Summer Disney Adventure: Day 7

It was an interesting day to say the least!

I have been making the
same joke to C for 25+ years...

every time I see a squirrel
at WDW, I say,
"Is that you, King Arthur?"
which is a reference to
The Sword in the Stone...

so of course I texted these
pics to C today with the
caption "Royalty" and yes,
I do fancy myself pretty hilarious
with this one joke that I know
C never tires of hearing ;)

We had a late breakfast at the resort and then left for Epcot. We did not get far.

The strap on my mom's backpack got wrapped around the wheel of her wheelchair. I mean really wrapped, as in the wheel could no longer rotate. It was completely locked in place.

I had my mom get out of the wheelchair so I could try to unwind the strap. I flipped the wheelchair on its side and then upside down and I tried and tried and tried, but no avail. Of course it was very hot out, and I was exerting a ton of effort, and I was getting very frustrated. Not a great situation.

Luckily, there was a cast member working not too far away and I'm sure we looked pretty pitiful, with me flipping the chair over and over and yanking on the bag and the wheel, and my mom sitting on the sidewalk with her portable oxygen concentrator.

He kindly came over and asked if we needed help. He tried to loosen the strap and couldn't do it either, which made me feel slightly better because I would have been pretty embarrassed otherwise. After several minutes of him working and me contributing nothing more than a steadying hand on the wheelchair, I asked him if he had scissors or a knife. Luckily, he had a box cutter! After getting it out of his work vehicle, he sawed the strap to get the bag free; this left the piece of strap wrapped around the wheel, which was much easier to unwind and remove with two free ends!

Fortunately, it was the "waist" strap that had to be cut, so the backpack itself is still perfectly fine. All of this took almost 30 minutes, and all my mom and I could do was laugh once we thanked him profusely and were back on track. Never a dull moment!

Our afternoon at Epcot was great! We went to the Beauty and the Beast Sing Along, which I hadn't been to before, and to be honest, I thought it was a bit strange for them to have reworked the story to showcase LeFou as the matchmaker. An inexplicable and unnecessary change! We also went to the festival center, which was beautiful, and listened to a lovely performance by a very talented pianist. We were sitting right at the front, so he could see how we were responding to the music (obviously many tears from me because, well, it's me and I always cry at music, and because one of the songs was "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"). After he finished playing, we were gathering our stuff up to carry on with our day and he came over to chat with us and to thank us for listening! What? We thanked him for sharing his gift with us! Such a nice way to spend some time today!

not really sure what was happening here

We noticed that right on cue, a storm was rolling in. When we were at Epcot the other day, we were forced to go all the way to  the front of the park to take a bus because the SkyLiner doesn't operate during inclement weather. We wanted to avoid that scenario today, so we made our way over the the exit and the SkyLiner Station. We got on a gondola just fine, and traveled from Epcot, through the station at Riviera, and stopped at Caribbean Beach where we had to transfer to a different line to get to Pop Century, We hopped off the first gondola and went right over the the wheelchair accessible loading area for the second gondola. At that very moment, they announced that the SkyLiner was ceasing operations due to the storm. We were moved over to a different queue, wear we waited for almost an hour before a bus arrived to take us over to Pop Century. Thankfully, the cast members at the station were very kind and chatted with those of us in line, which helped the time pass. I was still relieved when we were finally on a bus and ultimately back at our resort!

After all of that, we decided to have a quiet evening, so we ordered dinner and watched hockey in our room. At least we got a couple of good stories out of the day!

Happy Tails to you!