated animatronics (and
figurines that have a totally questionable likeness to the famous people
they're supposed to represent) but they have wonderful stories to tell & they're
fabulous, marvellous rides - I won't have a bad word said against either of them.
Yep, you've guessed it............ today was our one day, park hop trip to Disney World
and our plan was to visit Magic Kingdom, Disney Studios and Epcot to see as
many of our favourite things as we could.
We parked at Epcot, re-mortgaged the house to buy our one day park hopper tickets and travelled to the Magic Kingdom (with the other 5 million
people!! who were also visiting the parks that day) via the Disney monorail and
ferry boat.
(I must just say here....as it was a Saturday, I'd
expected it to be busy but, WOW the sheer number of people there was mind
blowing......we've been to DW in both July & August when the kids are off
school and never, ever seen the parks so
packed out.)
Magic Kingdom
Carousel of Progress - honestly, I love this attraction -
I'd gladly go on it every day.
Big Thunder Mountain was closed but we went on the Seven
Dwarfs Mine Train which was a good substitute
(Just as we started to queue a lovely man offered to take
us through the fast pass lines with him & his wife, how nice was that.......instead
of waiting 40 mins we waited for about 5.)
The Haunted House - something else I'd re-do and re-do -
the epitaphs on the headstones as you queue for the ride are enough to keep you
occupied for ages
Splash Mountain - it's always great to visit with Brer
Rabbit & his gang and get soaked.
Guess whose arm got trapped in the gates as we were
lining up to get into the next 'log'?
I'm a mind reader.........you're correct!
Well, come on then, here's another couple.....
At the end of the ride, guess who was still holding on tight to the lap bar as it
was raised up to let people out? and guess whose hands went up with the bar and
trapped their already swollen fingers between that and the inside front of the
log?
Flippin' 'eck, you're gooooooooood
Disney Studios (we're old enough to still call this place MGM Studios)
The Great Movie Ride - it's very old hat now and the live
action gangster scene has never been as good as the first few times we saw it
but it will always be on our must do list
Mupper Vision 3D - forever hilarious (and they have such
comfy seats in the theatre)
The Hollywood Tower of Terror - only a 15 minute wait and
nearly as stomach churningly gravity defyingingly screamily super duperly
fantastic as ever. T wanted to go
straight on it again but I ummmmed & ahhhhed - time was getting on & we
still had to do a couple of things in Epcot before Future World closed for the
evening. In the end, we decided to
leave.
It was a good job I did ummmm & ahhhh - we had to
wait over ¾ hour in blistering heat for a Disney shuttle to take us to Epcot
(there really should be some shelters at these bus stops!).
We were told that the delay was due to a traffic snarl-up
- by the time a couple of buses did eventually arrive, there were enough people
in the queue to fill 3 or 4 of them.......luckily, we made it onto the first
(otherwise we'd probably have been too late to do much at Epcot at all)
EPCOT
(Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow)
Thanks to the bus delay, we only had time for 2 of the 3
things we'd planned to do here......Ellen's Energy Adventure was the loser but
as we were sooooooooo knackeroonied at this point, it was probably the best
decision. The quiet/dark part at the
start of that particular ride would definitely have had us fast asleep in no
time (it's happened before!)
Spaceship Earth - the first thing we ever went on in
Epcot and we still ride on it every time we're in the park - we're definitely
nostalgia freaks (even though we quite like Judy Dench doing the narration now,
Walter Kronkite will always be our fave).
Soarin' - Despite the one hour wait (yes, an hour!), T's
decision to go on this rather than Ellen was definitely the best choice.
They've totally revamped it so it basically turned out to
be a completely new ride for us. Instead
of soarin over to California, you now get to soar over the world (e.g. Paris,
Sydney, Egypt, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal) - marvellous.
By now, it was 6:45 and we were starving - we'd drank
water (me) & coke (T) throughout the day but, apart from a few smints,
no food had passed our lips since Bahama Breeze (wait for
it)...............over 22 hours ago 😱.
Our stomachs thought our throats were cut.
We made our way to World Showcase and got the shock of
our lives - there were so many people there, you could barely move.
Regardless, we carried on to "China" to get
something to eat because we thought that would be easier & quicker than
walking all the way back to the car to drive somewhere else for food.
We may have re-thunkered that plan if we'd known that
there was a world food fair going on (lesson learned, always read the park
guide thoroughly!)......Dotted all over the place were booths selling food from
every corner of the earth (Australia, Mexico, Italy, China, Hawaii, France to
name a few) and they slowed foot traffic down considerably.
People were milling around on the walkways checking out
menus, if they'd been lucky enough to be served already they were standing
anywhere & everywhere so they could actually eat the food and the queues
were so long at some places, they were snaking back & forth and we had to
cut through the same line 2 or 3 times to get passed!
Feeling like we'd just trekked over the Himalayas, we
eventually made it to China & the Chinese eatery (the permanent one, not
the food fair booth) and I got fried rice and a beer with T getting beef noodles
and a water (designated driver).
We sat inside & tucked into the first food we'd seen
in a millennium & thoroughly enjoyed every morsel.
We chilled out for a bit & at around 7:45 we left to
visit all the other "countries" & make our way to the
"UK" to watch the fireworks show. That trip lasted about a nano
second.
The place was even more packed out by now and the crowds
were already 2 deep at some of the 'prime viewing locations'. It wouldn't have been worth our while staying
around for another hour, we'd have seen next to nothing so instead, we took a
couple of snaps of the fantastic sunset over the World Showcase lake as we
started on our journey to the car park & 'home'.
You really can't 'do' Disney in a day but we gave it a
good try and only missed seeing one thing on our 'park hopper bucket list'.
By the time we got back to the Best Western (BW), we were
shattered.....totally happy and extremely proud of ourselves for getting around
the parks so well.........but we were shattered.
Huge applause & stamina awards for us, please.......but
first, a shower, a couple of beers and a few snacks would do nicely, thank you.