While I wouldn't call this a true last-minute trip, it was planned
only a couple of weeks ahead of time.
Last spring, we were able to attend the "After Hours at Magic Kingdom Park" event and we LOVED it.
It felt like we practically had the entire to park to ourselves and we
were disappointed that at that time, it didn't seem like they would be
continuing the event.
Lo and behold, I caught wind of the event returning for a
few nights in January, February, and March.
When I checked the available dates, there were only two Fridays, and one
of them fit perfectly into our schedules.
So we bought the tickets and booked our hotel and flights about three
weeks prior to the trip!
This was our fifth trip to WDW in five months! I wrote in my post about our trip in December
that our streak this time would be ending at four months, but this trip
extended it to five! However, that's
where it will really end, as we have no plans to visit WDW in February.
Our Magic Bands were the newly-updated style, and the
character names I chose were Leia and Han.
I am still not over the death of Carrie Fisher. <3
Thursday, January 26
On Thursday night, we flew to Orlando on United, and let's
just say that United is far from my favorite airline. Anytime we've flown with them, I have been,
if not disappointed, extremely underwhelmed.
This was no exception. We try to
avoid them whenever possible, and we will continue to do so in the future. While we aren't people who constantly travel
for work, I like to think we travel often enough for our experiences to be
more than just a fluke on one particular trip.
We've had much better luck with other airlines time and time again –
better planes, better service, and certainly better prices, etc. – so I don't
foresee any future travel on United unless we have absolutely no other option. The best thing I can say about the experience
was seeing the awesome rainbow walls at the airport!
Then came the fun of the Orlando airport. It is undergoing some major construction and getting
from the gate to the main terminal involved a bus, a tram, and a lot of
patience because they waited until the bus was full before driving us to the
next stop and some other folks were clearly in no hurry to get to their
destination.
The saying "things happen in threes" proved true
that night, because the rental car experience was also ridiculous. Their "system was down" and they
were doing everything by hand. So each
customer required at least 10 minutes with the employee to fill out all of the
paperwork. There were already six people
in line ahead of us when we arrived, so if you do the math, you know we were in
for a very long wait. When we finally
got through the line and completed the paperwork, we went out to the garage to
choose our car. The employee had told us
that if there were no full size cars (what we paid for), to choose a car from
the next highest tier, which was "small SUV." Well, there were NO full size cars, and there
were NO small SUVs. There were a handful
of mid-size sedans, but when we went to choose one, several were dirty, with
trash in them. As you might imagine, we
were NOT happy. We selected one that was
acceptable and finally drove away from the airport as quickly as the speed
limits would allow.
I'm happy to report that all of that craziness and
frustration was forgotten when we checked in to one of our very favorite
resorts, Port Orleans French Quarter, at 2:30 am.
Friday, January 27
Despite our late arrival time, we got up early and went over
to Disney Springs for a quick breakfast at Earl of Sandwich before briefly heading
over to DHS. We didn't plan on staying
there long, so we just wandered around the Star Wars Launch Bay area for a
little while before it was time for our Toy Story Mania fast pass. As usual, I went for accuracy because I have
absolutely no chance of beating C in terms of points, and I was pretty pleased
with my 42%!
We drove to Epcot to check out the International Festival of
the Arts that was taking place over the weekend. We really just wanted info about the Disney
on Broadway concert that we were planning on attending the next day; Annual
Passholders were able to get reserved seating tickets for the concert, so we
wanted to know how/where to get them.
The area for getting these tickets was located in Innoventions East, so
we went over there and were told to stop by the next morning to get the tickets
because they are distributed on the day of the concert you are attending. That wasn't the only good thing about
Innoventions East; we happened upon the Colortopia exhibit. How have I not visited this before? It is so beautiful!
We decided to head back to Disney Springs for lunch because
we'd heard a lot of good things about a new pizza place there called Blaze
Pizza. You choose the dough, sauce,
toppings, etc., much in the same way that you do at Chipotle (kind of in an assembly line style), and then they
cook the pizza in a surprisingly short amount of time and deliver it to your
table. We were hoping that the pizza
would be good, given the rave reviews, but were prepared to acknowledge that
the hype was greater than the pizza itself.
We could not have been more wrong!
It was beyond delicious. As two
vegetarians, pizza is typically a safe go-to choice at restaurants, so we tend
to eat a lot of pizza at a lot of different places. And this is VERY awesome pizza. After lunch, we picked up two cupcakes from
the cupcake ATM at Sprinkles and then went back to POFQ to rest for a short
time before heading to MK.
We took the bus over to MK around 5:00. It was pretty crowded, but we were in no rush
to do anything in particular because we knew we had the entire evening ahead of
us. We picked up our passes for the
event and then wandered around the park and rode the PeopleMover before getting
a Nutella waffle and watching Wishes from Liberty Square. As soon as the fireworks ended, the park
crowds thinned dramatically, and since the After Hours event was taking place
from 9 pm – midnight, the park was closing at 9 pm.
The event itself was, once again, fantastic. There were moments when the only other people
we saw around the park were cast members.
It was THAT empty. We had our own
vehicles on everything we rode and no wait for anything we were interested
in! The only attraction that seemed to
be busy – and that description is grossly overstating things – was Seven Dwarfs
Mine Train, which we decided to skip because we aren’t particularly enamored
with it. One of our favorite attractions is Haunted Mansion, and we had the whole thing to ourselves when we went on it...we were alone in the stretching room and then the only people to board the doom buggies, so there was no one in front of or behind us for as far as we could see! At the very end, Disney has incorporated some new technology to make the scene with the hitchhiking ghosts even more impressive, and this time, our ghost held up a sign that read, "Virginia, here we come!" So cute!
We went on The Jungle Cruise and had the whole boat to
ourselves. The skipper asked if we
wanted the usual spiel or if we were interested in some behind-the-scenes info, and obviously we opted for the latter! She
was a wealth of knowledge and we learned several interesting facts we didn't
already know. As our ride was ending, I
asked what her name was because her nametag was partially hidden by her jacket
(I haven't mentioned that it was really cold that night) because I wanted to
stop by City Hall later and fill out a compliment card for her. She asked where we were from and not only did
she know our city, she went to George Mason University for her undergrad
degree! We had quite a chat about that and
were once again struck by what a small world it really is!
One of the perks of the event is unlimited soda/water,
popcorn, and ice cream novelties. When
we took a break to enjoy a couple of Mickey bars, I decided to take photo with
a button I had brought with me. This
sounds like a simple task. While I was
setting up the photo, C opened the Diet Coke and then set it on the ground by
the bench we were on. We were chatting
and I was taking photos, and C forgot about the soda and kicked the bottle
over. While that would normally not be a
big deal, he had not screwed the cap on tightly, so it started to fizz all over
and flood the ground near our feet. I
began laughing hysterically and teasing C about the mess he made. Well, I clearly shouldn't have tempted karma,
because a few moments later I thought it might make a good photo to put the
stick of the Mickey bar through the pin of the button, but instead I ended up
dropping the Mickey bar on the ground while my button rolled about 15 feet away
from us. A bit of a comedy of errors!
The entire evening was practically perfect in every way, but
perhaps my favorite moment was as the park was closing, we heard the theme from
Up, Married Life, being played on Main Street, USA. We found a quiet spot with no one around,
right near the piano outside Casey's Corner, and we danced. It felt like we were the only two people on
earth. Magical.
Saturday, January 28
We slept in and then headed over to Epcot around
lunchtime. We headed straight to
Innoventions East in order to get our reserved seating tickets for the Disney
on Broadway concert later that day, as we'd been told to do. Well, apparently that was incorrect
information because the cast member told us we
should have registered online for the tickets.
We explained that we'd made a point of stopping there the previous day
to find out how to obtain the tickets and were told to return on the day we
wanted to attend the concert. She once
again stated that we should have registered online, and we once again stated her
that wasn't what we'd been told. Just when
I thought we weren't going to get the tickets, she asked us which performance
we wanted to see, told us to stay put, and disappeared for a few moments. She returned with two tickets and told us she
didn't want us to be upset! We were so
happy and relieved and thankful!
As I mentioned earlier, the inaugural International Festival
of the Arts was happening, so we spent most of the afternoon enjoying all of
its offerings, including a Mary Blair exhibit at The Odyssey, and stopping at
the France Pavilion for ice cream. We
also got coffee at Starbucks, and while I usually choose Disney character names
for our cups, I decided to do two of our favorite hockey players' names because
it was the day of the NHL All Star Skills Competition and these two players
were scheduled to go head-to-head. Anyone
who knows me is well aware of my adoration of Crosby, and Matthews is the
Leafs' young superstar, so it seemed fitting to take the photo of the cups at
the Canada Pavilion (even though Auston Matthews is American, he plays for
Toronto). We also spent some time at the
Japan Pavilion; our big takeaway was learning that Pikachu's favorite foods are
apples and ketchup. Who knew?
We went to Via Napoli at the Italy Pavilion for dinner
before going to the Disney on Broadway concert.
Two Broadway stars, Kevin Massey and Kerry Butler, performed songs from
Tarzan, Newsies, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast. It was fantastic! While I haven't seen the Broadway musical
versions either Tarzan or Aladdin, we saw Newsies when it was on tour last
year, and we saw Beauty and the Beast on Broadway more times than I can
remember when it was playing in Toronto many moons ago!
After dinner, we walked over to Boardwalk and stopped at
Ample Hills Creamery for ice cream before heading to Jellyrolls. We thought we were arriving pretty early (about
7:55), but when we got there, the place was packed. As in we were lucky to get one of the last
available tables, which was all the way in the back. There was clearly some sort of convention in
town and the attendees had decided to spend the evening at Jellyrolls. I wanted my beloved Scotty to know we had
indeed arrived (I had let him know earlier in the day that we were coming to
see him perform) but we were stuck in the back with almost no view of the
stage. He was able to get us moved up to
the very front row to sit with two of his friends, and we enjoyed the rest of
the entire night thanks to their willingness to let us join them at their
table. As always, Scotty was amazing,
and he played "Shake It Off," which was one of the highlights of the
night for me (such great memories…)!
Sunday, January 29
It was sadly the morning we were leaving, so we packed,
checked out of the hotel, and decided to go to Disney Springs for a few hours
before heading to the airport. We had
lunch at Blaze Pizza again, for our second time on a three-day trip – that
should tell you how good it is!
Returning the car went much more smoothly that picking it up had gone a few
days earlier, and the flight home was fairly uneventful. I was very happy to see the rainbow walls
again, because they meant we weren't far from home and seeing our furry little
gals!
Thanks to my mom…she is the best Fairy Dogmother ever!!!
Happy Tails to you!
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