After an impromptu dinner of Thai noodles (thanks! Thai Kitchen microwave products! You're amazing.) and other snacks, we hit the road again for our second night at the Magic Kingdom. Because we're staying on Disney property we could take advantage of the Extra Magic Hours, meaning the park would stay open for us until 1am, three hours after the normal 10pm closing.
Here's a shot of the sunset over our resort as we left:
After arriving by monorail (let's be honest; we're going to ride it every chance we get), we headed over to Tomorrowland (another area of Disney that looks about 20 years overdue for a rehab) to get FastPasses for the Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin. To kill time before that ride, we went and saw Mickey's Philharmagic, a 3-D movie and music experience that incorporates smells, sounds, and other special effects (including being doused with water). Hands down, the most amazing 3-D experience ever, and usually I could care less about 3-D.Next, we rode It's a Small World (I know, I know. What were we thinking???) Surprisingly, this ride is much nicer than I remember, due I believe to a recent rehab that improved the sound quality and restored the visual elements to their original World's Fair vibrance. Here, a shot taken when we got stuck at the end of the ride waiting to disembark:
The ride itself was fairly unremarkable, save the Darwin-Award-winning child who sat in front of us and constantly stuck her arm into the water and under the boat, playing with the boat track and narrowly missing amputation. I am not stating this too strongly; as a child, I was at Disney when a girl did exactly the same thing and ended up horribly disfigured when her arm became trapped between the boat and the loading dock. After grimacing for most of the ride and silently cursing out the girl's parents, we disembarked. For such a child-centered ride, it was quite a tense few minutes!Next, we returned to Buzz Lightyear to use our FastPasses, and exited the ride at just about 10pm. We debated watching the 10pm fireworks from Tomorrowland, but decided instead to walk through the crowds to go to the back of the park and ride some of the bigger rides that would be open late. Well, we barely made it through the hoardes of screaming children (and parents!), but we did manage to snap some pictures on the way to Frontierland:
Incidentally, I know from working at Disney that the Magic Kingdom has to have several fire trucks on hand each night during the fireworks show, as invariably the fireworks catch brush, weeds, and trees on fire with surprising frequency.Next, we hurried to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and found it had a posted wait time of 40 minutes. Undaunted, we entered the line and found it to be more like 5 minutes. (We have learned that if a sign says 5 minutes, it really means 40 and vice versa.) After riding, we debated riding BTMR again, but were HORRIFIED to see THRONGS OF PEOPLE (again, can't state this too strongly) EVERYWHERE!! Naively, I sort of thought that the park being restricted to resort guests only would mean that it would be emptier with far shorter waits. Well, I was dead wrong about that.
Abandoning our hopes for another BTMR ride, we decided to ride Pirates of the Caribbean again, thinking maybe it would be as empty as the previous night. Not a chance. We did get on, although not quickly, and found the ride to be a bit less fun when filled to the brim with stinky, screaming boatmates. After PoC, I took CP for a cruise on Walt Disney's journey-into-the-heart-of-colonialism-ride, otherwise known as the Jungle Cruise. Again, the 5 minute posted wait time turned out to be more like half an hour, but we perservered and were rewarded with a very funny skipper. The corny jokes are even cornier than when I was a kid.
By this time it was close to midnight; we were tired and hot (no storms yesterday, so no relief from the heat), so we decided to check out Space Mountain and then hightail it out of there. As we crossed through Fantasyland, I noticed that Cinderella Castle was finally open for visitors (it used to be an open walkway all the time, but now during the day showcases some kind of Princess show), so I snapped a couple pictures of the Cinderella tile mosaics:
On a whim, we rode the Winnie the Pooh ride since CP is an AA Milne fan; a good ride, but I wouldn't wait more than 10 minutes or so for it. Clearly, I am not in the 4 year old demographic they are shooting for! Space Mountain turned out to be MOBBED - at least an hour wait, and no FastPasses left to avoid the crowds - so we gave up and exited the park.To get to our car we again had to take the monorail, which normally would be a thrill. Not during Extra Magic Hours. During regular park hours there is an express monorail that takes visitors directly to the parking area, but during the late hours only the resort monorail runs, which means making extra stops on monorails even more crowded than normal. If the cattle-car feeling wasn't bad enough, our line-mates were obnoxious whiners (I'm referring to the adults here; the children were all up way past bedtimes and at least had an excuse for bad behavior) who hurled expletives and instructed their children to commit bad behaviors all in service of cutting the line and boarding the monorail faster. This was backed up by a chorus of screaming coming from the hoardes of toddlers who clearly weren't used to staying up until 1am. Absolute madness. Madness!
Around 12:45 we poured ourselves into the rental car and headed back to the hotelresort. It's definitely nice to stay on property where the drive "home" takes mere minutes, so we were showered and sleeping shortly after 1:15.
A final note about Florida weather, with some visual evidence. The humidity here is KILLING us. It's hard to breathe (my allergies HATE Florida, to boot), it feels uncomfortable, and it's doing crazy things to my hair. Exhibit A: My hair before leaving the golf resort yesterday morning:
Exhibit B: My hair after a day in the Florida heat and humidity:
Sadly, this was not as bad as it was the day before. It's lucky for me that no one knows me here.Next up - politics, good food, and Hollywood.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment