Magic Kingdom (Day 2)

We next visited the Magic Kingdom.  We didn't expect the crowds to be too bad (even though it was a Friday), because the park closed at 7:00 PM that evening for a separately ticketed Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party event.

In no particular order, here are some of the highlights from that day:

We started out the morning on the Jingle Cruise. Kate's favorites are the elephants.

Kate's love of elephants extends to Dumbo as well.

In the new Fantasyland area is a statue of Gaston. The only think that it's missing is that it is not covered with hair.

Every night Cinderella's castle was transformed into Elsa's Ice Castle.  It looked pretty amazing.

In front of Beast's Castle.  Just before enjoying some LeFou's Brew (similar to a frozen butterbeer, but with an applebeer like concoction).  Unfortunately, we were unable to try some of the delicious gray stuff.

Hello Lumiere.

Whenever I am focused intently on something, I nearly bite my tongue off as I chew on it. As a side note, the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland is way better than the ride at Disney World.  The guns at Disney World can't be removed from the cart, so the range of motion is fairly limited.  Also, because the guns are stuck to the cart it was difficult to aim.  But maybe I'm just bitter because I scored a whopping 32,000 points while Ada score more than 400,000!

Also in the new Fantasyland. In front of Ariel's palace.  The same Little Mermaid ride that is at California Adventureland (and that you can nearly always walk onto) is here at Disney World, but the wait was rarely less than 30-40 minutes.  Crazy.

Another picture from another angle in front of Belle's castle.

Cinderella's Castle.

Look at the flying rodent that showed up.

We waited around 40 minutes to see Anna and Elsa.  That's about as good as it ever is.  When we were at the Magic Kingdom on Monday the waits for Anna and Elsa were over 2 hours at times.

Both Anna and Elsa just loved Lyla's shirt with Olaf on it.  I think that he had had a bad day.

With that lady from Tangled.  We visited all these princesses just before the park was about to close for Mickey's Christmas Party.  It was kind of in the in-between time and the lines were quite manageable.

Cinderella.

Now for some pictures from the rides.  One of my favorite purchases when we visit a Disney park is to buy the photopass that let's you have all of the pictures that the Disney photographers take.  When we returned from Disney World I downloaded just under 2 GB of pictures and videos of our family at the park.  At Disney World the photopass also allows you to keep all of the pictures from the rides, which was kind of fun.

Space Mountain. Those are some comfy seats, but I especially like the bearded fellow who joined me and Ada in our picture.

Space Mountain.

Space Mountain.

Splash Mountain.

Splash Mountain. Look at Alison cowering under Ada's jacket.

Jesse and Woody.

Lastly, a video from a new ride - the Seven Dwarf's Mine Train.  Look for me, Ada and Kate.

After we left the park (i.e. were kicked out for Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party), we took the monorail back to our hotel, ate some dinner and then watched the fireworks show at the Magic Kingdom from the beach across the water.  It was chilly, but quite lovely.

A Blog Post - Epcot (Day 1)

I still enjoy reading everybody's blogs, and I've always had the best intentions with my poor little blog. Here's to a fresh start!

Rather than starting where I left off, I'm going to blog about our most recent trip and maybe work my way back from there...

Back in May Jet Blue announced they were starting a new route between SLC and Orlando, Florida.  At the time we were able to get our flights for about $200 per person, which we thought was a great price for us to get the family to Disney World. Flights at that price were going fast so we had to decide quickly whether or not we wanted to do it.

The only downside was that the flight from SLC to Orlando is a red-eye flight that left at midnight.  We put the girls to bed like usual (they didn't even know we were flying anywhere), and we woke them up just before 10:30 to catch our flight on time. They were tired, but they were all able to sleep on the airplane once we got into the air.

Alison and I both had a tough time getting any sleep, but that was the price to pay.

We had booked a room at Disney's Polynesian Resort, which is just across the lake from the Magic Kingdom (on the monorail line).  If you stay at a Disney resort, Disney World offers free transportation from the airport to the resort, including picking up and delivering our checked baggage later in the day.  It was really slick. We arrived in Orlando at 6:00 AM and had the bus all to ourselves.  We were also glad that we were able to get checked into our hotel room that early.

We also purchased the Disney Dining Plan which allowed for each of us to have 1 sit down meal, 1 quick-service meal and 1 snack per night of our stay.  Our first meal was a breakfast at 1900 Park Fare at the Grand Floridian Resort.  We walked over to the restaurant from our room, it was a little chilly and the fog breaking off the lake was beautiful.

At 1900 Park Fare.

We had a lot of characters stop by our table while we were eating, including the Mad Hatter, Tigger, Winnie the Pooh, Alice and Mary Poppins.

The food was decent, it was served buffet style.  We especially liked their strawberry soup.

After breakfast, we rode the monorail from the Floridian to the Transportation Center, then from the Transportation Center to Epcot.

Our first stop at Epcot was (drumroll please), to see more characters!

This time we saw Goofy, Mickey and Minnie:

After the characters we went on a few rides including the Finding Nemo ride and the Chevrolet Test Track ride.

We went on the ride in the Epcot ball where we got stuck for 15-20 minutes.  I passed the time by talking silhouette shots of Alison.

After eating some snack, we took the monorail back to our hotel to catch a nap.

Nobody wanted to wake up after about an hour and a half, but we had places to go and princesses to see.

We took the monorail back to Epcot and then started to make our way around the World Showcase.

First stop was for Ada to get a picture in front of the Eiffel Tower of France.

While in France we stopped to see Belle.

I was really excited to see Belle.

And Aurora.

And then Snow White in Germany.

And Donald in Mexico, of course.

We had a dinner reservation at the Garden Grill.  This is another character dining meal, this time served family style.  The restaurant slowly rotated around a large diorama of different landscapes.

We saw Mickey (for the 3rd time today), Chip, Dale and Pluto.

After dinner, we stayed for the fire, water, and fireworks show Illuminations: Reflections of Earth. The highlight was "Let there Be Peace on Earth" set to fireworks (Youtube link).

We finished the night by taking the monorail back to our hotel room and reading a Christmas book.

We all slept well that night.