Well I sure hope we LOVE SSR (Now Trip Report!!)

[DisneyRegulars]

(Note-I'm here now. We are at our pre-night off site hotel and check into OKW in a few hours. Couldn't sleep, DH is snoring and left his good pillow in the car)

Sorry BOG was a bust. I've wanted to try it but wasn't sure my kids would like the French menu. Nervous about crowds this week but doing rope drop to get as much done as possible before lunch.

Thanks for the TL suggestions, we don't subscribe but i'll still try the link. DD12 was looking at the brochure this hotel offers on it and cannot wait. She and DD8 are my thrillers. The boys not so much.

Can't wait to hear about ToW. DH and I are coming solo in April and that's on the maybe list.

Have a wonderful trip! There are triple tubes on the crush n gusher slides at TL, so you and your thrill seeking girls can all go down together. I feel your pain with the DH snoring. Grizzly has a CPAP machine, but even that can get really noisy. Hopefully your pre-night stay was not at the Orlando Vista.

I think your rope drop plan will allow you to do lots before the crowds swarm in.

 

[DisneyRegulars]

We got out of BOG around 8:30 and had about an hour and a half before Wishes. We slowly made our way over to the Top of the World Lounge to check things out up there. We got to the check-in desk at BLT tower and the lady manning the counter asked for our DVC cards. Silly me, had brought just about every other card we own, but not our DVC cards. She said, no problem, just let me look at your room key. The room key did not say we were members, it only said 'DVC Room Only', but she took this to mean we were DVC members and let us up. Yippeeeee!

So up we went and the first thing we noticed was the magnificent view from the balcony outside the lounge. We arrived around 9pm and there was one other family in the lounge. They had 3 kids with them. Between 9 and 10pm the place slowly filled up. There was one other couple, but the majority of patrons were families will little kids. It seemed like an odd place to bring kids, and I know this has been discussed over and over, but after visiting the lounge, it definitely seems like an odd place to bring kids. It is very much a bar, and I wouldn't bring my kid to a bar back home. Also nothing prevents the families from just watching Wishes from the balcony and not entering the bar, so I'm not entirely sure why they were there. Perhaps they should change it to a diner theme (like Beaches and Cream) or something more kid friendly since the majority of patrons were actually families. We tried a variety of drinks as we were there for an hour. I think between us we had a Yellow Monorail, Mojito, Wiskey Sour, Bay Lake Sunset, and a Mudslide. (Don't worry, we were riding the buses!) All were yummy, though I found the Yellow Monorail a little too sweet. At 9:55ish we made our way out to the balcony. There were other people out there, but there was still space along the railing during Wishes, so it wasn't packed by any means. Wishes was neat from up there. The only odd thing was that the fireworks appeared like they were over Space Mountain, and not the castle.

Overall I would totally go back to the TWL for Wishes or a night cap again. It seems a little under utilized and it was sad to see it so empty when we arrived, but we liked it. Before going on our trip I had read somewhere on the DIS to take some time to look up when at Disney, so I tried to do that this trip. I liked the chandelier in the lounge, so here you go:

I also thought this tiny sink in the bathroom was completely adorable, and also speaks to the fact that Disney expects kids to be up there:

I would say if you are DVC, go check this place out before it becomes history. There just didn't seem to be enough people up there to keep it open for long.

We took the bus back to Downtown Disney and walked from there to our Carousel room. We timed it, and I think it took just under 15 minutes. Not bad at all. Especially since the walkway was closed and we had to find our way walking in places we definitely weren't supposed to be walking. Shhhh.... don't tell anybody.

Up next our 'take it easy day' takes us to Blizzard Beach, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Epcot, and Walgreens. Um yeah, we stink at taking it easy.

 

[tb1972]

Thanks for your review of the TOWL. DH and I plan to check it out in November when our kids aren't with us. I didn't think it seemed like a place for kids!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Thanks for your review of the TOWL. DH and I plan to check it out in November when our kids aren't with us. I didn't think it seemed like a place for kids!

You're welcome! Definitely go in November. Totally worth a visit, and the view is amazing!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

I feel like I have been writing this report FOREVER and I've only gotten through 1 day, and the best day (Utlimate Tour day) is still an entire day worth of trip report away. Sigh...Hopefully I haven't bored you guys too terribly much. I promise I will get there.

So Friday was our designated Blizzard Beach and relaxing day. Well we definitely managed to do the Blizzard Beach part. Relaxing, not so much. I think I will just sum up our Blizzard Beach morning with some lessons learned.
1. This is the most important lesson, so pay attention. If you are a party of 2, DO NOT run immediately to the family raft ride, Team Boat Springs. Don't do it. Don't even think about. We ran immediately to the family raft ride and were told that you needed at least 3 people in a raft to ride down. Well we figured that anybody running up to this ride first thing would most likely be a family, and we didn't want to impose on a family by crawling into their raft, so we had to find another way down the mountain. This is where the lesson comes in. The only way down this particular slope is either Slush Gusher or Summit Plummet, and we were not about to walk down all the stairs with our tales between our legs. Both of these slides were slides that neither Grizzly nor I cared to ride. We definitely wanted nothing to do with Summit Plummet, so we chose what appeared to be the lesser of two evils and went down Slush Gusher. This ride was TERRIBLE!!! There are hills in the slide and with each hill you lift farther and farther off the slide. You get airborne and due to the extreme splashing are airborne flying through the air with your eyes shut. Down right terrifying. To top off the extreme terrifying nature of this ride you get a nice cherry on top in the form of the largest wedgie ever. Just horrible. Nothing about the Slush Gusher was enjoyable, except maybe for the fact that we didn't have to walk down all the stairs. For the rest of the morning I felt like my swim suit bottom was stretched out and loose and was concerned for every other slide we went on that it wasn't sitting right afterwards. So let's review the lesson. Avoid a terrible terrible ride by not running immediately to the family raft ride if you only have 2 people in your family. Don't say I didn't warn you.
2. Eat the donuts! We didn't eat breakfast. I don't remember why, but there was a reason. So we rode all the slides and then stopped for some donuts. We got a dozen. Probably could have eaten 3 dozen they were so yummy. We got the chocolate and white chocolate dipping sauces. The chocolate sauce was similar to Hershey's syrup and was yummy. These donuts were so light and fluffy. I've heard people rave about them. I can confirm the yumminess. Yum!
3. Prepare to be chilly if it's cloudy. After riding all the slides I was too cold to do much else. We ended up skipping the lazy river and the wave pool and instead ate some donuts and had some hot chocolate to warm up.
4. The changing rooms were quite nice. Having always arrived in a bathing suit and left in a bathing suit I never needed the changing rooms before. We took a second to retrieve our clothes from our car and change into them before leaving. The changing areas were clean. The curtains closed completely so you felt like you had privacy, much unlike the standard gym room shower curtain. There were large mirrors not in front of sinks that were perfect for applying more sunscreen. [**UPDATE--Grizzly informs me that the mens rooms are not so awesome, and they only have large areas with benches for changing. I guess guys don't want as much privacy as women.]
5. And a final lesson learned, be sure to jump off your tube before you hit the stairs at the bottom of Runoff Rapids. If you make it all the way to the stairs, there is no way to get off gracefully, and you will look like a complete idiot in front of the young attractive life guard. The more attractive the life guard the more difficult it will be to gracefully detube. Just leap off before you hit the stairs to avoid the awkwardness of the stairs-tube dismount.

So that about sums up our Blizzard Beach morning. We had a blast minus the Slush Gusher debacle and the chilliness. After changing we headed over to Animal Kingdom to spend some time before our 12:30pm Yak and Yeti ADR. Yummy appetizers coming our way!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

So we hopped over to Animal Kingdom from Blizzard Beach. Parking was all the way out in the Giraffe lot (the furthest lot away), and yet we were still too impatient to wait for the next parking tram. We walked. I suppose this was a good decision because the more I walked this day, the more uncomfortable my shoes got. In particular the arches of my feet were getting very sore. We meandered our way into AK and zoomed straight to Everest and took on the single rider line. I got to sit next to a little girl who did not like the ride at all, and looked white as a ghost when it ended. After our quick foray up the Himalayas we headed over early to Yak and Yeti. They sat us right away in a restaurant that was nearly completely empty. It was lunch time, where were all the people?

We ordered nearly all the appetizers. Seriously, I think there were only 2 that we didn't get. Our lack of breakfast must have gone to our heads. For two people it was about 1 dim sum basket for 2 too many. Our favorite this time by far was the chicken lettuce wraps, I know I don't have the name quite right, but they were delicious!!! We both would have been happy if we just had had the lettuce chicken things and our beers.

While at the restaurant I'm beginning to become quite sleepy and tired, but instead of going back to the hotel to rest we make the crazy plan to head over to Hollywood Studios to ride a couple of things, then walk over to Epcot and stop by Beaches and Creme along the way. Exactly what anybody would decide to do if they were tired and had a marathon like activity to do the next day, right?

We usually ride Kali River Rapids, but neither of us wanted to be walking around soaked for the rest of the afternoon, so we played fast pass fairy and handed them off to another couple.

Our tiredness was showing as we chose to take the parking tram back to our car. We NEVER take the parking tram. We really should have just gone home to rest.

 

[DisneyRegulars]

So while I'm waiting for some endless queries to run, I thought I might be able to sneak in an update. I think I last left off with us heading over to Hollywood Studios. (Oh how it irks me to call it Hollywood Studios, it will forever in my mind be MGM). We park. We could tell we were tired because we took the parking tram. Oh the shame! Our mission was to ride Rockin Roller Coaster and Tower of Terror, and of course check out the Muppet Store. The lines for both of those rides ended up being outrageous. We were reminded so many times this trip why rope drop is important! ToT had a posted 120 minute wait (I seriously had to look twice because I didn't believe it), and we didn't plan on being around long enough to take advantage of the posted fast pass return time. So we hopped in the RnRC single rider line and called it a day with regards to the rides.

We then wandered over to the Muppet Store. Every few years I find a gem in this store, but haven't been lucky my last couple of trips. I never lose hope though, and check every trip for some cool Muppet paraphernalia. Again thinking about the advice to 'look up' I did just that, and we actually spent quite a bit of time looking around the entire Muppet store at all the funny signs and things. Here are a few of my favorite things we saw from looking up:

DO NOT LOOK HERE!

So of course you look, and you see this:

This sign is hard to see, but it reads "Absolutely no point beyond this point," which for some reason both of us thought was quite funny. Perhaps it was the heat. Seems only marginally funny to me right now:

I really enjoyed that getting 'no soup' costs more than a bowl or a cup of soup. The CM kindly pointed this out to us as we went hunting for the key under the mat at the ticket booth.

And finally my favorite favorite thing, eyeballs all over the cabana outside (maybe it was a bus shelter, not too sure).

I guess to fully understand my love of the eyes you should see my office. I have a can of emergency googly eyes, and have plastered them all over my office. Including on my muppet poster, and have a giant pair of googly eyes on my door.

I also took this one picture after looking down in AK as we walked in from the parking lot. I thought it was absolutely hilarious that the cross walk people looked like they were wearing MC Hammer pants. Grizzly thought I was crazy to be stopping to take a picture of the cross walk sign, so I feel compelled to share it with you.

Up next, we head to Epcot to acquire some salted caramel squares, with a quick detour to Beaches and Cream for some sundaes.

[Just as I finished this up my query finished!! Perfect timing]

 

[DisneyRegulars]

I'm getting so close to finally being able to talk about our Ultimate Tour!! I left you as we were leaving HS to head over to Epcot. In order to 'rest' for our exertions the next day we decided to take the boat over to Beach Club. What an horrible mistake this was. We must have just missed the last boat, so we had to wait forever for the boat to arrive. This alone was very irksome to us because we love to walk everywhere, and the thought that we could have walked to Beaches and Cream by the time to boat came drove us crazy. We had to remind ourselves several times that we were resting, and that we weren't in a rush. But that mentality does not come naturally to us. We finally boarded the boat, but by the time it arrived so had around 342 other boat passengers. EVERYONE snuck on that boat. We nearly died of the heat in there. It was so uncomfortable. We were not able to make it all the way on the boat and got off at the first stop, the Swan and Dolphin. Yeah fresh air! It is amazing how cool the 90+ degree heat and sun felt after being on that boat. So of course we now feel compelled to race the friendship boat to the Beach Club (our minds tell us that every passenger is headed straight to Beaches and Cream). We weren't even walking fast, mostly a jaunty mosey, and we easily beat all the boat. Beaches and Cream had a 45 minute wait for the counter, so we opted just to get the ice cream for takeout. We both got brownie sundaes. They were yummy.

While eating our yumminess we had the pleasure of watching someone else's kid have a complete and utter meltdown. The child, about the same age as our own, between 3 and 4, completely lost it when his Dad went into the take out area to get ice cream and he wasn't allowed to go. He thought he wasn't going to get ice cream, and was so lost in his hysterics that he was not able to understand that his dad was in fact getting him ice cream. I'm sure the mom must have been totally embarrassed. I know I would have been. The CM who guards the SAB entrance even came over and tried to calm the child with a special toy that he could choose from out of a secret stash of toys the CMs apparently just have available. That calmed the kid for about 30 seconds and he started right back up again. I'm talking screaming, tears, throwing himself to the ground, pounding the ground and his mother, tantrum to the extreme. I looked for an opportunity to assure the poor mom that she was not alone and this type of thing happened to the best of us, but it just never presented itself. Grizzly and I just looked at each other after they left and both said "that kid needs a nap!". The CM even apologized and said "I tried", we just thought it was funny, assured him he gave a valiant effort, and were both happy that it wasn't our kid (because yes, we've been there).

After our sundaes, which were supposed to be a pick me up we got progressively more and more tired. To avoid the heat we wandered our way through the Beach Club hallways, and found our way to the furthest door. This was an awesome route! We walked ever so slowly to Germany, acquired our chocolate squares and began our slow journey back to our car. I think I needed to sit twice on benches before making it out of Epcot. Just completely zapped of energy. How would we ever make it through tomorrow? We walked back to HS, no one could pay us enough to get back on that friendship boat!!! But we did kind of cheat, and walked as far as we could through the Beach Club, then into the Yacht Club (this place seemed surprisingly run down and in need of an update, aren't the regular hotels supposed to be maintained better than the DVC resorts? It seemed like night and day between the Beach and Yacht clubs. After exiting the Yacht club we walked over the bridge and wound through the Boardwalk hallways as long as we could as well. The time in the AC was refreshing. Once outside on the path we started high tailing it as fast as two tired people with sore feet can high tail it because it looked like it was about to start pouring any second.

It was during this final walk that I was convinced I needed new shoes. My arches were killing me and there was no way tomorrow would be enjoyable with my feet aching all day long. We managed to get back to our car and about 3 seconds later it started pouring. I thought some Crocs would be better than my GoWalks, so we headed to Downtown Disney. Sticker shock, $45.00, kept me from purchasing the crocs. I just couldn't bring myself to pay that much for a pair of crocs when Marshalls regularly has them for about $15. Sigh. What to do what to do? We needed sunblock so we headed over to Walgreens to fetch some. It took 45 minutes to get there!!! 45!!! This whole time I forgot to mention that we had an 8pm curfew so that we could relax and watch Teen Beach Movie which was debuting that evening. Time was ticking away as we sat in the car through 8 bazillion lights inching our way towards Walgreens.

At Walgreens we bought several necessities all in preparation for our Ultimate Tour. Our final purchase included:
Dr. Sholls Arch Supports (I figured with 100% satisfaction guaranteed I couldn't go wrong, and fully expected to be writing to Dr. Sholls to request my money back the next day).
2 5 Hour Energy Drinks
A collapsible zebra print water bottle for Grizzly (very zexy looking, and only $1.99)
Walgreens brand sunblock (there's some foreshadowing here, please play scary sounding dun dun dun daaaaaa music in your head)

We made it back to our room with just enough time to spare to take a shower and hunker down in bed to watch Teen Beach Movie. I LOVED Teen Beach Movie. I also loved High School Musical, so you can see my standards are pretty low. But I can't wait to watch it again.

Stay tuned, up next I'll give some details on our Ultimate Tour preparations followed by some highlights of our day.

 

[catherines_mama]

Okay... Break in the action here (because it is HOT) to get caught up. Kids are watching a movie (checked out from community hall) and DH is snoring (shocker). We'll head to the pool shortly.

Sounds great! I'm hoping for TOTW after we eat at Cali Grill in April. Sounds like a nice spot to get a drink and watch Wishes! This trip we realized our kids might just be paraded out and Wishes is where it is for them. Thanks for the review.

Blizzard beach sounds fun! Crazy 3 person rule. I'd have just bombarded a family, we'd have let you join ours.

Sorry about your feet. My arches are always my issue and I have tries Dr Scholls they have one special for women. Yeah, no help. I hope your feet make it through the ultimate tour.

Yay for more!!!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Okay... Break in the action here (because it is HOT) to get caught up. Kids are watching a movie (checked out from community hall) and DH is snoring (shocker). We'll head to the pool shortly.

Sounds great! I'm hoping for TOTW after we eat at Cali Grill in April. Sounds like a nice spot to get a drink and watch Wishes! This trip we realized our kids might just be paraded out and Wishes is where it is for them. Thanks for the review.

Blizzard beach sounds fun! Crazy 3 person rule. I'd have just bombarded a family, we'd have let you join ours.

Sorry about your feet. My arches are always my issue and I have tries Dr Scholls they have one special for women. Yeah, no help. I hope your feet make it through the ultimate tour.

Yay for more!!!

I've never been much of a parade person myself, so I'm right there with your kids. It's most likely due to the fact that as a kid, parade time was the best time to ride rides, so my parents never let us watch the parades. During our Ultimate Day was the first time I ever saw the Electrical Parade, and I've been to Disney over 20 times. The special Dr. scholls for women are the exact ones I bought, and they actually were a life saver for me.

Are you enjoying OKW? We just booked a 2 bedroom to share with my parents next January.

 

[catherines_mama]

Yes we love OKW! i have stayed at BWV, Kidani and OKW and this is my favorite. It truly does feel like home. We booked HH and are in bldg 23. Waterfront and right at Peninsula Rd stop. It's an easy walk to Hospitality House and the 1st stop coming home from parks. No bus noise. I have no complaints at all. Having the car right outside is great if you are a car driver. DH refuses and that's fine- still love him. All bus stops are great, Epcot is the only one that is a bad walk from exit, but oh well- not everything is perfect.

 

[333disneymom]

Joining in. Like your writing style! Looking forward to the rest of your report. We are headed to Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon for the first time in a few weeks.

Sent from my iPad using DISBoards

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Joining in. Like your writing style! Looking forward to the rest of your report. We are headed to Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon for the first time in a few weeks.

Sent from my iPad using DISBoards

Thanks and welcome! If you like other water parks or water slides in general I think you will love both water parks. The theming is really outstanding at both of them, way better than your standard six flags water park type place.

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Removing Double Post.

 

[DisneyRegulars]

We made it! It's that point in the trip report where I finally get to talk about our Ultimate Tour of the Magic Kingdom. I thought I should maybe start with a little bit of our preparations. We didn't just roll out of bed Saturday morning and say to each other, "You know what might be fun today, lets go try and experience all 57 core attractions in the Magic Kingdom." No no no. Only a crazy person would do that. We are not crazy people, we are clearly leaning more towards the completely and utterly insane. The utterly insane plan their day of torture very carefully, they don't just wing it. We started preparing weeks before our journey by ordering matching shirts. (Everyone knows you can't do any sort of event in the MK without matching shirts, it just wouldn't be an event if the shirts don't match.) With shirts ordered we set about making our notebook. (By we, I really mean me, Grizzly was just kind of along for the ride) Found this super cute Mickey notebook at Walmart.

Inside this notebook I carefully glued print outs that included:
1. Our touring plan. We added in show times while we waited for the MK opening show.

2. Log Sheets that needed to be filled out.

3. List of all 57 Core Attractions in the Magic Kingdom, and what you needed to do for each attraction to be considered complete.
4. List of 24 Bonus attractions in the MK and what you needed to do to complete the attraction.
5. A print out of the official Ultimate Touring Plan rules (there are 23 of them!)

We used this book to keep track of our progress, as well as for a place to collect character autographs. (We managed to collect 6 character autographs during the day) I must say it felt weird dealing with so much paper in this very digital age, but the notebook came in very handy.

In addition to this book we also packed a small cross body bag. A survival kit of sorts. The bag contained the following items:
1. Backup phone charger that provided up to 5 charges for my smart phone. This was so awesome to have. We bought it specifically for our Ultimate Tour day (we were not messing around here), but it will come in so handy for travelling. I just lent it to my friend for his trip to Europe, and I used it on my work trip directly following our park visit, so already it's been extremely useful.
2. 6 Energy Bar type things. I bought 3 different brands of strange flavored energy bars to keep us going so we wouldn't need to stop for more than one meal.
3. 2 Five Hour Energy Drinks (never tried these before)
4. A contact case of sunblock
5. Extra Pen
6. Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom Cards and Map
7. 2 remaining gift cards
8. $2.50 in quarters for the shooting arcade and skeeball in Tomorrowland
9. A Park map
10. Baggy for phone in case it rained
11. Small plastic bag for notebook in case it rained.
12. Bandaids.

I had a water bottle that I clipped onto the bag and Grizzly had his sexy zebra print collapsible water bottle purchased the night before.

So I think that sums up what we brought with us into the parks. Grizzly wore a digital watch because the log sheets required constant time checks. You never realise how incredibly efficient Disney loads rides until you try to log the posted wait time, fast pass distribution time, time entering queue, time entering attraction and take a picture of yourselves all between getting in line and before the attraction becomes pitch black. This proved to be one of the most difficult and hectic aspects of the day. Especially figuring out how to take a picture in pitch blackness without using your flash.

So that's how we prepared. I guess I can capture our morning. We got up with the idea that we would go get a leisurely breakfast. In making this plan we failed to realise that breakfast did not start at the ungodly hour that we planned to eat it. Instead we applied sunblock. This proved to be a far more difficult task than one would anticipate. Apparently we hadn't bought sunblock at Walgreens, but a mislabled bottle of white-out instead. Grizzly looked like someone had painted him white. I wish I was kidding. I AM NOT KIDDING! Me being slightly less hairy than Grizzly looked slightly less white, but still, the stuff was terrible. Never again will I buy Walgreens brand sunblock. Grizzly remained white all day. I will say though, that neither of us got sunburnt, so there is a slight chance it may have worked.

Because our breakfast place was closed we instead headed out to McDonalds to pick up a quick and yummy McGriddle. We only eat these guys on vacation, but I have a soft spot in my heart for them. They are delicious. We wolfed down our sandwiches while driving to the MK. The parking lot looked this this when we arrived:

We were maybe the 6th car there. So yes we weren't the most insane park goers that day. (Yes, we are going to blatantly ignore the fact that those 6 cars probably had ADRs to attend to). So off we trotted to the MK and arrived at the turnstiles at 7:15am. Yup, a ridiculous 1 hour and 45 minutes early. I think we were a little excited. Here we are at the turnstiles looking fresh and chipper:

Notice how we are both in the picture, so someone else equally insane, or unable to tell time, was also there with us. Also notice cute matching shirts, small bag, and Goofy hats. The goofy hats proved to be a good choice, but you'll have to wait until next post to learn why...

Alright. I've brought you to the start line of our own personal Amazing Race combined with Marathon. Don't worry, I'm not going to drag you through all the attractions we did in one big long laundry list rant. Nothing worse than reading first we did A, then we did B, then we did C. Ugh, don't worry. I won't put you through that. But I will share with you some highlights, lowlights, and other memorable tales that I remember from our amazing ultimate tour. Stay tuned stay tuned!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Here we go! After some internal debate I have decided to chronicle this tour on an hourly basis. Will we make it through all 53 core attractions? Will we officially complete the Ultimate Tour? Only 14 hours separate you and the answer to this most pressing questions.

So we begin our tour with hour 1. Our mood is light. We have had an hour and a half to talk with our crowd neighbors. One of them happens to be a spanish teacher and she asks if I know what my shirt says. I was suddenly terrified that perhaps our shirts made no sense, but was told that we did well. Thank goodness! The train pulls up to the station and we manage to have one of our crowd friends snap a picture of us in the all of 2 seconds of the MK opening show. No song, no dance. No Casey Jr. coming round the track. NOTHING! Train pulled in, characters waved and then the race began!

We felt rather silly, but we rushed right to the Merida Meet and Greet. We were the second group there, and had to wait an agonizing 15 minutes for the attraction to open. We spent the time thinking about all the fast passes we could have gotten along the way. We spent a lot of this day running through could have / should have type analysis. We did A LOT of things wrong. At 9:15am, Merida stuck her head out and surprised the little girl in front of us. It was cute. If I had a little girl who loved Merida, I would make sure to line up first thing in the morning one day.

Here is our Merida evidence:

Also this hour we managed Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh and the Astro Orbiter, for a total of 5 core attractions.

I learned very quickly that I stink at taking selfies. Most of our pictures look like this, with only half of Grizzly in them. What am I saying, half would be a respectable amount of Grizzly, I was lucky if I got even the brim of Grizzly's hat. Here is our most pathetic selfie of this hour, on Pooh:

And best one on Astro Orbiter:

The most frustrating thing this hour was that the Astro Orbiter attraction took a whopping 26 minutes to complete. This proved to be one of the longest attractions of the day with the exception of the Monster Inc. Laugh Floor. What made this particular ride incredibly frustrating was that when we got up to the loading platform we realized they were purposefully leaving 3-4 cars empty each time!!! Why on earth would they do this? Didn't they know we had a race to do, and that this was not a good time to be artificially inflating wait times. Grrrrrrrrr!!!!!

So standing after hour 1:

• Core Attractions: 5/53
• Bonus Attractions: 0/24

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Hour 2: 10:00am to 11:00am

The entire morning we were very conscious of making sure to get back to Main Street to ride a Main Street Vehicle before they stopped running them. After getting off the Astro Orbiter time suck machine we scooted as quickly as possible over towards Main Street. Low and behold there was pixie dust everywhere!!! What do our little eyes see but a horse and carriage waiting just for us in the hub. We zoom over to the horse, spirits soaring, only to be told that we could not ride this EMPTY horse carriage as he was out only for promotional purposes. I'm not sure what the promotional purposes were, we did not see any cameras or anything of that nature. The horse carriage keeper informed us that he would be out again and picking people up at 12:00pm by the station in front of the Main Street railroad station, and that we should be there 10 minutes early. Sigh...We had wasted 8 precious precious minutes attempting to ride a promotional horse and carriage.

The remainder of this hour we tackled Storybook Circus (I think this is the name for the old Toon Town right?). Our stupid mistake for this hour was forgetting that we didn't need to meet with both Goofy and Donald Duck and we wasted 15 minutes for Donald to fix a problem with his head. Woe. For this hour we completed pictures of the mosaics inside the castle, meeting Marie, the Great Goofini, Pete's Silly Sideshow, Casey Jr. Splash Area, and Dumbo.

While we were scooping up fast passes for Dumbo we came across a cat. We had no idea who she was, but got a picture with her anyways. Turns out it was Marie, apparently a cat from Aristocats, a movie I have never seen.

Goofy went completely ballistic for our hats.

I cannot believe we waited unnecessarily for this duck.

After completing Story Book Circus we headed out of the area, never to return again for the remainder of the day. It felt good to have one section of the park completed. Coming soon we slowly start ticking off those E-Ticket rides, and try to track down the elusive main street vehicle.


Totals after 2 hours (It's now 11:00am):

• 10/53 Core (We think we're doing pretty well)
• 1/24 bonus

 

[Thumper4me]

Great job so far with the Ultimate Tour!!

I am looking forward to reading more and finding out how you did overall.

Kelly

 

[ABE4DISNEY]

I waver between thinking you two are awesome or insane! I can't wait to see how your Ultimate Touring Plan turns out!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Check it out! After over a year I finally figured out how to multi-quote!!!

Great job so far with the Ultimate Tour!!

I am looking forward to reading more and finding out how you did overall.

Kelly

Thank you! So glad you are enjoying it, I'll try not to keep you in suspense for too long.

I waver between thinking you two are awesome or insane! I can't wait to see how your Ultimate Touring Plan turns out!

May I suggest both? More coming I promise.