Walking Softly and Carrying a Big Stick: A TR-Approved TR Updated 8/30 [Archive] - The DIS Discussion Forums

VBsHustla

09-09-2008, 11:36 PM

:wave2: Hello! Welcome to our first attempt at a TR. If you’d like to find out a little bit more about our planning, please check out our pre-TR. If not, here is a little information about us. The TR is coming right up!

We couldn’t think of a better way to start writing about our trip than consulting our favorite book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so this first post contains many allusions to Alice, which we actually find quite appropriate. We hope you love it, and we thank you for joining our mad tea party. :flower3: We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. Or you wouldn’t have come here. :ccat:

We apologize if this starts out a bit awkwardly. We don’t know how to begin a conversation with people we have just been dancing with.

Details
Cast of characters: Who in the world am I? :confused3 Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

Jen (1/3 of VBsHustla) – Like the White Rabbit, Jen makes outrageous demands of her counterparts: “Mary Ann! Mary Ann! Fetch me my gloves this moment!” Often encounters a piece of rudeness more than she can bear; often creates a piece of rudeness more than others can bear. :eek: First visited WDW at age three, after a thwarted attempt at age one, where she had to make a pit stop at the emergency room on the way to the airport and was instructed not to fly due to an ear infection.

Laura (1/3 of VBsHustla) – Laura was anything but a regular bee; in fact, she was an elephant. :dumbo: She had gone so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way. First visited WDW as a baby and has been hooked ever since.

Elizabeth (sometimes affectionately referred to as Leonard, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people) (1/3 of VBsHustla) – Elizabeth is one temperamental flamingo. She may bite. Flamingos and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is – birds of a feather flock together. Only mustard isn’t a bird. And Liz is rather frightened of birds. And dinosaurs. :scared1: First visited WDW at age one.

Mom – Mom of Jen, Laura, and Kevy, who will not be joining us on this trip because he will return to college before we leave.

Dad aka Pandy – Dad of Jen, Laura, and Kevy. Shares ginger hair with Liz.

Here is a photo of us with our friends Chip and Dale:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2108/2134497342_9cfc11cb0d.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ja2160/2134497342/in/set-72157603534116374/)

:santa: From left to right, Jen, Chip, Laura, Dale, and Liz. :santa:

TR (honorary) – Born in 1858, Theodore Roosevelt was the twenty-sixth President of the United States. He was a professional historian, naturalist, explorer, author, and soldier. He first walked softly and carried a big stick in Disney World on October 1, 1971, when the Hall of Presidents (and the rest of the Magic Kingdom) opened.

Here's a photo of TR discussing the preservation of American wildlife:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3097/2763681019_edeca532a9.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ja2160/2763681019/)

VBsHustla

09-09-2008, 11:37 PM

August 26, 2008:

Woot! Only one day until we left! :woohoo: That evening, we finished up our last minute packing, got yelled at for our giant suitcases, and most importantly, crossed out the final Mickey on our countdown!

Last minute packing:

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These were the most important items we packed:

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Our countdown:

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We insisted on putting on our finest attire for this momentous occasion:

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After this, we settled into our four hours of sleep: Liz, freezing away in the Kevy quarters, Laura worrying about her room being painted while she was away, and Jen scurrying about her room to prepare it for painters. Plus, we were all just too excited to sleep! :yay:

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VBsHustla

09-09-2008, 11:38 PM

August 27, 2008:

We woke up bright and early at 5:30 in the morning to prepare for our 8:00 flight. We were originally planning to take a later flight, but we decided, after all the rave reviews from the Dis, that we wanted to try out Le Cellier. The only available ADR during our entire trip was August 27 at 2:10, so naturally we booked our flight around Le Cellier! :laughing:

Laura and Liz, who take approximately five minutes to prepare for the day, were ready to go before 6 and spent the rest of their waiting time exploding Cheerios all over the floor. :rolleyes1 Jen, who takes approximately three hours to prepare for the day, spent her morning watching General Hospital and blow-drying her hair, since her Chi was packed away. We should take this time to mention that Chis are our number one product and will appear frequently throughout this TR. We each had to bring along one of these superb tools, as we often Chi-d our hair simultaneously in both the evenings and mornings to help contend with WDW’s signature humidity.

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We left at about 6:10, and Laura and Liz were extremely hyper and insisted on dancing to the new Jonas Brothers album to start the trip off right. The rest of the car was not quite as pleased. :confused3 We arrived at the airport and dropped the car off in a nearby parking lot, and then we hopped aboard the airport shuttle for our first wild ride of the trip. Liz was nearly propelled out of the seat on a particularly sharp turn. This would not be the last time that happened on this trip!

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We adhered our Magical Express tags and said goodbye to our suitcases for the next 12 hours or so. :wave2:

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We then headed through security and had to put on some socks so that our feet wouldn’t touch any airport contaminants when we were stripped of our flip flops.

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Once we made it through security, we were completely starving, having only eaten full Ziplocs full of Cheerios an hour before. We eat quite frequently, as you may come to notice. We headed to the Continental Presidents Club and enjoyed some disgusting bagels and bananas to keep us going until we arrived in Florida.

We also took that time to read one of our favorite publications:

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We only had about 20 minutes in the lounge, so after we ate, took our first of 900 million bathroom breaks, and caught up on our AudioFile, we headed to our gate.

Mom and Dad decided they would actually like to not miss the flight, so they headed straight for the gate. We, however, decided we would need plenty of entertainment. We picked up a literary work that we knew would keep us thoroughly entertained for hours:

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We spent the rest of the flight posing like Nick Jonas :cool2::

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Taking self portraits:

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Liz somehow managed to surprise herself by taking this pic of herself.

Creating an envelope for our tips for housekeeping:

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And catching up on our correspondence to our dear friend, Theodore :hug: (not Roosevelt, before you find us too strange!):

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We had such a great time that we were completely shocked when our pilot announced that we’d started our initial descent. :) We landed at MCO at around 11:00 and were happy that it appeared we’d have plenty of time to get to Epcot for our Le Cellier ADR.

We got to the Magical Express counter, and Dad and Jen hopped in the queue while Mom, Laura, and Liz sat down with the bags we brought on the plane in the nearby chairs. Just as Dad and Jen got up to the counter, Laura received a phone call on her cell phone from a number that began with the area code 407. Recognizing it immediately as the Disney area code, Laura picked up the phone and was asked who she was and if her dad was there. After running her cell phone to her dad, it was determined that Continental had called and discovered Dad’s credit card and that he could return to the gate and get it. Dad also realized that his license was missing! He and Jen set off to get a pass into the terminal, ride on that fake monorail, and return to the gate to retrieve the items. In the meantime, Laura and Liz changed into shorts in the bathroom so they’d be ready for Epcot as soon as we got to the Grand Floridian and checked in. Dad ran through the airport, while Jen skittered at his feet trying to keep up. Dad ended up finding his license (the ID he’d need to get the pass), so Jen then was free to find the Crocs store. However, she was soon devastated when she found the Crocs store had gone missing. :sad1: Then, she emerged on the other side of the food court, in an identical hallway, but this one contained the Crocs store! :thumbsup2 She was delighted and waltzed through, before returning to Mom, Laura, and Liz at the Magical Express area. Dad returned soon after, and we boarded our bus in no time.

VBsHustla

09-09-2008, 11:39 PM

We were sharing our Magical Express with the Contemporary, Polynesian, and Wilderness Lodge although there were no Poly or WL guests on our particular bus. It was actually very empty (at about 12:30 in the afternoon). We were the only ones headed to the GF, and there were about two or three families headed to the Contemporary. We were so excited that we actually got to watch the Magical Express video! We’ve taken it twice before and only Jen had been able to see it. We enjoyed that all the characters were staying at the GF!

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We were so excited when the driver announced that we should get our cameras ready because we were about to drive under the Disney World sign! :woohoo: Dad laughed and wondered who would ever take a photo of such a thing, while Jen, Liz, and Laura all broke out their cameras and started snapping away.

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We were so excited to start seeing the monorail tracks, the Disney buses, and then the Magic Kingdom gates! We arrived at the GF and were so happy to be back that we launched into a GF photo shoot.

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We felt right back at home when we were greeted with the familiar sight of the salmon monorail standing triumphantly broken down on the monorail tracks. And worry not, that salmon monorail will come up again and again: breaking down, jumping up and down on the tracks, and even testing its emergency breaks while we’re onboard. :scared1:

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We arrived at the Grand Floridian at 1:15, and were a bit concerned that we would be late for our ADRs, knowing that we’d have to take a monorail to the TTC, a monorail to Epcot, and then walk from Future World to World Showcase.

We checked in first, and had a lovely CM, Kasia. :goodvibes Kasia was really helpful, kind, efficient. She was a delightful CM and enjoyed our tiaras. She even treated us like princesses! We later wrote a letter to WDW about her. Kasia confirmed that we had a garden view room, but that it wasn’t yet ready. She was able to tell us that our room was in Boca Chica, one of the two buildings we had requested. We stayed in Sago Cay last time we stayed at the GF, so we decided we’d like to try out another building. We requested either Boca Chica or Big Pine Key when we called Disney about ten days before. We consulted maps of the GF, because we really wanted a good view, and we thought that we might be able to get a pool view in one of these buildings.

We then took some pictures of the GF lobby, which we think is beautiful. We even spent a few of our afternoons just sitting in the lobby, looking around, and listening to the lovely pianists who play there.

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Jen then changed into shorts, and we checked our bags at the GF so that we wouldn’t have to carry everything to the parks. After we checked our bags, the guys at bell services complimented our tie-dye shirts and gave us pretty yellow carnations. They said the flowers were for the princesses and their court, our mom. We loved the flowers! :flower3:

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Here are our flowers in our bags. To distinguish our bags, we chose different color Mickeys, wrote our names on them, laminated them, and then tied them on with ribbon.

We then mailed our Joe Jonas gram to Theodore, and hurried upstairs to catch the monorail!

VBsHustla

09-09-2008, 11:40 PM

We arrived at Epcot about thirty minutes later, and even though we had about two minutes until our ADR, we couldn’t resist the temptation of taking and posing for a few pics with Spaceship Earth!

We should also mention that a drawback of the Magical Express is not having access to your luggage before heading out to the parks. We are all very pale with sensitive skin, and we didn’t have any sunscreen with us since it can no longer be carried on the plane. We attempted to buy some in the airport, but there wasn’t any in the shop we checked. We didn’t have time to buy any in the GF, so we had to walk through Epcot without any to get to Le Cellier. After we had eaten, we ended up buying the same Coppertone we had in our suitcases for $7 more than we had got it for at home, but we were just glad that we wouldn’t get horrible sunburns on the first day of our trip!

After zooming through Epcot, to both avoid the sun and get to our ADR, we arrived at Le Cellier only a few minutes late. We checked in and Mom and Dad waited inside, while Jen, Liz, and Laura waited outside. Even though we’ve visited the World Showcase countless times, we’ve somehow never really gone through Canada. We thought it was beautiful! We walked along the path between Le Cellier and O’Canada and took lots of pictures.

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We were happy that someone walking by asked us where she can get a tie dyed Mickey shirt! Two or three other people also told us they liked them while we were on that path, too, so we were excited!

Once we had a sufficient amount of pictures, we decided to go back inside, and we had about another ten minutes until we were seated. We were surprised by how tiny Le Cellier is. No wonder it’s so hard to get an ADR! We really liked the theming and atmosphere, though. It reminded us of Beauty and the Beast.

The CM who seated us thought we were a bit weird, though, it seemed! He was like, “those shirts are…interesting, I’ll just say.” And he said he thought they were very original and that he’d never seen such a thing. We were surprised, considering Disers love Le Cellier and that there’s many a 50 page thread on the Dis featuring similar tie dye shirts, but it was a pretty amusing conversation regardless.

A chef came over to talk to Laura, who is allergic to peanuts and tree nuts and is also a vegetarian, not to mention extremely picky. He confirmed that what Laura wanted would be okay, but that the bread was not safe and asked if we had any questions. Laura had been looking forward to trying two things this trip: Tonga Toast and the s’mores at Le Cellier. The chef said the s’mores would not be safe, and although it was expected, Laura was rather upset by this news!

Here are some photos of our meal at Le Cellier:

The bread:

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Jen had the mushroom filet with lemonade:

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Le Cellier Mushroom Filet Mignon with wild mushroom risotto, white truffle and herb butter sauce

Jen thought it was delicious and especially liked the mushroom risotto and the sampling she enjoyed of Laura’s mashed potatoes.

Laura had mashed potatoes with a tomato salad and water:

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cream cheese mashed potatoes and the tomato stack with caramelized onions and cucumbers

Laura really liked the mashed potatoes and thought the tomato stack was really good, as well. The tomatoes and cucumbers both tasted very fresh.

Liz had the same filet as Jen, but with roasted potatoes instead of risotto, with lemonade.

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Liz was not a huge fan of hers and didn’t really like the roasted potatoes.

Mom and Dad both enjoyed their meals and had the New York strip steak.

For dessert, Jen had the chocolate mousse:

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We all adored how cute this dessert is! As a huge dessert/ chocolate lover, Jen thought the mousse was pretty good, not the best, but that it was great that it was a moose.

Laura really wanted the s’mores, or at least some sprinkle covered marshmallows, but our server said that they’re already put together and contaminated by the questionable chocolate when they arrive at the restaurant. Not wanting to risk a trip to the hospital, Laura opted for some fruit instead, which was pretty good in spite of being frozen.

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Liz got the s’mores, which were also really cute, but not the most delicious of desserts. Liz assured Laura that she wasn’t missing much.

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Mom and Dad had the sherbet and crème brulee, and both really liked theirs and were happy that we had tried out Le Cellier.

Coming up next: How many parks will we feel the need to reunite with on our first day? Will we be locked in the GF storage facility? And more than one magical surprise!

VBsHustla

09-10-2008, 11:15 PM

August 27, 2008, Part 2:

After exiting Canada, we made our way to Future World. On the way, we purchased a Coppertone and sprayed ourselves down. Because we then looked so stunning from the glistening sticky spray, we decided to conduct a mini photo shoot in front of the ball. :thumbsup2

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We then waltzed over to Test Track, which we had seen was only a 20 minute wait on our monorail ride into the park. However, when we arrived, the stand-by line was a 40-minute wait, and the single rider line claimed to have a 30-minute wait. We find that queue to be horrifying and we pretty much hate this ride, so we fled for a more suitable “first ride of the trip” experience.

We decided to hit up one of our fav attractions, Where are ya, son? aka Finding Nemo. On our way, we took a detour to Club Cool. We had never been to Club Cool, but have read lots about it on the Dis, so we knew we had to stop in. When we entered, we immediately loved the blast of air conditioning that welcomed us and “Pumpin’ Up The Party,” one of our fav Hannah Montana tunes! We danced away whilst sampling the soda. :banana:

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Having read many accounts of trips to Club Cool on the Dis, Jen had no idea what the Beverly was :rolleyes1 , so she was tricked into drinking it! :scared1: Jen doesn’t know why she thought the Beverly would not be as bad as it seems in all of the pictures showing horrified children whose parents have tricked them into trying it, but we guess she just thought she was too tough to be taken down by a sip of soda. pirate: But, oh, how wrong she was! :eek:

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This tasted like a mix between liquid Benadryl and Nyquil. Those Italians must mix this with some strong liquor in order to enjoy it. However, maybe they just love disgusting soda. While in Italy a few years ago, we saw millions of ads for a soda called Chino (which was perfect because this was the year that The OC came on television, and Ryan Atwood was from Chino, so we were delighted by the shared name). Kevy first tried Chino in this strange cafeteria/ shop in the basement of Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. It was terrible. :scared1: It also tasted like Nyquil, but a bit worse. We think Chino is actually worse than the Beverly. Naturally we brought home about 27 bottles of Chino from Italy as souvenirs for all of our friends at home. Anyway, back to the Beverly. It was really awful. Some of the other sodas were quite enjoyable, but our feet were sticking to the floor of Club Cool, curbing our ability to dance like we meant it, and we had places to be, so we got a move on.

We finally headed over to Where are ya, son? which had no wait. Mom and Dad had never ridden before, and they enjoyed it. We also had a great time over in our clam. Our fav part of this ride is when our number one tune starts to play. It really is a big blue world! We also got to see the shark and dolphin! :fish:

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We then headed over to another all time fav attraction, Figment! :figment: Woot woo! We loved the ride, as usual (we loved the old version, but also find the new one delightful), and had a dance party while on board. We always miss Figment dearly when not in WDW, so we were pleased to reunite with this gem of a ride. Jen has a little Figment stuffed animal (the tiny ones with the magnetic hands and feet) perched atop her computer, so he is watching over us as we compose much of our TR.

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One of our idols, Dr. Nigel Channing :idea:

In the Figment ride, Liz particularly loves the scent room, where she insists upon holding her nose and securing her tiara when Figment lets the skunk smell spray. Jen and Laura recognize that the smell is far milder than actual skunk, which we smell quite frequently at home when driving around at night, but Liz just cannot stand the Figment skunk stench. Despite the smell, we all (Liz included) continued dancing along through our tour of the institute and Figment’s home.

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We continued the dance party in the imagination station outside of the ride, by conducting an orchestra including a Figment on a tuba and a Figment attached to a fife (a likely pairing of instruments, we thought). We made beautiful music with our erratic dancing. :rockband:

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VBsHustla

09-10-2008, 11:16 PM

After we had enjoyed our fill of the imagination station, we made our way over to another hot-ticket attraction, Spaceship Earth!

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We all loved the old Spaceship Earth (really!), and were eager and a bit apprehensive to see the new changes.

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From the moment we entered our time traveling vehicle, however, we knew we’d prefer to be transported right back to July of 2007 when things were still right in the world and that great guy narrated this attraction. We had no choice but to scream when we first heard that lady chatting about our grand and miraculous spaceship! How dare she usurp our fav guy! An absolute outrage. From the Greek dramatists now discussing mathematics, to the removal of Snow White and the Japanese IMing, we were quite simply appalled. We also felt it was absurd that they took the liberty to change the Dark Ages portion. Apparently these days that was just a time when a few things were ruined but actually they were really preserved so it didn’t matter?! Odd! Laura was also offended that her all time fav scene of any and every ride as a child, the one of Michelangelo painting the ceiling, was completely ignored as that crazy narrator was chatting about an unrelated topic at the time. It’s hard to even express just how offended we were by this disgusting excuse for an update. We will reluctantly admit to being vaguely amused by the whole picture thing at the end, however.

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But we’d trade it any second to hear that guy chatting about the ReNAIssance again! :lovestruc

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VBsHustla

09-10-2008, 11:32 PM

Laura, Liz, and Dad decided they couldn't live without visiting the Tower of Terror on our first day in WDW. So we headed out of Epcot to the bus area. A bus to MGM was waiting for us, and we thought this would be a great sign that we would have good luck with our transportation all week. This was certainly not to be the case. After our best bus ride over to MGM, we stopped to get some cups of ice water from the stand to the right of the entrance of the park.

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We were positively delighted to walk in to the sounds of one of our fav films! We sang along to "You Are The Music In Me" while walking down the street and missed our dear friend, Bernard, who loves to play the air piano while enjoying this tune!

We then headed back to the Tower of Terror, and pretty much walked right on.

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Liz, Laura, and Dad absolutely love the Tower. Jen and Mom think the ride is fine, but don't love it, and Jen is very freaked out by the theming. She absolutely hates scary movies and anything of the sort (including even the Haunted Mansion). Even though the Tower CMs no longer act creepy, Jen is not a fan of the Tower's atmosphere. Anyway, despite some of us being freaked out by the décor, we enjoyed a nice ride on the Tower. We did not approve of this precise sequence, however. There weren’t enough full drops, so we never really got that whole flying in the air feeling. Luckily we knew we had another week’s worth of Tower rides to anticipate.

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:scared1:

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After exiting the Tower, we passed by the Beauty and the Beast show, which was about to begin. We were going to go in, but decided we did not want to see the show without catching our fav act Four for a Dollar.

We decided to head over to the Toy Story area to see what it looked like and so that we would know where to find the ride on another morning. We thought this area was adorable!

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We could not believe it when we saw the signs for Hey Howdy Hey Takeaway! “Hey Howdy Hey” is one of our fav tunes and always adds to our Frontierland experience, and we also adore the phrase takeaway and use it daily!

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We walked over to another must-do attraction, the Voyage of the Little Mermaid. We had to wait for a while for the next show, and were horrified to find that we could not walk around the holding area and admire Ariel's treasures because people were sitting and laying all over the floor. We've seen children sitting down in holding areas before, but never a room full of children and adults all sprawled out across the ground. It was strange. We did get to admire Tink's Prison, which is right near the entrance on the back wall, and then enjoyed a lovely Voyage! We (and especially Jen, who voyages repeatedly on afternoons Liz and Laura devote entirely to the Tower) love this show. Fare forward, voyagers!

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And fare forward we did…

Coming up next, our return to the GF…

Theodore

09-11-2008, 08:08 PM

Wow!!! What a delightful thread this is!! Theodore Roosevelt is smiling up in the heavens!

I feel as if I was on holiday with you all! This photo journal was almost reminiscent of the Spice Girls VHS "One Hour of Girl Power" - all the trips were documented so superbly!

I simply adore the tye-dye shirt making extravaganza...what dedicated fans of DW! Your childhood photos brought a little tear to my eye, it's so refreshing to see such young tots enjoying themselves and getting lost in the magical world of WDW. Mickey and Minnie love it.

Before I conclude, I must also say I love the "Welcome to the future" astronaut photos of you lovely ladies! The cartoon bodies are so realistic!

cheerio chums!

VBsHustla

09-11-2008, 10:44 PM

Theodore

09-12-2008, 01:19 AM

:welcome: Thanks for reading, Theodore! You are our fav!:woohoo:

Welcome! anyone who supports DW and TR is A-okay in my book!!

VBsHustla

09-12-2008, 11:58 PM

Welcome! anyone who supports DW and TR is A-okay in my book!!

Thank you! And just wait until we get to our journey around the Epcot World Showcase. It'll practically rival An American Tour Story in its travel documentation! :goodvibes

laurniacalifornia

09-14-2008, 02:37 AM

Hiii!!!!
Yes, so I'm stunned w/ the overwhelming detail of your TR and am in need of more photos so I can visit Disney World vicariously through you all! After reading everything I was prompted to watch YouTube videos of Maelstrom and then I found this spectacular one of WDW Splash Mountain recorded by a logfull of what seemed like grown men exclaiming enthusiastically over the many singing woodland creatures. I became rather upset b/c there's this wonderful part w/ my favorite evil condors surrounded by streaks of lightning that I don't believe is in the WDL version. Ridiculous! I was also excessively amused by the license fiasco. I guess I'm always amused when someone else does something that's any type of version of my trademark bumbling; like I was in a store the other day and left my sunglasses and car keys in two different locations within the same store and tried to retrace my steps and recover them without my mom noticing. The recovery was eventually successfull but my mom did indeed notice. I also very much enjoyed the Le Cellier photos and hope that you took the same care in recording all of your other meals! I can't describe my satisfaction upon learning that someone finally had the bright idea to adorn a s'more w/ a rainbow sprinkled tower. I've been waiting for that to happen since I was like 3 years old. What was that little cottage in the photos? Just some random cottage? All this talk is making me wild for some Tower action. I guess I will have to be content w/ my little hallway-less contraption imitation in Anaheim, however shaft1 is rather thrilling. Next time we come across those silly teenage CMs who declared that the elevator in horrid shaft2 falls faster we'll insist they immediately enroll in a physics course and sprint into shaft1!:wizard:

VBsHustla

09-14-2008, 05:22 PM

VBsHustla

09-15-2008, 09:57 PM

After our quick trip to MGM, we headed for a bus back to the GF. We wanted to settle into our rooms and have plenty of time to get over to the Magic Kingdom for Wishes. Unfortunately, it took an hour and a half from the time we walked out of MGM's gates to the time we arrived at the bus stop at the GF. So frustrating! On the bus, we discussed our plans for the evening with Mom and Dad. We had thought that they would come to the Magic Kingdom to watch Wishes with us, but they said that they were tired from traveling, and wanted to stay and get settled in their room and then watch Wishes from the GF. This sounded reasonable, but we had ordered them a cake to be delivered to their room by GF Private Dining at 10 pm, so that it would be waiting when they returned from the MK and so that we could stop by their room and see it! :scared1: With this new plan, Jen feared that they would be asleep before 10, and if they weren't, there wouldn't be a chance for us to see the cake anyway! Jen thought all of her surreptitious planning had been for naught! She thought about telling Dad about the cake in advance so that he would answer the door and accept the cake when private dining delivered it, and would take a picture of the cake so we could see it. She then decided against telling him, and thought about calling private dining when she got to the GF and was away from Mom and Dad to arrange for the cake to be delivered another day.

When we finally got back to the GF, we headed to the check-in desk to find out where our room was. We learned that we would be in room 8344 in Boca Chica, one of the buildings we had requested. :goodvibes Mom and Dad were in Sago Kay. After we were told where our room would be, Jen decided to head over to the concierge to see if they could get in touch with private dining to arrange for another cake delivery time. Jen spoke to a lovely woman at the concierge desk and told her about the original plan for a 10 pm delivery, and then asked if the woman at the concierge desk could connect to private dining and perhaps see if the cake could be delivered earlier, so that at least Mom and Dad would be awake when it arrived. It turned out that the cake was already ready (at about 6:30 pm)! Jen was told that the cake would be delivered within thirty minutes, and was completely delighted! After feeling totally relieved that the cake that she had wanted to surprise Mom and Dad with would indeed remain a surprise, Jen popped into the Sandy Cove Sundries shop and picked up some postcards to send to her friends.

In the lobby before Jen went to bell services: http://i397.photobucket.com/albums/pp60/VBsHustla/IMG_6765.jpg
During this time, Laura and Liz went to bell services to collect the bags that we had stored with them during the day. Bell services told us that we could meet a CM with our bags right outside of the door near the large staircase in the lobby. We thought this was rather odd. We figured they may as well just hand us our bags right by bell services rather than take them from bell services and meet us outdoors.

Waiting outdoors for our bags:
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http://i397.photobucket.com/albums/pp60/VBsHustla/IMG_6767.jpg Love those GF garbage cans!

We waited for a few minutes and then we were absolutely delighted when our confused CM arrived in a giant, giant vehicle with only our three little bags as passengers. We thought this was pretty amusing. Apparently the GF thought we had left large suitcases with them. The CM was like, “um, where are your suitcases?!” He was super nice and we quickly assured him that we could certainly carry these bags ourselves. We asked if he knew where we could find our water that we had ordered. He looked in the storage room but couldn’t find them. He then invited us in for a look!

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Liz loving the GF storage facilities!

We adored our tour of the storage facility, but after we searched high and low with our new pal, we also couldn’t find the water. We were so confused and so was the CM! He then was like, “hey, did you guys order a cake?” And we were like “actually, yes,” but we were again confused, because why would a cake from Disney Dining be in this garage? :laughing: He took us to a refrigerator, where there was indeed a cake for someone with our last name! However, we quickly realized that a giant, half eaten sheet cake was not what we ordered and that it must belong to someone else. While Jennie often takes extreme measures for a good slice of cake, we supposed that even she would not go so far as to order a giant sheet cake and consume the better portion of it before sending it off as a surprise to Mom and Dad. :thumbsup2 All three of us soon gave up, and the CM said that perhaps the water was waiting in our room and to let them know if it wasn’t. We then parted from our new friend and proceeded toward Boca Chica!

After collecting our bags, Laura and Liz met up with Jen who was walking along the path around the pool to our room in Boca Chica. :grouphug: Reunited, we all continued along the path to find our room.

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We walked to the far end of the hallway on the third floor, and worried that because our room was at the end of the hallway, we would be getting a view not of the pool, as we had anticipated we might get, but of another building.

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We entered the room and were pleased to see how large it seemed, while Jen was chatting on her phone with our parents. They were letting us know that their water had been waiting in their room when they arrived. We walked into our dark room and didn’t understand how to turn on the lights. As Liz and Jen were trying to solve this mystery, however, Laura suddenly began screaming. We absolutely could not believe what we saw when we made our way to our balcony doors.

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THE MAGIC KINGDOM!
party:

We were completely elated when we realized that we had been given a room with a Magic Kingdom view! Our cameras definitely did not do this view justice. It was lovely in person! Dad was still on the phone and later said that he thought something was terribly wrong when he heard us screaming uncontrollably. He even said he thought we’d seen a bug! So surely you can understand just how crazy this reaction really was. It was quite simply the greatest view ever.

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http://i397.photobucket.com/albums/pp60/VBsHustla/DW%20TR%20Day%201/175.jpg Delighted!

Narcoossee's was right below us to our left, but straight ahead out of our window was Cinderella Castle, the train station, and Space Mountain! We couldn't believe our luck, having paid for a Garden View, and being given a great Magic Kingdom view room! As we continued to jump up and down and squeal, Dad also told Jen that he and Mom were so surprised by the cake they had just received and wanted to thank us for it! The cake had arrived about 10 minutes after Jen asked the concierge to call private dining about delivering the cake as soon as possible. After we screamed some more and took pictures of our amazing room, we ran out to Mom and Dad's room to see their cake.

Our room:
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VBsHustla

09-15-2008, 10:09 PM

Jen had ordered the mini castle cake about 10 days before our trip. She called the cake hotline, and was put through to the GF bakery. She asked a few questions about the cake, such as whether any of the flavor options would be safe for someone with nut allergies (Laura). Jen was put through to Linda, who said she could not guarantee any of the options would be completely nut free, but that the yellow cake with white chocolate mousse filling would be the safest. Although the cake would be too small for anyone but Mom and Dad to eat anyway, Jen thought it would be nice to order something that we all could taste a bit of if we wanted to. Jen thought the vanilla cake white chocolate mousse combination would probably be the best option anyway (the others were cheesecake or chocolate cake with chocolate mousse filling) since the cake would be covered in vanilla frosting with a white chocolate castle topper. A few days before we left for WDW, Jen got a call on her cell phone from a 407 number. Jen normally hesitates to answer unknown numbers, but was delighted to see that someone from WDW was calling and answered right away. :woohoo: It was Linda, who had found out that the white chocolate castle topper should not be eaten by those with nut allergies, so she was calling to see if Jen wanted to order a different cake or have the bakery leave the castle topper off. Jen assured Linda that she would make sure that Laura did not eat the cake, and that the bakery could still include the castle topper.

When we went in to see Mom and Dad's cake, we found that the bakery had left the castle topper off of the cake, but placed it alongside it. They decorated the cake with beautiful, elaborate little flowers, which went onto the plate and tied the castle into the cake. We had never seen a mini castle cake like this, but thought it was really beautiful!

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We were also loving the towel animal!

Mom and Dad also were delighted with the cake, which was what we intended! As they do not frequent the DIS, Mom and Dad had no idea that you could order custom cakes to be delivered to your room, so they were completely surprised! We did not eat any of the cake, but Mom and Dad said that it was very good, and that the white chocolate castle was great too. :wizard: It was also perfect, because they wanted to stay at the GF that night and weren’t hungry enough to eat dinner after having a late lunch at Le Cellier (which we thought was completely absurd, as we were of course ravenous for our dinners), so the cake was perfect.

After snapping some pics of the cake and checking out Mom and Dad's room, we left the lovely GF and were off to the MK.

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We took the monorail over, and were so pleased when we walked through the MK's turnstiles and under the train station for the first time during our trip! We were, however, surprised to see Halloween banners and decorations up already. It was still August!

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We were honored to be back in the MK and we couldn’t dream of anything better than to be walking right down the middle of Main Street, USA!
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By the time we got to the MK, it was a bit after 8. We wanted to get dinner and get in a few rides before we watched Wishes at 10. We were very upset that we would not be able to watch Spectromagic for the first few days of our trip (due to the Liberty Square bridge refurbishment). :sad1: Spectro is our fav nighttime spectacular, and we are used to enjoying it twice each night of our trips (sometimes more if we run from the train station to Frontierland and catch the same parade twice). Anyway, this night, we walked in and enjoyed Main Street for the first time this year. We took some pics, and Jen stopped at Casey's to get dinner. Laura and Liz decided to check out Columbia Harbour House, where they enjoyed some rather bland salads and were completely and utterly repulsed after being attacked by a giant bug! :eek: It was the most frightening experience. :scared1: This bug was literally about four inches long and was stampeding toward us. :eek: We were running away and screaming, but none of the CMs were fazed by this!

We continued our day of riding the most popular, most exciting attractions at every park by hopping onto the Teacups and the Carousel.

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We were desperate for some in action, spinning teacup shots, so we felt the need to ride this ride straight away. Plus, we simply adore Alice and much like the White Rabbit, we couldn’t wait another moment! Unfortunately we didn’t capture the perfect spinning shot, but this just meant that we’d have to try again another day. Jen normally does not ride the teacups (because they make her nauseas), but she so wanted perfect spinning teacup photos that she toughed it out and rode the teacups repeatedly on this trip! While taking photos of Liz and Laura she actually felt perfectly fine, but got rather dizzy when not focusing on taking photos.
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Please excuse our fluorescence in these photos. We're shocked that we've managed appear even more ghostly than normal! :scared1:
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VBsHustla

09-15-2008, 10:35 PM

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We headed directly toward another favorite, the Carousel. We love this ride, as it always allows us to listen to our favorite songs and view our favorite sights. We were glimmering, shimmering, and carouseling the night away!

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We would have adored a nice Philharmagical experience, but with only a few minutes left, we decided to head straight to Main Street for Wishes.

We love Wishes, and seeing it for the first time on each vacation is always a magical experience. Our usual spot is right outside the doors of the Main Street Ice Cream Parlor, where we then run right as Wishes ends. We did stand near the ice cream parlor and Casey’s this night, but did not make our customary ice cream run because (believe it or not) we were very full at this point. We took a few photos of Wishes, but vowed to get better shots when we had better viewing spots later in the week.

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After Wishes, we walked toward the exit and were pleased and a bit sad to see the CMs with the See Ya Real Soon sign. We loved it when two CMs posed for our pic!

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We decided to take the boat back to the GF and were able to enjoy the Electrical Water Pageant, which was featuring some lovely patriotic tunes just as we were passing by it. We were pleased to complete the GF transportation triumvirate in one day: boat, monorail, and bus.

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We were very excited to see that our water had arrived and was waiting in our room. Our Dad called and had taken care of it when we were at the MK, because while theirs was waiting in their room, ours seemed to have gone missing. Liz immediately filled our refrigerator with our lovely Zephyrs.

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We then prepared to go to sleep since we had woken up at 5 a.m. We thought the shower was the oddest, but we loved it! We then settled into our beds and had a nine-hour discussion about which pillow we each preferred. We tested them all out and found each pillow to be vastly different from the next! How very curious.

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We absolutely love the turndown service at the GF, but we were a bit upset that they no longer have what we call “Sleep deep, little sheep” cards. Two years ago, we got these great little cards each night to wish us a good night! We adored the looks of the new chocolates, though. The GF picture is a great addition!

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We enjoyed a little late night Raven Symone and Phil of the Future, before going to sleep at about 1:00 and dreaming about our morning EMH at the MK that would begin in mere hours! :lovestruc

butiflfeet

09-16-2008, 01:05 PM

Your trip report has me so excited for our upcoming vacation! I can't wait to hear more about it!

VBsHustla

09-16-2008, 11:06 PM

Your trip report has me so excited for our upcoming vacation! I can't wait to hear more about it!

Welcome and thanks for reading! We hope you have an excellent trip!:goodvibes

TINKB72

09-18-2008, 02:49 PM

Wow!! Awesome TR!! :thumbsup2

You guys rock! :worship:
I can't wait to hear more....keep it coming!

VBsHustla

09-18-2008, 09:48 PM

Wow!! Awesome TR!! :thumbsup2

You guys rock! :worship:
I can't wait to hear more....keep it coming!

Welcome and thanks for reading! We're glad you're enjoying it!:goodvibes

DonnaMartinGraduates

10-01-2008, 10:39 PM

VBsHustla

10-03-2008, 03:27 AM

Great TR!

The pics of the inside of GF looked beautiful, the only thing missing was Uncle Jesse sitting at the piano singing "If ever single word I said, could make you laugh, I'd talk forever..." And the Epcot pic was great. I'm glad to see the spot of that memorable Cory/Topanga kiss looks as good as ever!

My fave part was the Ryan Atwood beverage. If only they had a Misha drink! Or a Julie/Luke!

But my true fave part was how you all occupied yourself on the plane. The Mousekeeping envelope was probably very well received, and I'm very jealous of Theodore's letter. I am glad you clarified that it wasn't written for Teddy Roosevelt...

I loved your tiaras as well! I felt as if you were named "Princesses of the Day" and were on your way to a ridiculous tea party with your new BFF Snow White.

:welcome: Thank you for taking a little time off from protesting on Donna Martin's behalf to drop into our TR! We couldn't be more honored!

And please stay tuned, Uncle Jesse will be making an appearance in the GF in just one day's time! :moped: :cloud9: Also, while we didn't manage to find any Mischa beverages, some members of the VBsHustla party did manage to toast over the KiKi special, fresh margs! :p

VBsHustla

10-12-2008, 05:32 PM

August 28, 2008:

We jolted awake with a fright bright and early this morning, to the sounds of Jen’s jarring cell phone alarm! :scared1: We prepared for the day by throwing on our soffees, spraying ourselves down with an assortment of disgustingly scented products (Coppertone and anti-humidity hairspray), and securing our tiaras!:yay:

We headed off to the main building to catch the monorail, but not before snapping a few shots of the GF. It was the first time this trip that we were able to enjoy the morning’s mist floating across the Seven Seas Lagoon and settling over the GF!

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We arrived at the MK at about 7:50, which was ten minutes before it opened. We decided that we would stand toward the back of the crowd and enjoy the “welcome, welcome” ceremony popcorn:: rather than risk our lives in the mad-dash to attractions we have no interest in (for instance, Space Mountain.)

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We were so pleased when the opening ceremonies began and as always, were touched to be welcomed to a place where it’s all magic, wrapped up in pixie dust and a place where dreams come true!:cloud9:

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With a tear in our eyes and a skip in our step, we once again found ourselves walking right down the middle of Main Street, USA!:love:

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(behind a million other people, toward a castle with a crane next to it, but we were so pleased that we ignored these inconveniences)

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(the crane was putting Christmas lights on the castle)

VBsHustla

10-12-2008, 05:39 PM

We headed with a purpose toward one of our most beloved all time favorite rides. This ride is always our first stop, and we try to ride it at least 35 times per trip. :thumbsup2 Some of us have even been known to have its background music as a ring tone on our cell phones!:rolleyes1

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The ride was, of course, none other than Peter Pan. :banana: When we arrived, however, we were absolutely appalled to find a queue already forming in the area! :confused: We didn’t understand this in the least. We often tend somehow be either the first or one of the first on this ride. We’ve certainly never been the victim of a 10 minute Peter queue at 8 a.m.! We decided it must have been complacency and that we had yet to return to normal WDW form by that point. :confused3

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Soon enough, we hopped aboard our pirate ship and heard Peter yell “here we go!” as we were whisked across the skies of London. What a perfect way to start the day!:love:

We then moseyed over to Dumbo and were greeted with an even larger queue. It didn’t look all that long, but somehow this line seems to take ages. Normally we would be content to enjoy the surrounding scenery, but we were truly outraged by the giant crane that was obscuring our view of the castle the first few mornings of our trip! We are easily amused, though, and we couldn’t help but love it when this guy started descending in an elevator suspended in the air by a string!

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Everyone around us was strategizing about achieving their desired Dumbo color throughout our wait, so we selected what we think were the two most undesirable colors in an effort to help curb any early morning meltdowns!

We hopped into our yellow and orange Dumbos and away we flew!:dumbo:

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Our next stop was a trip aboard the happiest cruise that ever sailed!

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We danced with the monkeys of the jungles and sang with the children of the world!

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We considered a trip to the frontier, but we were headed to Chef Mickey’s for an 11:00 breakfast/lunch and we didn’t want to be drenched for our photo shoot with Mickey and his pals!

VBsHustla

10-12-2008, 05:47 PM

We danced to a little Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah and then decided for a quick trip to Tomorrowland to see if perhaps we could get on Buzz with a suitable wait time. If not, we knew we could pop in to visit our number one guy, John (of the Carousel of Progress.) :goodvibes We usually hate Tomorrowland, because it’s always crowded and congested:crowded:, and we were very weary of it at 9:30 on an EMH morning. We were truly shocked when we discovered it to be nearly completely deserted!

We walked into Buzz and walked straight on!

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We adore this ride, but 2/3 VBsHustla is never really that pleased with the final outcome! Jen always destroys Liz and Laura, two pretty pathetic perpetual Ranger First Classes, in this game. That Planetary Pilot is clearly out to destroy us!

We then took the opportunity to take some pics trapped with Zurg, because shockingly, there was not anyone else there doing this.

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Jen also purchased a delightful hot green Buzz tee, which was about a nine hour transaction even though we were the only ones in the store!

Then, finally, our eyes met with the most beautiful sight we could ever wish to see!:lovestruc

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The TTA! We absolutely love the TTA and couldn’t be more thrilled to be touring this wonderland of Tomorrow, especially because we were lucky enough to have our very own row of cars. We saw some very interesting things during this particular TTA journey! We got to scope out that new Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor attraction, which made Liz extremely angry. She posed the question that if everybody’s got a laughin’ place, why would we need a floor?! Everyone agreed that this attraction was likely an unnecessary outrage, so we didn’t consider checking it out.

Then, we saw something completely absurd! As we were cruising past Space Mountain, we observed a wait time of ten minutes?! :yay: We were amazed. We hate that queue, as it’s always three hours long and both outside in the blazing sun or inside in a rather claustrophobic building. We often don’t even ride this ride because the queue experience is really not worth it to us! However, for a ten minute wait, we were delighted to give it a try. By the time we arrived, the predicted wait time had been pushed back to 20 minutes. We decided that was still better than usual, so we walked in. This was the weirdest experience! We zoomed right through the building and walked right up to the left side. The left, to us, is the only acceptable side. While on the TTA, we made sure the left was open before even considering riding. The left was a great time this time around! None of us were overly jostled or suffered whiplash and we were able to wildly wave at some TTA riders while climbing up the mountain. An absolutely brilliant time! :thumbsup2 We were just shocked that there was hardly anyone in this building whatsoever! We entered the queue at 9:39 exactly, rode the ride, walked through the exit, and emerged from the depositing gift shop at precisely 9:50! :woohoo: Pretty amazing and perfect timing, as we planned to be at the 10:00 opening of Toontown.

We took the path from Tomorrowland to Toontown and arrived in mere moments. We were shocked and dismayed, however, when we found Toontown to already be up and running in full swing at only 9:50 a.m.! :eek: How very misleading that times guide can be! Since the lines were already far too long to meet the characters, we decided to keep on walking. But we did find the time to pose with this delightful miniature shack, which we’ve never noticed before. It reminded us of the tiny Toontown buildings of our childhood, which we are so fond of seeing on Full House re-runs when Nicky and Alex pose as we used to pose.

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We thought that we might want to take another spin on the teacups in the daylight to try to get the pictures we wanted. Before we left for our trip, we even asked the Dis for tips about capturing perfectly spinning photos on this ride. We attempted to use this advice that the photography board so kindly offered to prepare for this feat. We took photos with Liz in the forefront and Laura spinning wildly in the background to ensure that we’d be very used to this whole process!

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It did not help! :confused: Luckily, we think we got some pretty nice ones on the actual ride!

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After the Teacups, we decided it was time to hop on the monorail and head over to Chef Mickey’s. We were just about the only people exiting the MK at 10:30 in the morning!

teresajoy

10-27-2008, 02:54 AM

VBsHustla

11-09-2008, 10:26 PM

I'm only about halfway through with your TR, but I wanted to tell you that I am really enjoying it!!!! I've got to go to bed now, I've stayed up way to late as it is, but I should finish what you've got tomorrow! :banana: :banana: :banana:

Welcome! We're glad you've enjoyed our TR so far! :goodvibes We should have an update coming up soon.:thumbsup2

VBsHustla

11-09-2008, 10:54 PM

We were very excited to dine with Mickey and his pals – we had worn some of our best Soffes and tees so we would look stunning in our pics, and we couldn't wait to stab our forks into some delicious, cold, hard Mickey waffles! But these dreams were not to be realized. We zoomed from the MK to the Contemporary via the monorail and were immediately horrified for the people staying in the Contemporary when we saw scaffolding and construction material all over. :sad2: We exited the monorail to the absolute loudest construction noise we've ever heard! And we've all lived and worked in New York City, so that's saying something. We knew we could not eat at Chef Mickey's during this chaos (and while dust was flying everywhere :eek:), so we decided the easiest thing to do would be to call the dining line to try to get an ADR for Kona Café, since it would require only a short monorail ride. Over the blaring construction noises, Jen was very relieved to hear the dining CM offer us any time we wanted within the next 30 minutes for Kona. Jen selected 10 minutes from the current time, then marched up to the Chef Mickey's check-in podium and cancelled our ADR for there. While Jen was canceling/ booking our breakfast ADR, Laura and Liz were shopping in the lovely Contemporary shops, where Liz purchased a replacement tiara, as hers had cracked. :scared1: Unbelievable that a plastic tiara that had been packed and dragged on planes for numerous trips and gotten millions of hours of wear would not hold up forever! :laughing: We popped back up to the monorail and arrived at the Poly in no time.

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We were incredibly relieved to walk into a quiet Polynesian and be seated immediately in an almost empty Kona Café. :thumbsup2 It was 11:00 am when we arrived, and we were hungry and ready to relax! Kona at this time was the perfect spot to do this! Though we were on the DDP, we paid out of pocket for this meal.

Jen: I had been so excited to try Kona's Tonga Toast (we had never been to Kona for breakfast before). However, I have to say I was disappointed in it. :confused3 I thought the Tonga Toast was way too greasy (and this is coming from someone who lists french fries and other not-so-great-for-me fried items among some of my favorite foods).

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The cinnamon sugar on the outside of the toast was delicious, and I wish I could have enjoyed more of it, but the outside of the bread was so greasy that I did not eat much of it. I did very much like the warm bananas inside of the Tonga Toast, which I pulled out and ate along with the inner reaches of the sourdough bread.

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The bacon, which I obviously understood would be greasy, was also too greasy for me to really enjoy. I guess coupled with the overly fried Tonga Toast, it was all just too much for me. I am glad I tried the Tonga Toast, because I had so been looking forward to it, but I would not order it again. I would probably return to Kona and try the Macadamia Nut Pancakes, though!

Liz: I too was super excited to try the Tonga Toast. Since cinnamon, sugar, bananas, and strawberries are some of my favorite tastes I thought it would be my top dish of the trip. :lovestruc However, I too found the toast way too greasy and sugary to enjoy. The inside banana portion was good, but had I eaten the entire toast I can guarantee that I'd have had a terrible tummy ache for the rest of the day. :sick: The potatoes were great though. They had a nice seasoning and were not dry at all.

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I also enjoyed a glass of Lilikoi juice which was sweet and delicious- I didn't even know that I liked passion fruit or guava juice!:upsidedow

Laura: I was extremely disappointed when the chef told me I couldn't have Tonga Toast! I've wanted to try it for years. :scared: However, in hindsight, I'm glad I couldn't have it, because Jen and Liz told me that I would have died if I had even tried a bite of it. They said I would have absolutely hated it. I'm not a fan of greasiness or really heavy food, even though I essentially subsist entirely on carbohydrates. The chef said he could make me waffles with no problem (the waffle process is completely nut free at all times.) The French toast was off limits entirely, because the bread was not guaranteed to be nut free, (also why the Tonga Toast isn't okay). The fried items (like the potatoes and the meat) seemed to be okay for those with nut allergies, but only if the chef prepares it separately. The chef who talked to me gave me a ton of options. I asked if I could have plain pancakes. He had a separate griddle that does not come in any contact with the macadamia nut pancakes, so he was happy to do this, but he warned me that mine wouldn't look as pretty as everyone else's! Although I wasn't all that excited to just have plain pancakes, they turned out to be delicious!

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I loved them. :love:

While the food gets mixed reviews from us, the atmosphere at this restaurant could not have been more delightful. It was mostly couples eating around this time, and they were all really nice, not rushing, and extremely enthusiastic about our tiaras! :banana:

Liz also experienced one of her fav moments of the trip whilst visiting the bathroom near Kona: I headed over to the ladies room before leaving Kona and experienced one of my fav parent and child squabbles of the entire trip. A mom and her two young daughters came into the bathroom after I had gone into a stall. I saw tiny crocs in the stall next to me and then saw the smallest pair zoom out of the stall. As her mother called after her, this little girl ran into the furthest stall and locked the door. Her mom then began banging on the door and yelling, "Katie Jane, you open this door right now!" By this point, I was washing my hands and was fascinated with the entire exchange. After a few tries of banging and yelling, Katie Jane's mom tried politely knocking on the stall door to get Katie Jane to come on out. However, he knock was only answered by a little voice saying, "nobody's home!" I left after this point, but was delighted by Katie Jane's very funny response to her mother's knock. :rotfl:

Along with the atmosphere, we also loved Kona's close proximity to the GF! After a short monorail ride, we headed down to the concierge desk in the GF lobby to change the ADR we had for Kona for later in the week – no need to go back there again this trip. We decided we would do the Supercalifrag breakfast at 1900 Park Fare instead; after all, we were right at the GF and Liz is a Poppins super-fanatic. :cloud9: We were horrified to learn that the earliest ADR we could get was for 8 am; we could have gotten any time we wanted that morning, but the restaurant just doesn't open until 8! We'd had a 7:30 am ADR at Kona and were planning on being at Epcot for rope drop on that day. Oh well, we decided, we would roll with it. :)

We then headed back to our lovely room and were pleased to see that Mousekeeping had already beautified it for us. :goodvibes We freshened up a bit, re-spraying our heads with Fructis and our bodies with Coppertone. The room smelled delightful! But it was no bother, we enjoyed the balcony for a bit, and used it as a safe space to spray some more Coppertone.

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Liz was enjoying a rest in a comfy chair in the room, and Jen and Laura decided that it was time for a mini-photo shoot. We took a few self-portraits, but Liz was terribly rude and deleted a number of the pics! :mad: Here is an example of one that survived.

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VBsHustla

11-09-2008, 11:01 PM

Our room was right near the boat launch, and as we were not in a rush, we decided to take the boat over to the MK (the boat stops at the Poly first, then goes on to the MK, whereas the GF is the last stop before the MK on the monorail). En route to the boat deck, we stopped to take some self portraits, as the GF looked lovely and so did we! :rolleyes1 We were photoshooting it up for a while, and four or five different GF CMs offered to take photos for us, so we let them all! :upsidedow

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When we headed down to the boat dock, we were upset to see a boat just pulling away! :rolleyes:

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If only we had skipped 40 of the 80 photos we had just taken! :laughing: Oh well, we thought, and took the opportunity to capture on film that glorious spot where Aunt Becky enjoyed a picnic with Chip and Dale.

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VBsHustla

11-09-2008, 11:05 PM

We found there were really many interesting activities to be done while waiting on the GF dock:

We reenacted Aunt Becky’s confusion and anger over Uncle Jesse’s lateness:
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We danced:
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We posed:
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We admired the gorgeous view of broken down monorails:
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We took some lovely photos of the GF:
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We jumped for joy:
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We witnessed this bird randomly begin to scream and flip out:
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We began to randomly scream and flip out:
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We brawled:
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When the next boat arrived mere moments later, we were still the only passengers awaiting a lift to the MK, so we were delighted to have our own boat for the trip over to the Poly! :thumbsup2

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VBsHustla

11-09-2008, 11:10 PM

We were even more delighted when we met our most excellent captain, Mike! :lovestruc :lovestruc :lovestruc

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We instantly became BFFs with Mike, who turned out to be a compelling conversationalist. :hug: We had an excellent chat about our trip so far and Mike was very fond of our tiaras. He even insisted that we check out the Bippity Boppity Boutique. He thought we looked like we'd enjoy it! :laughing: When we got to the Poly, Mike glanced toward the dock and was abruptly like, "well, guess no one's waiting!" and pulled away! He congratulated us on having our own personal boat. We continued our chat with Mike by sharing our life stories with one another. At one point, we were taking self portraits and Mike offered to take a photo for us. :rotfl: Liz was like, that's quite alright, you can continue with that whole driving thing!

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While on board, Jen got a call from our dear friend Bernard (:wave2: hiya, Bernard, if you ever read this!). Bernard had recently begun working in Virginia, otherwise we may have convinced her to come to DW, and was calling to tell Jen that she was pleased to be sporting the Cleo Crocs that Jen had talked her in to buying a few weeks before. :laughing: After a brief convo with Bernard, Jen rejoined the conversation with Mike.

As we approached the MK, Mike insisted on turning the boat off and sitting there in the water for a while (Just kidding. Sort of. There was some boat traffic, but we like to think Mike just wanted to chat with us!) We were complaining about how ugly the castle looks with a crane emerging from its spires, but Mike assured us that it would be gone soon and that they were putting up their Christmas lights. We found this to be an absurd thing to do in August and Mike agreed! Unfortunately, we arrived at the MK soon after and had to part from our new fav guy. :( We desperately wanted to ask Mike for a picture, but we thought it would be too weird! :blush: We decided that since we take these boats multiple times per day, we'd surely see him again, so after a friendly farewell, we headed back into the MK feeling absolutely tickled! party:

OhMari

12-09-2008, 09:25 PM

A month has gone by, I hope you come back and finish.

VBsHustla

12-09-2008, 11:13 PM

A month has gone by, I hope you come back and finish.

With school breaks coming up, we intend to get a lot more updates up! :rolleyes1 No, really! :flower3: Anyone out there dying to find out what happened to us at the MK, hang in there a few more days! :upsidedow

VBsHustla

12-23-2008, 10:51 PM

After strolling through the gates and collecting CMs’ wishes for us to have a magical day, we made our way into the MK. Hiya, MK! :wave2:

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Our first priority was getting FPs for Splash since we had avoided riding it earlier when we thought wetness would ruin pics at our Chef Mickey’s meal that was not to be. However, we were first sidetracked by a trip into the Main Street fire station, since Jen had been dying to go after realizing she’d never been there. :firefight We had a good time looking around, and of course took some pics!

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Next, with the goal of a Splash ride in mind, we headed right up to the train station. :drive:

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We love the train, but rarely take it from Main Street to Frontierland (usually just Frontierland to Toontown/ Tomorrowland), so it was nice to see the Main Street station again! :wave2:

Even nicer was the part of our day we’re declared Hubertmania in our TR notes. One of our general goals during this trip was to meet Mary Poppins, and a huge dream was to meet Hubert (Jen and Laura thought Bert’s name was Hubert until we saw the Mary Poppins show on Broadway about a year ago, since Mary sings “it’s a jolly holiday with Hubert” in Jolly Holiday, after all!), but we know he’s usually not out much. Well, much to our delight, when we reached the top of the train station stairs, there were Mary and Hubert happily posing for a pic with one girl, and with no additional line in sight! Hiya, Hubert! :wave2:

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We squealed with delight and skittered right over to their minder. After mere moments, we got this lovely pic! :lovestruc :cool:

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Doesn’t Hubert just look so delighted? :sunny: We certainly were! What luck – Mike and Hubert in one day! :p We should also mention that Liz is a Poppins fanatic, so this whole thing was superb for her (even if Mary didn’t quite look a bit like the true Mary Poppins)!

Following our superfralicag encounter, we enjoyed a nice ride over to Frontierland, grabbed FPs to Splash, and then headed over to Thunder.

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(No dancing!) :dancer:

VBsHustla

12-23-2008, 11:03 PM

The posted wait time for Thunder wasn’t bad, so we meandered through the regular queue. :tiptoe: :tiptoe: :tiptoe: We say meandered because we always seem to be stuck behind people who walk like it’s their job to prolong our Thunder queue experience as long as possible. When we finally made it up inside, there were actually quite a lot of people in there, particularly hot and smelly people. Being made hotter and smellier by the lack of air way up there in that cabin on big Thunder Mountain. To make matters worse, Laura has to contend with the memory of the pre-Fastpass days of three-hour Thunder queues that inevitably featured hordes of people dining on those horridly scented Tolucas. :faint: Eww! Maybe someone needs to tell the Imagineers that the sea breeze cannot reach such elevations? And that perhaps some working fans would be appreciated in the holding area? While we were trying to amuse and cool ourselves in the long, hot line, we noticed a somber fellow who was hating the whole situation far more than we were, and to delight us even further, he looked just like Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys. Loved that solemn fellow. :goodvibes

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Down at the boarding area, we told the CM we’d all be riding together, got a crazy look (:crazy2:) as per usual, and scooted down toward the back. While waiting a few people deep before boarding, a woman with her husband and son that were two rows ahead of us in position to ride in the same train as us asked if one of us would ride with her son so no one had to be alone. :hug: Her son looked to be not much younger than us, probably 18 to 20, and probably mortified. We assured her that single riders were allowed, that her son would be just fine alone, and that we would all be happy sitting in one row. ::yes::

Once we got into our row, we found we fit just fine – phew, no one had grown since last year! We actually find that sitting all together is more comfortable on Thunder, because with just one or two people, we slide all over and hit into the sides of the seat, but with three we’re not quite squished but there’s absolutely no room for any sliding! :crowded:

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Good times were had by all on Thunder, and then we wandered over to the pin trading shop next to Pecos Bill’s. We wanted to get a sheriff’s badge for our friend Theodore (aka Lauren). ::cop: We know they didn’t carry badges with girls’ names (which is actually quite offensive, but whatever, luckily we call our friend a man’s name), but then we found they didn’t even have the name Theodore! How offensive! :mad: TR would be totally outraged! Once we bore this bit of rudeness, we stormed out of the shop and our moods were lifted instantly at the prospect of Dole Whips. :flower3:

VBsHustla

12-23-2008, 11:08 PM

The Dole Whip line was a bit absurd, but it seems to always be, so we waited. :bored: While waiting we noticed a straight up kinda girl who looked and was dressed just like Ashley Tisdale. :yay: What luck – Hubert, a Nick Carter imposter, and a Maddie Fitzpatrick look-a-like all in one day! :upsidedow Could the celeb sightings get any better? Liz and Jen got Dole Whip floats (even though we usually just get the pineapple soft serve), as they were the most expensive items and we were using snack credits. Added bonus, they turned out to be totally delicious (as I’m sure everyone here on the DIS already knows)!

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After enjoying our delicious pineapple treats (and after Laura and Liz had changed into their Elizabeth Swann crowns), we walked back to the far reaches of Adventureland and enjoyed a swashbuckling journey through Pirates. :boat:

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VBsHustla

12-23-2008, 11:20 PM

After some intense sword crossing we emerged from the Pirates gift shop to found Captain Hook and Smee hanging out, so we hopped in line and got some pics.

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We had asked Captain Hook to sign a postcard for Jen’s friend Lizzy, and he leaned on our little TR notebook, which he then signed a page of! :confused3 And Smee did too! We guess our dollar store High School Musical TR notebook did make a lovely autograph book. :worship:

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After our meeting with Smee and Hook, a dream team member named Shannon came over and chatted with us about our trip for a while. :chat: As Shannon was about to leave, a dream team colleague named Bob came over and they both chatted with us for a while longer. :chat: They were both lovely, and we like that dream teamers who aren’t on dream missions just wander around and chat! While chatting with our new friends, our Mom and Dad happened to wander over to us.

We bid our goodbyes to Shannon and Bob, and then Dad wondered if Laura and Liz had made their Elizabeth Swann crowns! :scared1: We’re talented, but not that talented! We were like, “who do you think we are? Disboutiquers?!” We were met by blank stares.

Feeling still in a quite piratey mood, and needing to kill only a little bit more time before we could use our Splash FPs (so not wanting to wander too far from the area), we embarked upon yet another Pirates adventure. Great, as always! pirate: We just love hoisting the colors!

Liz and Laura removed their Elizabeth Swann crowns so as not to be inappropriate (:cat:) when venturing out of Adventureland.

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Next was Splash, which we also always insist upon riding as a trio. This one is not so much for comfort, since, let’s face it, overstuffing three people into one of those rows is not in the least bit comfortable (what with the lack of space and that slight ridge thingy protruding into the back of the person sitting in the middle), but we’ve found that we actually get far less wet sitting with three of us in one row, and it’s fun! :sunny: That ride is rather long, and it would be absurd to be sitting alone without anyone to chat, sing, or dance with. :grouphug: Another strategy we have for not getting so wet is sitting in the third row. Anyway, this time, we told the CM we’d all like to sit together, got a really crazy look, and then proceeded to stuff ourselves in one row. :dance3:

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We love Splash! :goodvibes It’s so adorable and the tunes are so fun. We are known to break into “How Do Ya Do?” pretty much anytime, so it’s great when we can sing and skadooble along with it when it’s actually playing on Splash!

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VBsHustla

12-23-2008, 11:24 PM

We also adore that we can easily spot our photo in the pic area afterward. Ours is always the boat that’s exploding with people! :boat: + :crowded:

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After an enjoyable time splashing along and a quick stop for a premium for Laura :mickeybar, we made our way toward another of our favs, Peter! :woohoo:

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Jen had decided that she needed a Peter chapeau this trip, and insisted upon visiting Tink’s Treasures :tinker: to buy one so that she could wear it on Peter (after we stopped to get Peter FPs to potentially use later). We spent quite a while in the shop finding and buying the chapeau, but luckily Laura and Liz found some great things to take pics of to make the time pass!

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With her new Peter chapeau, Jen was very pleased to head over to Peter.

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We had FPs from this morning that we were planning to use, but the FP line looked outrageously long, so we had to reject it. We went over to the carousel, which had an actual line (which we have never experienced before), so we rejected the carousel too. :sad2:

We then popped into a ride we knew we could rely on, Philharmagic! We had a Philharmagical experience, as usual! pixiedust:

VBsHustla

12-23-2008, 11:34 PM

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It was now getting late, so we made our way out of the MK to get to MGM. It was crazy windy and ominous-looking at this time, but thankfully it never rained on us. :umbrella:

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To “hop” from the MK to MGM, we had to take the ferry over to the TTC and then a bus to MGM. (i.e. 1. :boat: 2. :drive:) This took ages, but luckily we were in good spirits. :yay: After all, we did get to ride our favorite ferry the General Joe Potter! :boat:

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The General Joe first intrigued us years ago, during the Dawson’s Creek era. We found the character of Joey Potter to be an admirable young woman, and were delighted to find a boat named after an admiral of the same name. :woohoo:

We created this great new tune during this boating trip as well! It’s entitled “General Joe” and can be performed to the beat of “G.N.O.” by Miley Cyrus. “Let’s go, General Joe, let’s go!” could be heard echoing across the depths of the Seven Seas Lagoon as we made our way to the TTC. :music:

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Once we exited the General Joe, we were absolutely elated to be greeted with a High School Musical 3 poster! :woohoo: We always find it necessary to jump with HSM advertisements, and this one was the perfect choice as it wasn’t in an area that was too populated. We jumped with an HSM2 sign last year at MGM and received some horrified comments and looks. This time, we only received a few confused looks! :confused3 These people just don’t understand how exciting it is to capture yourself in mid-air! :yay:

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VBsHustla

12-23-2008, 11:47 PM

We then enjoyed a three hour-long bus ride to MGM, where we had to stand, but had a delightful time regardless. :goodvibes In fact, we enjoyed one of the oddest chats of our entire trip! We were reminiscing about how much we adored season one of Laguna Beach and then made a note to ourselves to break out our DVDs and relive that glorious season and then tune into The Hills. :)

For some odd reason, we decided to go to Star Tours first. It was likely because we had a few minutes until our Mama Melrose ADR, and this ride is in the general area. The sign claimed it was a reasonably short wait (must have been 10 minutes or we surely would not have went in), but we entered and promptly exited once we saw the entire first room was full of people. :eek: The CM commended our decision and told us to come back later when there would surely be no queue.

We then headed over to another all time fav attraction, The Muppets! We were lucky enough to walk in just seconds after the last group entered, so we were able to enjoy the entire chickening pre-show. :woohoo: We just love physical comedy involving chickens, so this show is right up our alley. We also adored being able to see Joan (aka Miss Piggy, who performed as Joan S. Jonas with our favs the Joni.)

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Unfortunately, it was just about time for our ADR. So we didn’t get to watch the actual show!

We headed over to Mama Melrose and enjoyed the most delightful meal! We love this place. Those pizzas are delicious! :lovestruc

Another traditional photo we take each year is with the giant Kermit statue across from the restaurant. Liz and Laura illegally climb onto this building and take the oddest of photos! :upsidedow They then break a few limbs jumping back down. :rolleyes1

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After our Mama Melrose dinner two years ago, we thought up what became one of our all time favorite games in times of boredom: top five lists. We play this game on many of our bus trips, including the ride back to the GF that night. Someone proposes a topic and then we list the top five reasons we love it. We established that we’re very Letterman, but with half the attention span. :goodvibes

We also were pleased because a child sitting across from us on the bus engaged in the most animated Suite Life handshake with his dad right before our eyes! It was brilliant! :woohoo:

VBsHustla

12-23-2008, 11:48 PM

When we got back to the GF, we played in the lobby for a while and mailed some correspondence.

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Once we returned to our room, we still had tons of energy to work off, so Liz and Laura were sent out to the balcony to have a dance party to that outrageously loud Electrical Water Pageant. We had an excellent view and simply loved the tunes!

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Then, we did a little exercising on our GF bench. :yay: We highly recommend this! We then showered and set our television’s sleep timer, since Liz and Laura are too frightened without it. :scared1: However, we had quite the odd night’s sleep, because our television never turned off! Laura awoke multiple times throughout the night to a series entitled Jetix or something of the nature, and both Liz and Jen awoke at various times to the Little Mermaid cartoon. All of us were just confused in our sleepy states and couldn’t make the decision to turn it off until Laura finally realized at like 5 a.m. what was going on and turned that nuisance off! :goodvibes

VBsHustla

12-25-2008, 12:26 AM

:santa: Happy Christmas, everyone! :santa:

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:santa: Wishing you a magical day! :santa:

VBsHustla

12-29-2008, 09:42 PM

August 29, 2008:

After dreaming all night of getting to enjoy Where Are Ya, Son? The Musical, aka Finding Nemo :fish:, Jen grudgingly awoke to her alarm at 6:45 am, plugged in her Chi and began readying for the day. Laura and Liz woke up at 7 am and we all crowded around the vanity:crowded:, enjoying the sounds of Matt Lauer. Astonishingly, Jen was actually ahead of schedule this morning (having only woken up 15 minutes earlier than Laura and Liz, this was quite the surprise!), so she headed down to Saspy’s (Gasparilla Grill, which our dad always forgot the name of and called Sasparilla’s throughout our last trip).

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She picked up a fruit cup for herself and a bagel each for Laura and Liz. We all met up and headed to the bus stop via the service passageway between Saspy’s and Sago Cay. The area was very crowded, but luckily as soon as we finished Coppertoning ourselves, an AK bus pulled up. A very crowded AK bus :crowded:. Jen found one seat and sat on down so she could enjoy her delicious fruit cup. Laura and Liz could not find open seats, so they were forced to stand. Sitting across from Jen was a boy who looked to be about 13 who whispered to his dad that the people in the back of the bus were jerks for having backpacks on two seats when two girls were standing. The boy’s dad agreed, and silently so did Jen. Regardless, Liz and Laura had a great time standing, swaying about as the bus skittered along. When the bus totally paused at one point, Liz almost flew out the door :faint:. She loved it. Thank goodness those backpacks needed their own seats :rolleyes:.

We arrived at the AK at about 10 minutes to 9, so we zoomed through the entrance and through the Oasis to the center of the park near the Tree of Life. :teleport:

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Except we were actually rather far away from the Tree of Life. We hated it. People were literally shoulder to shoulder, and there was no way to maneuver any closer. :crowded:

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Our plan was to get to the safari, since we are perfectly happy riding Everest on the single rider line, and can do that at any time of the day. We vaguely understood that the opening ceremony was going on as we bemoaned our situation, but of course could not actually see or hear it :listen:. When the crowds finally began moving, we inched along behind the hoards of strollers and general slow pokes. Relief came as the entrance to Kilamanjaro Safari finally came in to view! However, we saw that there was already a 60 minute wait posted as the standby time for the safari! :faint: Although it felt like it took 120 minutes for us to arrive at our destination, it really was about 9:05 when we arrived. Absurd! So we bopped over to the fast pass machines, which we had been planning to do before riding standby anyway. Laura asked a CM if the posted standby time could possibly be right, and he assured us that it was, and strongly suggested we get FPs and just come back later.

We think there must have been tour groups that got on the safari early that morning, or perhaps the Tusker House early breakfasters getting into the standby line before the general crowd creates a huge backup these days. :confused: We’d certainly never experienced a crowd like this at the safari on any of our previous AK mornings.

Anyway, we decided to get on with our day and made our way from Harambe over to Anandapur. Along the way we stopped and grabbed our first cups of free water (sans straws). We were actually looking forward to trying the paper straws that we’ve heard are so disgusting because we’ve never gotten them at the AK, but the drinks didn’t come with any and we didn’t see any out. Plus we were on a mission. We really needed the water though, even so early, because it was unbelievably hot already! The AK is always just SO hot! With our refreshing waters in hand, we walked along the path and saw lots of dads running from Asia to Africa, presumably with the family’s fast passes for Everest in their pockets. We loved it. We felt sorry for the dads at first for having to run all over the place, but then decided that they probably get the better end of the bargain, as they were not the ones navigating the strollers and the hot, angry children through the insane crowd going to Africa that we had been in earlier. Yes, we decided, we’d prefer to run the extra mile to and from Everest and then meet mom and the kids at the safari. Anyway, while discussing this, we took a few photos, and eventually wound up at Everest, which we all enjoy.

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VBsHustla

12-29-2008, 09:47 PM

We found that the single rider line was not yet open, but happily the standby line was very short, so we went through that! We had actually never been through the standby line (only FP and single rider), and we really loved the theming! :thumbsup2

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Even though we were moving at a brisk pace, we of course found the time to take photos! :lmao:

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Jen even took photos of the train before we boarded. This greatly amused a CM, who decided to jump into one of Jen’s photos, which greatly amused Jen, so she is posting it here. :rotfl:

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We had a lovely ride, and then Laura and Liz had some fun in the gift shop with their Elizabeth Swan crowns. :cool2:

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Because we had zoomed through Everest, we had time to get in a second ride before we needed to head over to Finding Nemo. It was late enough at this point that we were able to get more FPs, so we got some Everest FPs to use for later, then headed back into the standby line. The line was a bit longer this time, but we still made it on the ride quite quickly. It was another great ride!

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VBsHustla

01-02-2009, 09:56 PM

After this go round on Everest, we walked over to the Where Are Ya, Son? theater :fish:. Liz and Laura had to remove their Elizabeth Swan crowns as we were no longer in Asia, so they would just look silly. :crazy:

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Back with their Cinderella and Belle tiaras securely on their heads princess:, they were back to normal and ready for entrance into non-Asian territories.

We had decided we wanted to catch the first Nemo show of the day, since it was our most important attraction at the AK, and we didn’t want to risk missing it. We also wanted to get over there early, since we have heard it gets very crowded, and when we saw the show last year we sat in the absolute last row, because we strolled in about two minutes before the show started, and were actually pleased with our seats initially because we thought we would want to duck out after a few minutes. Needless to say, last year we absolutely loved the show and stayed until the end!

Well, this year we waltzed into the theater, after being curtseyed to by the CMs outside, and it was almost completely empty! We had our pick of seats, and considered sitting in the middle of the theater to get a comprehensive view of the production, but used our better judgment and marched straight down to the front just because we could! :cheer2: We sat in the second row because the first row was a short bench meant to accommodate one or two people and a few wheelchairs. There was no one around us for a while, but finally a few families came down just before the show began, so we didn’t feel so awkward. :rotfl:

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The show was fantastic! We really love everything about this show – superb tunes, great actors, gorgeous puppets and sets, and an adorable story! Definitely one of our fav DW shows! :thumbsup2

After leaving the big blue world, we swam together over to Dinoland, USA. Jen bought and read the Imagineering Guide to the AK (and the guides for the MK and Epcot) before our trip, and learned that Dinoland, USA is supposed to be a town where fossils had been found and then the intellectual Dino Institute was founded, and locals also created the carnival and kitschy places like the gift shop and Restrauntosaurus. We had never realized the story behind this land, and always just thought it was a rather weird mish-mash of Dinosaur the ride and a bizarre carnival and 1950s-style Americana. :confused3 The story behind Dinoland, USA really made us appreciate it more! Despite appreciating the backstory, Liz was still terrified as we waltzed through the land. She has an inexplicable, yet very real fear of dinos. ::yes::

Regardless, Jen and Laura forced Liz to ride Dinosaur. :lmao:

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A fun time was had by all (but one)! :laughing: But we told Liz she had loved it and moved on, skittering back to Everest. Our parents had arrived in the AK while we were in Nemo, and now they wanted to ride Everest. Mom, dad, Laura, and Liz rode Everest while Jen waltzed over to the Royal Anandapur Tea Company for a frozen chai tea. She had read raves on the DIS about them, so wanted to try one out. And while Jen loves roller coasters and most all rides, she sometimes gets sick of riding them multiple times in a row, and enjoys taking the time to explore other areas. She took some pics on her path from Everest to the tea stand, which was now millions of times more crowded than it had been earlier this morning. She was disappointed to learn that the Royal Anandapur Tea Company does not accept snack credits for any of their frozen drinks; she’d been planning to get frozen teas for mom and dad, but now decided against it. She still got her own frozen chai tea, which was great!

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She thought the frozen chai tea was especially great in the heat of the Animal Kingdom! :drinking: However, not having a straw really diminished her enjoyment of this frozen treat! As it was a very hot day, the frozen chai melted quickly, leaving ice at the bottom of the cup, and a puddle of chai at the top. :sad2:

Jen meandered back over to the Everest area with her tea, taking a few photos.

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Jen then met up with Laura and Liz after they had ridden Everest. Reunited, we headed over to the safari to grab some fast passes for our parents. They went to see Finding Nemo while we did this. Their FP return time was not for very far from the time that we picked up the FPs, so we decided to kill some time and ride with them later. We had wanted to do one of the jungle trails, and we’d never been on the Maharaja Jungle trek, so we bopped back over to Asia to check it out. We first grabbed some water cups so we wouldn’t melt away in the heat, and took some pics along the way back.

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VBsHustla

01-02-2009, 10:02 PM

When we arrived at the Maharaja Trek, we were completely enchanted! :goodvibes We felt that we had stepped into one of our fav new films, Cheetah Girls: One World. The whole trek was so very cheetahlicious and we loved it! We found it much more fun than the Pangani trail – better theming, and, oh yeah, the tigers were excellent too! :rotfl:

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Here we are posing like we are from "The Jungle Book" we adored the little girl who balanced water jugs on her head with our good pal Mowgli. (Though he is not nearly as good as that Mowgli look-a-like Romeo!)

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Once finished trekking along the trek, we wandered over to the middle of the park and got some pics with the Tree of Life.

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We had been wanting to get pics with the animals carved into the tree, but we hate the Bug’s Life film, so we don’t like to go up there. We asked the photopass photographer if there was a way to get up close to the tree without going to the film, and she suggested we check if a path to the left of the tree, on the way to Africa, might be open. She said it was near the tattoo stand, and sometimes blocked off, but that we should give it a try. We walked around and saw an opening in the jungle near the tattoo stand, nothing we would ever have suspected was a path on our own, but we walked in and it turned out to be the right path, which was open! :thumbsup2 We kept walking in and were pleased to get to see the beautiful (albeit somewhat creepy, what with the abundance of rodents and other critters on the actual tree above us) animal carvings up close! :woohoo:

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A friendly piranha! :lmao:
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Liz is so very pleased to be posing with this bird. :yay:
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VBsHustla

01-02-2009, 10:06 PM

A lizard or iguana or some such thing.
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It was very hot out.
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America, spread your golden wings. Sail on freedom’s winds, ‘cross the sky. Great bird, spread your golden wings; flying high, flying high!
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Kangaroo hop!
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Up next: Will we tear ourselves away from the tree to make it to the safari?

DonnaMartinGraduates

01-02-2009, 11:26 PM

Update soon.
You know I love it.
I'm hoping for a Kelly (either Clarkson or Taylor) reference in your next update, though.

Theodore

01-04-2009, 07:24 PM

Well ladies! I thoroughly enjoy the update! It's been ages since I last stumbled upon this exquisite thread! Those wooden animal carvings are so lifelike! My pal Bluebell and I simply adore them. However, we feel like the turtle has some sort of goiter growing out of its neck. Perhaps the craftsmen who constructed that wonderful piece should perform some emergency wood/veterinary surgery!

That colourful bicycle cart reminds me of my old days in Moracco...oh the days! It's so pleasent to see you enjoying such an olden piece of tranportation. Before I conclude this post, I must say, you all look to extravagant in your tiara's. What beautiful princesses! Lisa Turtle would approve of such fine pieces of royalty!

Theodore

01-04-2009, 07:33 PM

Update soon.
You know I love it.
I'm hoping for a Kelly (either Clarkson or Taylor) reference in your next update, though.

Better make it a Kelly Taylor reference! Jackie Taylor would love it.

VBsHustla

01-15-2009, 04:59 PM

Update soon.
You know I love it.
I'm hoping for a Kelly (either Clarkson or Taylor) reference in your next update, though.

I'm sure something throughout our day was reminiscent of one of the delightful situations Kelly Taylor found herself in! :woohoo: In the meantime, I will provide you with the emoticon evolution of Kelly Taylor:

1) high school: :snooty: + :beach: + :car:
2) :love1: OH NO! A love triangle with Dylan McKay and Brenda Walsh
3) :love1: OH NO! A love triangle with Dylan McKay and Brandon Walsh
4) :confused3 Whomever shall I choose?!
5) :scared1: a brief interlude from this stressful situation after being tricked into joining a cult
6) :wave2: I choose me!
...Unfortunately the timeline must end here, as Kelly Taylor's subsequent actions are not Dis appropriate. :eek:

As for Kelly C, I will have to consult my notes from that day to determine whether or not we took a risk, took a chance, made a change, or broke away. ::yes:: We will try to update soon, but if not, at least the summer love will keep us warm long after our autumn goodbye, autumn goodbye, autumn goodbye! :sunny:

Well ladies! I thoroughly enjoy the update! It's been ages since I last stumbled upon this exquisite thread! Those wooden animal carvings are so lifelike! My pal Bluebell and I simply adore them. However, we feel like the turtle has some sort of goiter growing out of its neck. Perhaps the craftsmen who constructed that wonderful piece should perform some emergency wood/veterinary surgery!

That colourful bicycle cart reminds me of my old days in Moracco...oh the days! It's so pleasent to see you enjoying such an olden piece of tranportation. Before I conclude this post, I must say, you all look to extravagant in your tiara's. What beautiful princesses! Lisa Turtle would approve of such fine pieces of royalty!

Thank you Teddy! :lovestruc Glad you are loving the TR! Worry not, now that we know there is such a demand for Kelly Taylor references in DW trip reports, we will be sure to work one or two in from now on! :thumbsup2 Hope you are recovering nicely from the recent Melanie C birthday bash I'm sure you threw! :cake:

Neve

01-15-2009, 05:36 PM

I must say, I just happened upon this TR after a jaunt through my fav the Budget board and I love it!:lovestruc What a great distraction from the bitter winter chill!:headache:

You have the most refreshing view of the world! :dance3: If I had one wish, I'd love to explore the magic or Norway or a safari with you! :grouphug:

On many a trip, I myself have squished into a two person seat with two other companions--I adore a good squished ride!:crowded:

:love: I particularly enjoy your lovely photos! It must be a delight to stop for a photo every few feet in the blazing heat! But, I am sure you are glad you did it!

I also found the Kelly Taylor timeline quite helpful- soapnet has been causing chaos on my memory. That gal has too many situations to keep track of when they play them all out of order. :confused3

Keep up the great TR! Cannot wait to read more!:cheer2:

DonnaMartinGraduates

01-15-2009, 10:01 PM

VBsHustla

01-15-2009, 10:30 PM

That Kelly Taylor timeline is brilliant. What a whirlwind! I feel like you captured the essence of her character perfectly. I absolutely loved it. Thank you! I especially loved that you included her brief stint in the cult run by her fave psychology professor. If only there was a smiley to illustrate her hatred towards Valerie Malone. But then you would need to include that whole Tara nonsense (whic I loved - I'm not going to lie) , so it's good you ended when you did!

And the pic taken of y'all posing with your arms spread out certainly works for a Kelly C reference. You're spreading your wings and learning to fly.

Oh yes, good point about the Kelly C spreading our golden wings photo! :thumbsup2 Excellent. The horrifying Tara situation and Valerie Malone enmity, amongst many other absurd Kelly Taylor situations (the fire, her case of amnesia, her brief diet pill addiction, and not to mention getting shot by a gangster) were all considered, but didn't have any appropriate corresponding emoticons. :sad2: Unbelievable! :mad:

VBsHustla

01-19-2009, 01:04 AM

VBsHustla

01-24-2009, 12:22 PM

We wandered near the animal carvings for quite a while, but when mom and dad called to say that they were at the safari waiting for us, we wrapped up our photoshoot and started for the safari. We made it pretty quickly through the FP line and were soon traveling through the Kilamanjaro Safari, with a really excellent guide named Amber. We’ve never really thought much of our safari guides – they’ve always seemed knowledgeable enough – but Amber really told us a lot of information and was hilarious! :joker: In addition to our great guide, we also loved that we saw hundreds of animals! We’ve definitely never seen that many animals on the safari, even though we usually hit it up first thing in the morning when there are supposed to be an abundance of animals, and usually in the afternoon as well. It was about 12:30 when we went on this great safari. Even though everyone knows what the animals look like, here are some of our fav safari pics from our fav safari trip :goodvibes:

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Some of the best things about the safari are the baobab trees. We’re huge fans of the Little Prince, and the safari is the only place we’ve seen those rude baobabs in real life. Although we understand how harmful they could be for the Little Prince, they are very lovely to look at! ::yes::

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After our perfect safari, we were all hot and hungry, so we headed to the exit (while mom and dad headed to ride Dinosaur). We made our way out of the AK and over to the bus stop – the GF bus stop was the first one, so we were very pleased! We were not pleased, however, by the absolutely horrendous wait we had to endure! :scared: After waiting for what felt like an eternity, mom and dad moseyed out of the park and got in line with us. We watched multiple buses come for all of the other resorts. :faint: Our line grew very long. A second bus for the Poly pulled up right next to us, and with no GF bus in sight, we (and several others who had been waiting in the GF line) boarded the Poly bus. From this point, we had a fairly uneventful ride over to the Poly. On our bus were cute identical twin girls who were about 10, and one wore clothes that were all shades of blue, while the other wore all shares of pink. Obviously this seems like a weird comment, but the twin sighting will come into play later. Let’s call this our unsubtle brand of foreshadowing. :scratchin

VBsHustla

01-24-2009, 12:30 PM

When we got to the Poly, we were starving, and although we had planned to grab lunch at the GF, we took the opportunity to check out Captain Cook’s before journeying to the GF.

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Jen had the Multigrain Turkey Club, which she really enjoyed. All of the ingredients were fresh, and the sandwich was filling without making Jen feel stuffed.

Laura had the kids’ grilled cheese, after quite the ordering ordeal. Even though she really liked this meal, Captain Cook’s was not exactly the best at dealing with food allergies. :headache: Laura got the children’s grilled cheese with fries, apple sauce, and a Mickey ice cream bar. This was a very confusing transaction apparently! :rolleyes2 She couldn’t have the adult grilled cheese, according to someone behind the counter preparing the food. He said Laura could have the kids’ version, because that bread didn’t have nuts. This was perfect, because she just wanted a regular, plain grilled cheese. However, the CMs at the cash register insisted that she had to get a children’s sized beverage (a teeny water bottle) and a pudding cup rather than a beloved Mickey ice cream bar. :mad: Liz and Laura tried to explain that she had paid for the adult dining plan and due to food allergies, had to have the children’s bread, but that the rest of the meal should be the same as an adult meal. They agreed, luckily, because Laura was ravenously hungry after waiting an hour at the AK for a bus to the GF. :faint: Laura ended up loving her kids’ grilled cheese, so all was well! Liz had the adults’ grilled cheese, which she also enjoyed.

By the time we ate our dessert, Mickey Premiums all around :mickeybar, they were certainly well on their way to melting. Eating it was still a glorious experience, even if we did have to do it with a fork! :lmao:

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After lunch we hopped on the monorail and had an uneventful one-stop trip to the GF. We returned to our room, and Jen and Liz threw on their bathing suits and an extra layer of Coppertone and headed down to the beach pool :beach:, while Laura went back to the GF lobby to enjoy the atmosphere and keep up with her correspondence :snooty:.

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Jen and Liz enjoyed the pool, which was fairly crowded, but we had no problems finding seats to throw our towels on and our Crocs beneath. After a refreshing swim, we returned to our room where we met up with Laura (but not before taking a pic of Laura outside of our room, and her taking a pic of Jen on the balcony).

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We all proceeded to get ready for the rest of our day – showering, spraying our heads down with Fructis, spraying our bodies down with Coppertone – and we danced till the dance floor fell apart, then danced to some “Burnin Up.” party: :dancer:

Up next, a nautical, international evening!

Neve

01-24-2009, 03:52 PM

Thank you for the kind welcome!!! This TR is so entertaining!:woohoo:

Great Update!!

:dancer:I am such a fan of elephants and am glad to see you got such great shots!!

And I am so pleased to hear someone else dances til the dance floor falls apart! Uh oh! All over again! party:

Cannot wait to hear more about this trip and a how you liked Toy Story Mania! I am personally such a Toy Story Mania Maniac! :hyper2:

VBsHustla

01-26-2009, 12:02 PM

Thanks for reading, Neve! We're glad you're enjoying it! :goodvibes And, just hold on for a bit longer to find out how some of us felt about our first experience as Toy Story maniacs! ::yes::

VBsHustla

02-15-2009, 08:34 PM

After our dance party, made our way over to the MK in order to catch a bus to the Yacht Club, for a dinner we had all been looking forward to at the Yachtsman Steakhouse! We moseyed over to our parents’ room to meet up with them, then over to the boat dock.

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We took a boat to the MK, and missed Mike terribly. :boat: To get over our heartbreak, we took some pictures.

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While on the bus over to the Yachstman, we noticed another set of twins, which we found odd considering we had seen the other set of twins on our last bus ride. :scratchin We then also remembered a set of baby twin girls that we had encountered on the Maharaja Jungle Trek earlier that day. One of the twins from the trek was tottering around with a darling stuffed puppy, that she dropped and continued on without; Laura noticed the abandoned puppy and rescued it, returning it to its baby owner, whose dad was very grateful. Anyway, after reminiscing about our earlier twin sightings, we got to the Yacht Club a bit early, and had to wait to be seated, so we passed the time photoshooting it up of course. :cool2:

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VBsHustla

02-15-2009, 08:40 PM

The Yachtsman Steakhouse is classy without being stuffy. The tables are big and there is plenty of space between tables. We had a window table with a nice view of Stormalong Bay and out into the lagoon, which enhanced the subtly nautical feel of the Yachtsman. :sail: However, right after we sat down, a little boy who was about eight-years-old scooted all around our table, apparently so he could look out the window. We thought it was rude for his parents to let him do this, but overall a hilarious occurrence, so we enjoyed it.

The first food we enjoyed was the bread – sourdough rolls and onion bread. The sourdough rolls were good, and the onion rolls were great!

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Jen had the Yachtsman Filet Mignon, which she thought was great. The red wine sauce was delicious and complemented the steak really nicely. :thumbsup2 The mashed potatoes were good, but not as great as they had been when we were last at the Yachtsman two years ago.

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Liz also had the filet mignon, and enjoyed her steak as she did during our last visit, in particular the red wine reduction. However, the potatoes were definitely not as good as last time. They were nowhere near as buttery or fluffy. :confused3

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Laura, a vegetarian, started with the tomato salad (with baby arugula, white balsamic vinaigrette and Point Reyes blue cheese). The tomato salad was really good! It was very fresh and came with a bunch of different tomatoes. Laura had never seen a hot purple tomato before, so it was also quite the learning experience. :upsidedow

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Laura’s main course selection was interesting. After hearing about all of her food issues, our waiter and the chef decided she was going to have some sort of ravioli. They let her know that it was great and that she’d be loving it. Laura hated to break it to them that she doesn’t like raviolis and that she couldn’t possibly eat such a thing, but it had to be done. :sad1: Instead Laura requested macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes. Two years ago, she had mac and cheese and roasted potatoes here and they were both amazing. It was literally the best mac and cheese she’d ever had (and she’s had a lot.) :love: She had been looking forward to Yachtsman mac and cheese ever since. Also, everyone who had the mashed potatoes back then was just raving and raving about them, so Laura knew she had to try those, too. After we ate there, we started talking about the Yachtsman all the time. It’s not unusual for one of us to remark that we wish we were just eating at the Yachtsman. Now, it’s more like, “I wish I could be eating in the Yachtsman, circa 2006!” Laura’s was just flat out bad this time around. Her mac and cheese literally didn’t have cheese on it. :confused: It was basically plain, oddly slimy pasta. Both Jen and Liz tried it and can attest to this unfortunate truth. :sad: Laura didn’t eat much of it. The mashed potatoes were okay, but not very good. Liz confirmed that they, too, have changed since we’d been there last. By the way, since this cost two meal credits, these three items all counted together as a meal.

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For Laura’s dessert, she ordered the crème brulee for dad to eat.

Jen and Liz both had the chocolate sampler, which included a mini chocolate soufflé, which Jen thought was the best item on the plate (right). It also included a dessert with white chocolate infused with orange, which Jen found way too orangey (left). :crazy2: The last item was a banana chocolate mousse, which did not taste much like banana, and which overall Jen thought was fine, but not remarkable (middle). Liz too found the chocolate desserts not to be very good and far too "orangey" like Jen.

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After a rather long dinner at the Yachtsman, we scurried, and we mean really scurried, over to Epcot in hopes of making it in for Illuminations. Upon arriving at the International Gateway, about one minute to nine, we quickly got through the ticketing machines and waltzed up to the security counter. A man and his son had walked through on one side, and then the security guard checked one of our bags, while the man’s wife who had been standing behind him got incredibly upset that her bag was not checked immediately after her husband’s. She was huffing and puffing as the security guard glanced at one of our bags (which probably took about 15 seconds), and exclaimed, “I’m just with them, can’t I get through?!” more directed at us than at the security guard. :confused3 This was really the first ugly behavior we had witnessed during our trip, so although it wasn’t really upsetting for us, it was noteworthy in our minds. Despite our having ruined this woman’s night with our existence and presence on the other side of the security table, their party and ours made it in to World Showcase just before Illuminations began.

We stood on the bridge between England and France, and were only a few people back from the front of the bridge. It was a really great spot! :thumbsup2 We enjoy Illuminations, but we swear it used to be better (especially before Wishes came!). The soundtrack is great, but the actual show could use a bit of sprucing up, we think. Regardless, it’s a show we like to see at least once each trip.

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Coming right up: the rest of our time in Epcot and, finally, the end of this day!

VBsHustla

02-15-2009, 08:50 PM

Eww! I look horrifying in all of the latest photos! :worried: As does that mac and cheese. :( Oh well, nothing a little Norwegian wayfaring can't fix! :boat:

VBsHustla

02-15-2009, 10:50 PM

After Illuminations, we went to get EMH bracelets. We waited in a fairly long line off to the side of the bridge, with a young family with a baby in a stroller right behind us the whole time, jamming the stroller in to Laura’s legs the whole time. :headache: There were also huge groups of people cutting in line, with CMs standing around doing nothing about it! Standing in this line was so frustrating! :scared: When we finally got up to the front to get our bracelets, Laura and Liz got their bracelets, and then Jen had her arm out to get hers put on when the pushy stroller family literally pushed Jen, and the CM with the bracelets put one on the baby in the stroller! :scared1: This took forever, as the baby was crying and did not want to be touched or have a bracelet put on her. Jen was totally outraged, and before the rude parents could get their bracelets, asked the CM (way too nicely, actually) if she could get her bracelet put on as she had been waiting before this family came up and her friends were already done. With her bracelet on, an enraged Jen joined up with Laura and Liz and requested a quick stop in France for an adult beverage to numb the outrage.

Sweet relief came in the form of a Lemon Slush – delish!

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We meandered around the WS and came upon one of our fav places, Norvay! :woohoo: Whilst waiting in line (yes, there was a line!) for Maelstrom, one of our fav Epcot attractions, Liz took the opportunity to slip some Soffes on under her dress. Classy. :rolleyes1

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After a bit of a wait, we embarked upon our first Norwegian adventure, but were disheartened to find that on Maelstrom and in the shop, there were no male Norwegian CMs, our fav kind! :confused: I’m sure we are not the only ones to notice that the CMs in Norway are particularly attractive, and while the girls are certainly pretty, we’re just plain not as interested in looking at them! We figured all of the boys must have been having a party this night.

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But when Jen and Liz were taking a potty break, Laura spotted our fav Norwegian CM, who we have admired for our last three trips, a guy we call Logan Gilmore! :banana: Laura was so absolutely delighted to see Logan Gilmore pushing a cart into a CMs only area! :love: Thank God he was there! Laura exclaimed as Jen and Liz emerged from the bathroom that Logan Gilmore had just passed her, and we all got to see him briefly before he disappeared with his cart into the back of the pavilion. :dance3:

Delighted with our sighting, we bopped along to Future World to make a stop in another of our fav places, Mouse Gear! Does anyone else love the Mouse Gear tune “Hey, Hey Mickey” as much as we do? It’s brilliant! :banana: “Hey, hey, Mickey, here’s to the ears of love…”! It’s always on in Mouse Gear, and only Mouse Gear, and it’s just so wonderful and upbeat! :cheer2: Anyway, while enjoying our tune we stumbled upon Hannah Montana and Troy Bolton Crocs, which we found to be very good! A bit small for us, but lovely.

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VBsHustla

02-15-2009, 10:58 PM

After browsing for a bit, we walked over to the Land. We had wanted to ride Soarin’, but the wait was long, so we instead embarked upon another of our fav adventures, Living with the Land! :goodvibes We walked right on to a boat, which luckily included another family. Riding at night was super creepy, but it would have been way more frightening if we were completely alone. :scared1:

We really do adore this ride and find it interesting, but the greenhouse being dark at night with just minimal artificial lighting was so frightening! Regardless, we enjoyed the ride and the interesting vegetation, including the Miracle Fruit, the Cinderella pumpkins, and those earning their ears! Too cute!

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We thought about stopping by Laura’s beloved Environmental Fable, but it was already late at this point, and we knew we would see it when we were in Epcot during the day, so we passed on it this time (much to Laura’s dismay :sad1:). Instead we entered another must-see attraction, Figment!

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We truly adore Figment, and cannot understand why it is always a walk-on! We loved the old Figment, and love the new version, too! This night we enjoyed our own personal Figmenting experience, which allowed us to fully express our Figment love via nuts dance party. :dance3: :dancer: party: It was grand, and actually a shame that no one was there to witness our moves. ::yes::

We finally exited Epcot.

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And we arrived at the GF after what seemed like 17 hours after taking the monorail to the TTC then transferring to the resort monorail. Why are there no buses from Epcot to the monorail resorts!? Taking the two monorails takes forever, and is never a pleasant experience!

Relieved to return to our room for the night, we found a room service order form on our door, on which someone had ordered a few very large breakfasts. :confused3 How bizarre. Jen probably would have enjoyed the gigantic breakfasts, but as per usual, we had plans to be out of our room ridiculously early, so we would never order room service and eat there. :confused: We did some investigating, and found that the slip on our door had a room number a few doors down from us on it. Whyever would someone write down their room service order then travel down the hallway to affix it to someone else’s door? :confused3 We found this totally absurd, then realized the paper must have fallen off the rightful door and someone else must have placed it on ours. Glad that we had noticed the mistake, we placed the room service slip on the correct door so that we would not be getting someone else’s food the next morning.

After all of this excitement, we went into our room, got ready for bed, and enjoyed some nice sleeps!

Up next: will we stick to our plan the next day, or be totally crazy and veer off course? Will we all head to the same park?

VBsHustla

02-17-2009, 10:24 PM

Oh no! My behind is looking rather gigantic in that hot pink sack of a dress I was sporting:scared1:

Who knew soffees would be a more appealing ensemble?!:lovestruc

I am loving the odd dancing photos though!My slush looks pretty full too, so I know the adult beverage was not the impetus for the insane moves! :dancer: There is just something about the World Showcase that gets us in the party mood, I guess! party:

VBsHustla

03-29-2009, 05:33 PM

August 30, 2008

We had been planning on going to the MK today, even though it was an EMH day at MGM (since we had stayed out late at Epcot’s EMH the night before and like to spend a few mornings at the MK). Liz and Laura decided the night before that they wanted to get to MGM to ride Toy Story Mania before our only planned morning at MGM, which was to be our second to last day. I (Jen) really wanted to get in a few MK mornings/ rope drops, and also did not want to wake up at 6:30, which I would have to do in order to make it from the GF to MGM by 8 am for EMH, so I happily opted to stick with the MK plan. I awoke at about 8:20, got myself ready, and moseyed over to the monorail.

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So far, the one major downside I saw to heading out alone was that I needed to Coppertone myself on the balcony before leaving our room, since I didn’t want to carry the Coppertone with me (Liz’s usual job, which I can't complain about ;)). Anyway, after a quick monorail ride, I was strolling through the MK gates, and in mere moments, enjoying a lovely opening show. I was delighted to see my fav bug Jiminy next to my fav people, Alice and the Mad Hatter!

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Since I had enjoyed the opening ceremony, there were already quite a lot of people ahead of me walking down Main Street, but I wasn’t rushing since I didn’t have plans to hit anything big this morning. Being alone felt totally fine, since I guess I am quite used to the MK (and to traveling alone in my regular life, to work and such!), but I thought I would feel rather weird riding Dumbo alone. So, no need to run up Main Street! I took some pics, and made my way back to Fantasyland.

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Ugh, that crane!

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Let’s just cut off a bit of the castle, and much better! :laughing:

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And, ugh, those icicle lights! I would love to see the icicle lights turned on some day at Christmastime, but in the daytime in August, they did not thrill me. :sad2:

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Even though Main Street was more crowded that I would have liked, Fantasyland was still blissfully empty!

There was no question what my first ride would be – alone or not, Peter must always come first! Peter is just my fav! :lovestruc

After riding to Neverland, I reentered Fantasyland and pondered what to do next. I do adore Small World, but it seemed silly to ride a ride that never has a line at about 9:07 am. Ordinarily we would do Dumbo, but again, alone I thought I would feel odd. I thought I should experience something else whilst in Fantasyland, so I headed to Pooh!

I got my own honey pot and had a great time hopping along! :tigger:

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Next, I decided to head over to Frontierland. Usually we would do Splash this early in the morning, but I thought I might get ridiculously soaked sitting alone, so I quickly decided against Splash.

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VBsHustla

03-29-2009, 05:37 PM

As I slowly walked over to Frontierland, I stopped in to one of my fav bakeries in WDW, the Frontierland Bakery, where I got a giant chocolate chip cookie, which I highly recommend. :love:

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I was the first customer of the day, and I had a lovely chat with the CM in there, who had just moved from another location to the bakery (we chatted about the baked goods they offer, the location of the shop, the Halloween décor and festivities, what I was planning on doing the rest of the day). You don’t have to go very long stretches in WDW before you feel like you’re not alone anymore!

I stowed my cookie away for later, and headed to Thunder Mountain, a Frontierland ride I could enjoy without the danger of getting soaked. :thumbsup2

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Once I got to Thunder Mountain, there was no wait at all, and not even a slow poke prolonging my journey up the mountain, so I was on the train in an instant! :banana: I was one of the only riders in my car, and the one seated furthest back, so along with taking general pics of the ride, I took the opportunity to take some self portraits, of course! :laughing:

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It was now about 9:45, so I went up to the train platform to catch a ride to Toontown for its opening. The train took forever to come! I was the first person up on the platform, so I chatted with the CM there for a while, who explained that they were doing some maintenance on the trains and that only one was running that morning (as opposed to the two that are usually on the track at the same time). I also took this opportunity to take some pics.

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While waiting I also enjoyed some of my Frontierland bakery cookie – delicious! :cheer2: I was putting it away as I got on the train and a woman sitting behind me asked me where she could get one and all about it, so I raved about the cookie and we discussed our trips all the way to Toontown!

VBsHustla

03-29-2009, 05:46 PM

When the train pulled in to the Toontown station, I could see that Toontown had once again opened early! :confused: I was pretty disappointed, as on previous trips, I really enjoyed watching Mickey and the gang open up Toontown, and getting some great pics of them doing it! I wandered through Mickey’s house. Even though Toontown had opened early, there was no one in Mickey’s house at this time, so I was able at least to get some pics of Mickey’s house, if not the mouse himself.

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I checked back in on the judge’s tent, hoping that others were not aware that Toontown had opened early and that I could visit Mickey and Minnie to get some autographs on postcards for my friends. Unfortunately, the line was already rather long, so I decided to skip Mickey and Minnie today. :sad1:

Instead, I popped into the main tent to check out the posted wait times for the princesses and Mickey’s pals. Mickey’s pals only had a five minute wait time posted (the princesses were longer, but I thought I would feel weird meeting them alone anyway!), so I hopped in the line and was taken into their room almost immediately. There were probably two or three other families in there, all with one or two really small children, but I have to say I didn’t feel weird or awkward at all when I was in there meeting the characters! I really went in to get autographs on my postcards, but I would never pass up the opportunity for pics, and I pretty much love these weird solo character pics! :rotfl:

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After meeting with my pals, I walked through to Tomorrowland, thinking I might ride Buzz, but the posted wait time was about 20 minutes, and I just can’t bear to wait in that queue room for even a minute! It always smells and always makes me feel claustrophobic. :sick:

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So, I consulted my times guide to see when the next castle show (sorry, no idea what it’s called) would be. I have been wanting to see this show for the longest time, but no one else ever wants to see it, so this was the perfect opportunity! I was hoping to get in a ride of John Carousel, but there wasn’t quite enough time, so I headed straight to the castle.

Being that this was to be the first castle show of the day, it was not crowded at all. I had gotten a free cup of ice water from that CS place that sells those blue drinks and Tolucas under the TTA, so I got to sit down on a bench in the middle of the hub and sip my water and enjoy my delicious cookie. While waiting for the show to begin, I took some pics of the trolley stopped in front of the castle.

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The show finally started and I loved it! :lovestruc I enjoyed a good portion of it from sitting on my bench, but when Peter came out, I had to run up to see him up close! It had been sweltering, but during the show some clouds rolled in, and although it wasn’t as beautiful a background as it could have been, the temperature became much more tolerable. I thought this show was so adorable, and totally enjoyable!

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MushuGirl06

03-29-2009, 07:50 PM

I just read your whole TR! and i must say that i LOVE it
cant wait til you update again :cool1:

VBsHustla

03-29-2009, 08:21 PM

I just read your whole TR! and i must say that i LOVE it
cant wait til you update again :cool1:

Glad you're enjoying our TR! We love your sig! :thumbsup2

-Jen

VBsHustla

05-02-2009, 07:35 PM

:wave2: Hi, we're finally back with an update! Thanks to OhMari for rescuing us from the completed TR board!

Now, let's go back in time to August...

While watching the show, I had exchanged some texts with Laura and Liz about them coming to meet me at the MK (I wanted them to come, but they were quite hesitant since they were enjoying their time at MGM). Just as my show ended, they arrived at the MK! I was glad to see them, and we made our way back into the lands. Upon walking over the Liberty Square bridge, we spied Peter and Wendy involved in a private pirate adventure! Although we could not participate, we could take some stalker pics (one of our specialties)! ;)

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We then explored the backside of some shops in the Liberty Square area.

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Laura and Liz walked up to that door, which happened to be right next to a CM only area, but then a CM walked out so we didn’t take a pic. But we did take this pic of Laura feeling bashful. :blush:

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Instead we moved along to knock on this door.

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After all of that fun, we walked through Liberty Square and on to Frontierland to grab Splash FPs. Then we took a spin on Pirates and meandered through Adventureland, finding that one of our brother Kevy’s most admired guys, Aladdin, was out, so we hopped in his line.

When we got up to Aladdin and Jasmine, Aladdin asked if we had any questions for him! How strange! But yes, we asked, how was the Holland Tunnel built? Not really, we were caught totally off guard by Aladdin’s asking if we had any questions for him, but immediately upon finishing our encounter, we regretted not being able to come up with something great for him. Although we found Aladdin’s chatting totally bizarre, we apparently were totally enthralled by him, as evidenced by this pic that the Aladdin gang’s minder took for us! :laughing:

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Next, Jasmine posed us, and we complied. Good thing we looked just as great as Jasmine! :lmao:

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P.S., does everyone love that we all (Jen, Laura, and Liz, that is, not Aladdin and Jasmine) have on the exact same outfit in different colors? We love it.

After our exciting meet and greet, we went to one of our number one attractions, the Jamboree! We really adore this show. The songs are so fun and totally inappropriate! We love how the blood on the sidewalk bear looks just like Brandon Davis (oil heir extraordinaire/ socialite). Here’s a pic of that great bear, and next, for comparison purposes, is Brandon Davis.

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And the finale is superb! What could be more fun than stomping and screaming along to “Some folks say he looks a lot like me! Davy, Davy Crocket, king of the wild frontier!”? It’s good times!

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After that excitement, we decided to overload our hearts with delight by paying a visit to the Hall of Presidents!

Wooot! Finally a meeting with TR! :cheer2: :love:

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TR’s riding spurs.

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Inside of the Hall, when our hero TR was announced we gave him a round of rousing applause and burst into hoots! The audience all joined in our TR-themed party. JK. We politely and respectfully applauded.

After a moving and exciting show, we made our way back to Splash to use the FPs we had collected earlier, only to learn that Splash had been closed down due to rain (and that we could wait in a very long line of returning FP holders for an indefinite period of time to ride upon Splash’s triumphant return). No thanks, we said to the aggravated CM minding the FP return area and answering the disgruntled guests’ questions.

Due to the now drenching rains, we decided to head back to the GF. We thought a photo of us in front of the castle in a monsoon would be fun times, but were horrified to learn that no Photopassmen were out! Understandable, we guessed, but disappointing nonetheless.

VBsHustla

05-02-2009, 07:44 PM

After being forced to leave the MK without documentation of our arduous trek through the rain, we found a boat to the GF waiting for us at the dock. We were sad to see that Mike was not our captain, but delighted when our driver Hector handed us old rags as we boarded to wipe our seats down! We appreciate being put to work for a good cause. :laughing:

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The rain was still coming down, down, down in rushing rising rivlets when we docked at the GF, but we were in need of sustenance so we braved the elements and trudged along to Saspys. We all got wraps or sandwiches from the sandwich station, including a tabulleh wrap and a specially ordered cheese sandwich, both of which we highly recommend.

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Liz also recommends the brownie with fudge icing, which gets better with age. Really, space out your consumption of this delight over a few days and you'll see what she means.

So we enjoyed our lunches whilst watching some Wizards of Waverly Place and then Liz and Laura headed to the Contemporary to do some shopping, while I (Jen) took a long hot shower and then got to enjoy taking ages getting ready for the evening and using the lovely free H2O Spa products in our room. :cloud9: I had really been looking forward to swimming on this day, but this afternoon break turned out to be lovely. I also set out these surprise pajama tees I had ordered and had customized from DisneyShopping quite a while before our trip.

My shirt has little Tinks on it.

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Liz’s shirt has little Poohs (hahah). :rotfl:

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And Laura’s has little Mickeys.

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After a while Laura and Liz called and said they wanted to go from the Contemporary to MGM so I planned to meet them on a bus over to MGM. They called me when they got on a bus, I left our room a minute or two later, and the bus with Laura and Liz on it pulled up! Perfect! And here I am boarding!

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Not sure what is up with that smile. I don’t think I was aware that Laura was photographing me, but that smile sure looks posed. :confused3 This pic also shows what happens when I have too much time to get myself ready - I ignore the fact that it is monsooning out and 100 percent humidity and straighten my hair. As you can guess and will see in later pics, it did not remain straight for very long. :lmao:

We arrived at MGM and grabbed FPs for the Tower, and then hoped to catch the HSM show. Sadly the show was canceled due to the rain! :sad1: Instead we went over to the animation studio, where we hadn't visited in years. We're not big fans of the film with the Mulan dragon and didn't realize until we had read of a few accounts in TRs that we could participate in drawing lessons. We thought this sounded cool enough to warrant sitting through the little movie so we queued up for it then went on in. Check out this quality poncho, straight out of the bag it came in, never-before worn!

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This is what we get for defying Disney by bringing our own Dollar Tree ponchos. It's okay, Tree, we still heart you.

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Anyway, we entered the theater for the animation film and saw that the exit doors were still open, so though we felt a bit mischievous, we high-tailed it on through! Walking through the animation exhibits was pretty good. We found the area to enter the animation class only to find that we were the first group not to make it in because the room was full. Splendid. But we took this opportunity to meet Sorcerer Mickey (who of course took a break right before it was our turn to party with him; but we did have time to kill).

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Note for future - do not wear bright strawberry if you will be photographed with someone in red as it freaks out cheap digital cameras. Also, terrible picture in general. Great job making it blurry and not straight, Photopass guy! Why, oh why, do the photographers insist upon including their subjects’ entire bodies, including unbecoming Crocs and sneakers in the photos? :confused: Close-ups from the waist up, only, please! No one needs to see our Soffes and we won’t be heartbroken if Mickey’s shoes are cut off.

With quite a bit more time to kill before the next drawing lesson, we wandered into the art shop and realized that we could have come through that entrance and avoided waiting for the film to start and running through the theater. Oh well, a lesson for us for next time and for our dear readers (have we got any that might actually be going to WDW and who are not our friends IRL who we are forcing to read this TR??). So we went back to the animation holding area and waited around some more. When our session finally began we were one of the first groups to enter so we got prime seating in the front row.

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The animator leading the class gave us a few character choices to vote on, including Minnie, Daisy, Goofy, Chip or Dale, and Jiminy (!!). Daisy had some very vocal supporters and since we were up front we couldn't see which character the most people had raised their hands for, so we spent a few suspenseful minutes waiting before we learned that Jiminy had won! Woot! :woohoo: Jiminy is our fav insect and we were so pleased to learn to draw him! We thought the class was so much fun and are totally impressed that our drawings actually came out looking like Jiminy! We will definitely return for more animation classes on future trips. :thumbsup2

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By Liz

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Satisfied with our masterpieces, we artists moseyed over to the Toy Story area. Liz and Laura used the FPs they had collected earlier in the day before leaving MGM and I (Jen) bought Laura a Toy Story Mania tee, which is adorable but also crazy gigantic for a children's sized shirt. I arranged to have the shirt shipped to the GF and asked if I could stick our Jiminy drawings in the bag (since it was raining and we didn't have bags big enough to fit the papers) but the CM said they can't put anything not purchased from their shop in the bags because the items couldn't be replaced if damaged or lost. I tried to explain that I really didn't care if the drawings got damaged or went missing but the CM would not budge, so I left with a receipt for Laura's shirt and three poorly rolled up Jiminy drawings in my bag.

Laura and Liz emerged from another amazing ride through TSM soon thereafter, and we then got out of MGM to catch a bus to the MK to bear witness to Spectro's triumphant return (although many will not remember this far back in history, Spectro had been cancelled for most of August due to a refurb of the Liberty Square Bridge).

VBsHustla

05-07-2009, 10:03 PM

We had an uneventful bus ride over to the MK and since we had some time to spare, decided that we should get in one of our top attractions before Spectro. We hoped against hope that the line would be manageable as we trudged through the crowds to Tomorrowland. Phew! Miraculously the Carousel of Progress was crowd free! :woohoo:

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We settled in wishing we could enjoy some cold saspsrillas with John and looked forward to our great big beautiful parade-filled evening. After John we made a pit-stop at Cosmic Ray's to grab some fries to go to eat along our journey to our top Spectro viewing spot (real dinner not necessary as we were still full from our Saspy's lunches).

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Main Street was terribly crowded but we managed to make our way down to our ideal Spectroing area right near the Confectionary. It's usually relatively empty there, but as this was the night of Spectro's return, it was pretty grossly crowded. But we danced away even as people insisted on standing on top of us and thoroughly enjoyed Spectro's spectacular return!

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One major benefit of watching Spectro from this early point in its route is that we can fit in a ride before Wishes (or watch Spectro again in its entirety from Fromtierland). This night we cut through the Emporium and Casey's and soon found ourselves in Adventureland, where we enjoyed a spin on Aladdin's magic carpets. We love that we can see and hear Spectro going through Frontierland when we ride Aladdin at this time! And we also love how empty Adventureland is at this time.

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After Aladdin, it was still quite early but we decided we would walk over for Wishes early (about 15 minutes early) to get a spot near the hub. This is insane for us as we generally stroll up to our preferred spot close to the ice cream shop for easy after-Wishes sundae access about 30 seconds before the show starts. But we found being up closer really nice! It actually felt much less crowded than Main Street does and there were no distractions of people walking by. Plus we think we got some pretty nice pics! Wishes was magical and delightful, as always!

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VBsHustla

05-07-2009, 10:07 PM

After the show we slowly made our way over to the ice creamery to get some sundaes (this was the only thing we wanted to accomplish before watching the encore performance of Spectro, so no rushing necessary).

Jen and Liz got giant sundaes, which we were disappointed to learn, are not included in the DDP. We were also disappointed to find that our sundaes were way less enjoyable than they had been on previous trips! :sad2:

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Not enough ice cream or fudge, way too much whipped cream, and a staleish cinnamon-flavored waffle bowl. Cinammon and mint chocolate chip do not make a winning combo. Yuck. :sick: While our sundaes did not delight us, eating them in Exposition Hall did. Laura had read about it as a great quiet place to always find a seat a few years ago on the DIS and it never disappoints!

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What time is it? Spectro time!

Another bonus was that when we finished our sundaes we walked out the door and were right at our fav Spectro spot! We were a bit upset to find that Spectro had started a few minutes early but we didn't actually miss any of it. We know now that DW must have known of the drenching monsoon that was to plague us later that night. But at this point we were just thrilled to sing and dance along on this magic night when a million stars played before us. They were glimmering, we were shimmering, the world was carouseling, and good times were had by all. :dance3:

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After reveling in the magic we high-tailed it out of the park and over to the boat dock to beat the rush. We could see a boat about to arrive and hopped on as soon as it docked. Great, we thought, this will be a quick and easy trip back to our room. Not so, screamed the rain clouds, who then dumped giant buckets of rain upon us. :scared1: We cannot properly describe how unpleasant this was. We were pelted with giant, cold, stinging drops of rain for about 20 minutes while our little vessel rocked and bobbed across the lagoon. What relief when we reached the GF dock! That's the closest we'd like to ever come to a maelstrom. :scared: While glad to be back on land, we were still getting even more drenched. It took three days for our sneakers to dry out and it's a complete miracle that none of our cameras were ruined. Once back in our room we all took hot showers and went to sleep.

Up next: A day filled with even more singing and dancing than usual. Really.

Neve

05-09-2009, 10:14 AM

I too love that despite the impassable crowds of Tomorrowland, the Carousel of Progress is always delightfully empty. A wonderful cooldown spot, singling spot, and general place to be!:dance3:

Despite the whipped cream overload, I would much prefer one of those sundaes to the Nutrigrain I am currently eating!popcorn::

I cannot wait for the next update! Though I cannot imagine any more dancing than has already transpired! party:

:genie:If only everyday afforded the opportunity for so much dance-partying!

VBsHustla

05-31-2009, 09:38 PM

August 31, 2008

This morning we got to majorly sleep in - until about 7:15 for Jen and 7:30 for Laura and Liz since 1900 Park Fare (where we were eating to replace the Kona meal we had planned for this morning but had bumped up when we canceled Chef Mickey's) did not open until 8 am! While getting ready we enjoyed an odd puppet named Seymour on that great Playhouse Disney show Johnny and the Sprites. Anyone else see John Tartaglia in Avenue Q and find it a bit strange to see him puppeteering in an actual children's series? :confused3 Odd but totally enjoyable. After suddenly singing about Seymour and chi-ing and Fructising, we skittered over to the GF's main building and walked up to a beautifully empty 1900 PF podium. Sweetly smiling (but probably inwardly scowling) at us was our all-time fav DW CM, Jean! :woohoo: Jean is a regular fixture at the Garden View Tea podium, from behind which she has been looking down upon us for years. But oh what a lovely curmudgeon! Perhaps she finds it less acceptable to arrive to tea in plastic tiaras than to arrive this way to a character breakfast? If this is the case we can't imagine why, for what is tea if not a royal tradition? :confused: Regardless we loved getting a nice smile from our Jean as we checked in for our ADR, rather than being told that she just wasn't sure if she could fit us in to a completely empty tea lounge when we do our usual walk-up and then are made to wait about 30 minutes while Jean performs a thorough search for that one perfect empty table among the 20 others. Oh Jean!

Anyway, after starting our morning off right with that thrilling encounter, we were brought into the restaurant. This was one of our fav meals!

We thought they did a great job of seating everyone in an orderly manner and keeping the characters coming out at a great pace. The characters here were Pooh, Tigger, Mary Poppins, Alice, and the Mad Hatter. We particularly loved the Mad Hatter! :lovestruc All of the characters even stopped by a second time (to wave or say hi). We did not ask for a second round of pictures with them, so we are not sure if they would do that on their second trip around. We think they probably just came around again because the restaurant was pretty empty the whole time we were eating. We also loved that this meal was so quick. We had a great waitress who kept our orange juice glasses full and brought out our check about 15 minutes after we sat down, when we had asked her for it. She said she brings out checks early all the time during breakfast because she understands that people want to get out quickly and get to the parks, and then she brought checks to all of her other tables as well. We thought the food here was really good too.

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Jen tried the strawberry soup, which she thought was pretty good, though doesn’t like strawberries. She likes strawberry artificial flavoring, so she really enjoyed the taste of this, but the main thing that bothers her about strawberries are the little seeds, so those seeds floating around in the soup put her off. If only the soup were pure artificial flavoring and did not pretend to be authentic, she would have been crazy about it! ;)

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More of Jen’s food – we love Mickey waffles!

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The fruit here was really fresh and delicious!

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Laura thought the potatoes weren't good here, but everything else she tried was! She didn't think the Mickey waffles would be that great, but they were the best waffles ever! :banana: She ate them plain and they still tasted so good. She also really enjoyed being able to eat my normal breakfast food, oatmeal and bananas, both of which were very good here.

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Liz especially enjoyed our close location to the breakfast! :goodvibes The characters were all great- she especially enjoyed meeting Alice and Mary Poppins (two of her absolute favs!) :love:

Below are some pictures of us with the characters at Park Fare. Although this restaurant was not in our original plans, we did actually all have the lovely supercalifragilistic shirts you will see below with us because we planned to carry them in our bags on an Epcot day and stick them on when we found Mary Poppins. :yay: It turns out we got to wear them for breakfast over our regular shirts and pull them off before we headed to Epcot! In case anyone is dying to get one of these beauties, we got these at the Mary Poppins Broadway show.:rotfl: (Wow, we wrote about Broadway shows/ included musical references quite a bit throughout this short segment.)

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VBsHustla

05-31-2009, 09:53 PM

When we finished breakfast and settled our bill we popped into the bathroom in the GF lobby and peeled off our supercalifrag tees, then threw them in our bags. We were then off to Epcot and arrived in what seemed like 45 hours after a monorail ride to the TTC, an insanely long walk up and down the platforms to transfer, a long wait for the Epcot monorail, and then finally a monorail ride to Epcot. :faint: Our journey was almost as long as that last sentence. Almost. ;) We arrived not too terribly long after rope drop. But man, what a journey!

We stopped to pay our respects to the ‘Nsync pictures on the memory walls

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and then ran over to Test Track to grab some FPs since we hate waiting in that queue for even a few minutes, then went over to The Land to check out Soarin's wait time. It was only posted at 10 or 20 minutes so we decided to hop in line since the FP queue takes at least that long to get through. This turned out to be the first time any of us had gone through the actual line and we totally loved the weird interactive computerized games we got to play while waiting! :woohoo: We highly recommend taking a trip through the regular Soarin’ queue if you've not yet done so.

Once we were sufficiently danced out from our waiting games, it was time to head back to the actual ride, which was lovely as usual. :dance3:

What to do at approximately 9:30 am while the crowds are still minimal? Take in a viewing of Laura's fav attraction the Environmental Fable, of course! ::yes:: Laura was a bit upset when we were let into the theater almost immediately, missing most of the 30 minute pre-show. Jen was rather glad. The Fable was, obviously, superb. When we exited, we had planned on taking a trip through Living with the Land by daylight, but found that there was an outrageous 20 minute wait time posted, so we moseyed on out of the Land.

Next up was a ride through Test Track with our FPs.

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This ride just is not our fav. We love that Cory and Topanga introduced it to the world on TGIF, but that's pretty much where the love affair ends. Also, Laura missed her tiara terribly. At least Test Track does provide the opportunity for us to snap super-attractive pics like the ones below. :laughing:

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After Test Track, we were in a nice position to head over to the World Showcase and open it up by being the first patrons at the margarita stand (totally planned, btw). :cheer2: However only Jen and Liz got and enjoyed some 11 am fresh margs, as Laura does not drink.

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After grabbing our two margs, we ventured into the Mexico pavilion and attempted to ride the boat ride, but our attempt was rudely thwarted on account of our margs! :eek: Never had we been denied this simple pleasure before! Fine, we said, the new Donald version without that classic “hola mis amigos” tune is nothing compared to the original anyway! Except really we said okay and then took pictures with tacky sombreros and were on our way. Where to? You've guessed correctly! Up and across the sea to Norvay!

One of Jen's greatest pleasures in life is enjoying a fresh marg on Maelstrom because, how absurd! But we were once again rudely denied! :scared1: Waaat?! We think it may have been because female CMs were in charge of minding the queues in both Mexico and Norway. As we may have mentioned before, the Norvegian boys are particularly delightful and generally love us. Rejected from entering the ride, Liz and Jen sat on a bench and gulped down their margs while Laura enjoyed a solo Norvegian adventure. Right after she popped out Jen and Liz were ready to head in, so we all got to head back, back ov-er the falls and weather the maelstrom together (pun intended, hope you loved it! :thumbsup2). On our journey we created a nice little soundtrack for our shipmates, serenading them with a little yo ho, yo ho, a Norvegian's life for me. In the exit shop, we think we saw our Norvegian Logan Gilmore again! :flower3: And of course we were very pleased. Jen then picked up a school bread to go and we meandered around the world (showcase) conducting photo shoots whenever the spirit moved us (often).

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VBsHustla

05-31-2009, 10:04 PM

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There is so much wrong with this attempt to get the Epcot ball to wear a tiara! :rotfl:

We made it over to Japan just in time to see Miyuki's first candy show. We'd never watched her before, and thought it was very cool, but particularly loved her adorable commentary throughout the demonstration about the yummy yummy candy being hot hot. So cute!

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Next we back-tracked to another number one attraction, the American Adventure. :banana: Another CM who may rival Jean for number one in our hearts is George, proprietor of the American pavilion. We don't know his real name but have dubbed him George as he is such a good oldentime American guy. George is at the Adventure at all times of day and night, and performs every duty associated with the show, from screaming "hear ye, hear ye" outside to entice guests to patronize his great show to escorting guests to the escalators to announcing and beginning the show - and all with such unabashed enthusiasm! We don't know how he does it all, but thank goodness he does or it might just seem like an American story rather than an adventure. :wizard:

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Once inside the American pavilion, we enjoyed a Voices of Liberty performance.

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Then we took a look at a few national treasures.

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Jen adores Benjamin Franklin. If she had to choose her fav founding father (a very difficult decision), it would probably have to be dear old Benjamin. Give his autobiog a read sometime, you’re sure to love it! :thumbsup2 Even Jen admits that this rendition of Benjamin is quite bizarre. ::yes::

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The American Adventure is really a great and moving experience. And who could resist a show featuring an animatronic TR?! :confused3

Feeling inspired and uplifted, we exited the show and sat down at a table outside so Jen could enjoy her gigantic school bread!

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This was her first school bread experience and she found it delightful, though Liz did not enjoy it and Laura did not taste it.

VBsHustla

06-22-2009, 09:22 PM

Now that Jen was about 15 pounds heavier, it was time to do some more walking.

We visited Morocco.

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Then we visited France.

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We continued taking in the sights and made a stop in the UK's Toy Soldier shop, where Laura purchased a sweet, adorable stuffed Roo from really sweet, completely adorable CM Luke. :thumbsup2 We also stopped in to the tea shop, which is always a delight.

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Since we were in England, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to devour some delicious chips. ;)

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Jen was about to go for full-on fish and chips, but in utter horror Laura strongly cautioned that Jen would surely vomit after having consumed a giant marg and an enormous school bread in the last hour or two. :scared1: Jen heeded the warning and settled only for a rather large order of chips. She gobbled them up and did not vomit at all, thanks for asking. :rotfl:

Bellies full of scrumptious grease and starch, we pressed on to the great white north - land of steak, moose mousse, and Franck.

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We had never seen the circle-vision Canadian experience and had heard that Franck was the host, so we absolutely had to pop in.

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We enjoyed the film - lovely scenery and Franck is always a delight - but got a bit tired of standing and a bit dizzy. We weren't sure if the circle vision was cool enough to warrant the necessity for standing, but it wasn't too bad so we didn't complain too much and will now stop complaining here.

VBsHustla

06-22-2009, 09:31 PM

Finished with our journey around the world, we headed back to the future (world), where we again attempted to get some shots of the Epcot ball sporting our tiaras. Markedly improved from our last attempt, but still rather laughable! :lmao:

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Next it was on to another fav spot, Mouse Gear! We danced our hearts out to "hey hey Mickey, here's to the ears of love" and inappropriately tried on children's princess dresses and, of course, conducted a photoshoot. :dance3:

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It turned out we had way too much fun in Mouse Gear because when we made our way to Innoventions to get our Disney Visa character photo taken, we learned that we had missed the characters by two minutes! :sad2:

Reeling from the disappointment, we trudged on toward Figment and were completely shocked by the three-minute queue that we encountered there! Figment is our fav, but based on its usual crowd level (zero), we had figured that perhaps the general public does not love it as much as we do. :confused3 Well on this afternoon, Figment was positively hopping, with nary an empty row to be found in quite a long procession of Figment vehicle trains. How strange and wonderful! Despite the much-larger-than-usual audience, we still danced it up during our journey to the Imagination Institute.

Then we enjoyed our time in the gift shop.

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Following our thrilling Figment journey, we made our way out of Epcot for our trek back to the GF. As we were walking through those memory walls (shout-out to the 'Nsync pics in the front right area - ask us for exact location details if you need them), we saw a monorail approaching and scurried as quickly as we could up to the platform. Just about ready to die from the two-mile up-platform run, we watched as CMs closed the gate when we were about three feet away! :eek: And others already through the gate were taking ages to load strollers! We begged to be let through (based on the spotty monorail service this week, there was no way to know when the next would arrive) but were rudely refused! :headache: And there was no one coming up the platform behind us who would have to be let on. It was a piece of rudeness more than we could bear! We waited about five more minutes and then were so angry with the whole situation that we decided to walk down and get a cab. Knowing full well where to get a cab, but wanting the CMs to notice we were displeased and leaving, Jen asked where we could get a cab. Lest you think the title of this TR is a lie, take note of the big stick we yielded by passively aggressively asking where to get a cab in order to prove to the CMs that we weren’t having any of their rude monorail antics. :thumbsup2 So, anyway, we walked another three miles over to the bus/ cab lot and got in a cab that took us right to the lobby of the GF in about an hour less than we would have spent on Disney transportation. We will be using cabs much more frequently on future trips!

During our transport ordeal we decided that we would not want to waste the travel time our next night (our last night in DW) that would be required to get to and back from our planned meal at Tutto Italia in Epcot. So we waltzed up to the concierge desk and asked for menus of restaurants at every MK area resort so we could try to find something closer to replace that ADR with. We had never considered 'Ohana before as we had been under the impression it was a meats emporium, but we examined the menu and thought it looked good and would be fun, so we settled on that after much deliberation and advice from the wonderful concierge CM Robin. Now this was during free dining, so getting an ADR at 'Ohana with about 24 hours advanced notice was no small feat, but after quite a bit of finageling, Robin was able to get us an ADR for the first dinner seating, 4:20 pm! Nothing we would have chosen had we made an ADR months ago, but we knew other DISers are big fans of early ADRs so we decided to go with it. :banana:

Once our plans for the next night were secure, we stopped off in our room and then headed back out to explore the grounds and take an excursion to visit Franck's bridal studio and the wedding pavilion! What a wonderfully Franck-filled day (even though we did not at all recognize at the time that we were going on two Franck-specific excursions in one day)!

We checked out the gym and spa on our way - they looked nice.

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We vowed we would make some time on another trip to check out the spa. The gym? Totally not necessary since we do more running and walking in DW in one week than we do in the real world in one year (how do you think we can constantly enjoy Mickey Premiums?). :rotfl:

We continued on to the wedding pavilion and got to see Cinderella's horse-drawn carriage taking a little spin around a small circle between the wedding pavilion and parking lot.

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We hung back a bit as the last few guests from a wedding that had just ended made their way to the parking lot. Then we went up and explored what was the main attraction for us - Franck's shop! Hallo! :yay:

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VBsHustla

06-22-2009, 09:40 PM

It was adorable and we loved it! Even if we did look super-creepy peering in while some guy inside was looking! :lmao:

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Having had our fill of Franck, we meandered back over to the lobby and sat down on a couch where we people-watched and enjoyed some GF lobby tunes. :dance3:

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Then we went back to our room, where Jen realized she did not have her wallet with her KTTW, not to mention her driver's license, credit cards, ATM card, and cash. :scared1: She really, really hoped she has not dropped it along the path to Franck's and ran over to the main building where she waited to speak to Robin at the concierge desk. Jen explained the situation to Robin, who reassured her that wallets are often found and returned fully intact to the lost and found at the bellhop area. Jen then went and spoke to two CMs there who said they did not remember seeing a wallet like Jen's arrive in the last few minutes, so Jen was dreading a long night of canceling cards and dealing with not having an ID to fly home with :scared: when a CM appeared with her wallet! What a relief! :woohoo: Everything was in it and the CM who Jen thanked profusely said it had been found just a few minutes earlier on the couch where we had been sitting in the lobby. Jen stopped by the concierge desk to thank Robin for her help and returned to our room. :yay:

We all freshened up a bit and then went back downstairs and then out to the boat dock to get to the MK, still harboring ill feelings toward the monorail.

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When our ship arrived (after listening to a little girl loudly express her distaste for Demi Lovato, which made us lol :lmao:), we were again disappointed to see that Mike was not our captain. Our boat was also remarkably crowded. Our captain was a young boy, probably about 20, who seemed pretty tough/ cool and repeatedly called himself Captain Danny throughout our journey. We absolutely loved it! :laughing: And what we loved even more was that as we disembarked, after many of the 20 families with small children on the ship had exited, Captain Danny summoned us back and presented to us these beautiful gems! :cloud9:

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We were so delighted to receive these cheap plastic rings and proudly sported them all night. :thumbsup2 After the shock of our lucky experience had worn off, we became sad that we did not ask to take a pic with Captain Danny! Oh well, we reasoned, we will always have these elegant baubles to remind us of him.

Delighted, we entered the MK and proceeded to City Hall where we asked how we could submit positive comments about CMs (found out we could do this on the DIS), and were given six fanatical employee cards to fill out and return later. We took our cards and headed up Main Street to check in for our ADR at the Plaza.

This was so unbearable and atrocious that there are not words available to properly describe the horror. :scared1: Lest you be concerned, we will of course do our best to offer an explanation! Let's start with the fact that our ADR was for 7:30 (though we were early so checked in at 7:15). We were called to sit at 8:55 and did not see our waiter until 9:15. We've had bad service before but this was truly in a league of its own. :sad2: Once we saw our waiter and ordered, the food came rather quickly, so we were relieved. But we shouldn't have been. Laura had ordered the vegetable sandwich with no pesto since she had eaten it in the past and been told it was safe. She didn't tell the waiter about her nut allergy because it was already ridiculously late and we just wanted to get out of there. The 9 pm Spectro that we had wanted to see was going on before we even got our food! Anyway, not telling the waiter about the allergy was obviously a mistake, because after Laura had taken a bite of her sandwich, she noticed what appeared to be pesto on the bread. We're not even sure if there are nuts in their pesto or if what Laura saw was just herbs baked into the bread because our waiter was absolutely no help at all when we inquired in a panic. So Laura drank lots of water and ran to the bathroom next to the Tomorrowland noodle station to wash her hands of contaminants. Jen accompanied Laura because we were afraid an anaphalaxis emergency would occur. Jen and Laura returned to the Plaza, where we explained the situation to our waiter who kept trying to get Laura to order something else while we insisted that she really wasn't in the mood to eat anything from there! Jen also ate about three bites of the cheesesteak she had ordered, which was gross :sick: (consistent with everything else she had eaten at the Plaza in the past). We just really wanted to get out of that place at this point, so we requested the bill, paid, and then ran away with a vow to never return again.

Up next: Will our luck turn around, or was this really just a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad night?

VBsHustla

06-22-2009, 11:44 PM

Woot woot! :woohoo: Luke :lovestruc, Captain Danny :lovestruc, George, and Jean in one day! :cloud9:

One amendment, though: Liz purchased Roo from Luke (I already owned a Roo of course!) and I purchased a bunny! Luke was such a delightful British fellow, by the way. He was so pleased that Roo was being purchased because he felt terrible for that kangaroo because he was all alone! :upsidedow

PEPE THE PRAWN

06-23-2009, 04:39 PM

Great trip report! You ladies look like you had loads of fun. My feet hurt just reading your report. Thanks for sharing! :)

VBsHustla

06-23-2009, 05:59 PM

Great trip report! You ladies look like you had loads of fun. My feet hurt just reading your report. Thanks for sharing! :)

Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment! :goodvibes And yes, my feet hurt remembering our trip! :rotfl:

-Jen

Scott MC

06-28-2009, 11:22 PM

VBsHustla

06-29-2009, 01:06 AM

I'm very late catching up, but I've enjoyed your report immensely! We have several things in common you know....

1. We're fans of the Grand (I'll be there in about 8 weeks).
2. We might possibly have the music from Peter Pan's Flight as our ring tone.
3. We're both fans of the Carousel of Progress.
4. We both share a favorite book (Alice...)

I look forward to reading about more of your shenanigans in the future!

Thanks so much for reading. So pleased to meet a fellow fan of such perfect things! :goodvibes We hope you have an amazing time at the GF. Be sure to look out for Captain Danny. Certainly he'll present you with a lovely plastic ring. :laughing: And please say hello to John, Sarah, Patty, Jimmy, and our perennial house guest old Uncle Orville for us! :wave2:

-Laura

VBsHustla

07-12-2009, 10:32 PM

After our horrid experience at the Plaza, we traveled to an attraction that we knew would cheer us up, the TTA! During our exciting spin around Tomorrowland we got ready for the evening by breaking out our Dollar Tree glow sticks. Literally breaking out, by the way. After Jen had cracked a few glow sticks she felt a sort of slimy film on her hands, which were now streaked hot yellow, and we all smelled an unsavory scent. Was the universe trying to poison us? :confused: Oh well, we thought, as we placed the glow sticks that appeared to be intact around our wrists en route to the bathroom so Jen could wash what she could of the poison off of her hands. We also picked up some EMH bracelets after our hand-washing break.

By now it was already time for Wishes so we watched as we made our way to the castle hub via the Tomorrowland bridge. Not ideal to be watching as we walked across the MK, but we were late so we did what we could!

We desired to experience the wildest ride in the wilderness, so we of course trekked right over to the opposite side of the park, walked for an hour behind slowbies to get to a one-minute queue, and then got some crazy looks from the CM waving to us at our departure on account of our squishing the three of us into one seat. :dance3: Not that we minded the odd look, but we especially felt great about our bizarre pasttime when we weren't jostled like crazy during our ride. Thunder is so great at night! We had a lovely time, but after our ride decided to depart from Frontierland.

We were in the mood for adventure and only had about 15 minutes to kill before Spectro’s second showing, so we skittered over to Adventureland for a ride over Agrabah on Aladdin’s magic carpets. We enjoyed a lovely flight and then scampered over to watch Spectro from our favorite spot near the Confectionary – however, we’d gotten there a bit early, and were able to snag a prime spot that allowed us to sit on the curb in the middle of the street, so we got to see the other side of Spectro for the first time! Spectro was superb!

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After Spectro, we were herded back into Adventureland, and stuck there on account of Spectro still progressing though Frontierland, so we decided to embark on an exciting cruise through the jungle. It was here that we became acquainted with our second fav boat driver of the day, Skipper Adam. :sail: Skipper Adam finished off every one of his corny jokes with his name (so he could become famous through the proliferation of his name - we are doing our part here- and so we would know the jokes were his own). So, for instance, he would say in a totally deadpan voice with no intonation whatsoever, "Well, folks, I hope you all enjoyed your trip around the jungle. I had such a good time I’m going to go again, and again, and again, and again. Skipper Adam.”

He actually made the Jungle Cruise really hilarious! It's usually good corny fun, but after a few hundred times the jokes and commentaries are no longer funny. But not on this cruise! So, we commend you, Skipper Adam, and hope that you continue to close all of your comments with your name, even though your CP has undoubtedly ended.

Once we disembarked from our Skipper Adam-led cruise, we were in a fantastical sort of mood so we fluttered over to Fantasyland. Only to discover that it was absolutely packed! :eek: And the wait times for rides were absurd. It was still early on in the Extra Magic Hours and we knew the crowd would thin out if we waited, but we were tired and didn't feel like killing two hours just so we could ride Peter and Dumbo repeatedly, so we headed out of the MK.

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We dropped off our “great service fanatic” cards to commend the wonderful CMs we had met so far, and then rode the boat back to the GF.

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This ride was much less intense than the ride through the maelstrom we had experienced the previous night, thank goodness. When we got back to our room, Jen gave Laura and Liz their personalized Disney PJ sets, and we fell into our beds exhausted, but excited for our next day, as usual.

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VBsHustla

08-08-2009, 07:59 PM

September 1, 2008

Finally the time had come for Jen's first MGM morning! Remember, Liz and Laura had gone a few days earlier and continued to rave about TSM, so Jen was very excited to have a go at it! :cheer2: Jen was also excited to have something to run to that she actually wanted to experience at rope drop. Not what you would consider a fan of the Tower and an apathetic observer of the Rock’n Rollercoaster, Jen would probably head straight for the Voyage of the Little Mermaid at rope drop if left to her own devices. Not to worry though, Jen really does love MGM, just for the Voyage, Beauty and the Beast, the muppets, and Star Tours, rather than the big rides. MGM will probably always hold a special place in our hearts since we were youngins when it opened in the 90s and it was the hip new park. Anyone else remember that sweet Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show at the Streets of America? The Power Rangers have nothing on the Turtles. ;)

Anyway, we took a bus over to MGM on this morning and arrived well before rope drop and before they were even letting guests through the turnstiles. Boring! When we were finally let through we skittered down the street and secured a spot right at the front of the rope. Too bad MGM's opening show is an atrocity. Could they not just have Mickey and pals out chatting about Hollywood and screaming lights, camera, action? :confused3 They are bigger celebs than the amalgamation of stars being portrayed by each street actor. We would also appreciate an opening show starring some Playhouse Disney stars, even though we don't know who they are aside from Charlie and Lola (who are brilliant :thumbsup2). Anyway, we played the cards we were dealt and watched the current terrible opening show, then darted straight for TSM.

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Navigating around the strollers and little ones was a bit difficult but as we were at the front of the pack, we made it to the FP machines in good time.

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Of course the queues of about three people were already taking ages, and the FP machines were all breaking down, so it probably took about five minutes to get our FPs, which had a return time of about 11 am. We then proceeded to the standby line, where CMs were warning people that if they entered without their entire parties, they would not be able to meet up with their missing companions once they entered. The entrance area was quite hectic and scary. :scared1: But once we entered we were delighted by the adorable queue theming and of course took millions of pics.

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The wait time posted was 50 minutes, but we boarded our cars in about 25 minutes. Laura and Jen rode together and Liz went solo. Laura and Liz were old pros at this point, but it was Jen's first ride and she completely loved it! She is an expert at Buzz, but found TSM quite challenging, especially the first time.

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VBsHustla

08-08-2009, 08:08 PM

After an exciting ride on TSM, we went over to the Rock'n Rollercoaster, which had a posted wait time of only 5 minutes!

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If Jen was going to ride this in her adult life, she figured now was the time, so we all walked right into the screening room in no time. Laura and Liz gave Jen some quick tips on how to avoid whiplash as we zoomed through to the loading area, and it wasn't long before we were zooming through Hollywood! The tips for avoiding whiplash worked and Jen deemed it a pretty good ride. Not a must-do but also not one to be avoided completely. Now if DW decided to refurb the ride with a Jonification, Jen would be sure to ride as often as possible, as we are confident all other guests would do.

Next up was the Tower, which also had quite a short wait. It was however approaching 200 degrees at this point in the day, so what little time we spent outside seemed unbearable. :sad2: Jen pretty much hates the Tower because she is truly scared by the creepy décor and especially by the film in the library room. :scared1: Thank goodness the Tower CMs no longer act nearly as creepy as they used to. Once through the harrowing theming, all parties, including Jen, had a nice time plunging down in our doomed elevator.

To prevent any future nightmares, we made our way over to one of our fav DW attractions, the muppets! :3dglasses

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Upon entering the holding area to enjoy the 40-minute preshow starting Sam Eagle, chickens, and rats (what a combo!), we were presented with dream fast passes!! :yay: :banana: :cheer2:

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These were our first dream FPs during the two trips we had taken during the YOAMD, and we were very excited to receive them!

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We already had sets of FPs for TSM, the Tower, and the Coaster, but we would later give our extras to our late-arriving parents, who were often the beneficiaries of our FP collecting skills throughout the week.

Anyway, delighted with our newly acquired lanyards and our purple glasses we enjoyed a delightful showing of the muppets and then trekked over for our second ride on TSM. As we were loading into our cars, each CM who saw us remarked about us being back for a second ride! We did have tiaras on, but are not quite sure why we were so memorable! :confused3 Maybe it was really rare over the summer for people to be able to both ride TSM at RD and get fast passes with a decent return time? Also as we were boarding we saw our parents disembarking from one of the cars, so that was amusing. We showed our parents our dream FPs and promised all the CMs who kept saying they remembered us that we'd be back later for another ride thanks to our dream FPs. We had another great ride and all of our scores improved a bit.

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It was now 11:30 so we walked over to Starting Rolls so we could be among the first lunch patrons of the day. We all had delicious meals and did not have to battle any crowds, so a highly successful lunch!

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Next was another trip down Sunset Boulevard to the Tower, which we rode with our dream FPs while mom and dad rode with some we had acquired earlier.

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We also got some new FPs so mom and dad could ride more later in the day. Again, an exhilerating ride with a terrifying lead-up.

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After the Tower we went over to the Coaster, only to be told that it had been shut down indefinitely and to see that people already in line were being removed from the queue. This evacuation disturbed us, and we were okay with the fact that we wouldn't be able to ride again. Before we made our way out of MGM, we stopped back at TSM for one more ride using our dream FPs, and again had a most lovely time.

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We said our final goodbyes to MGM for this trip and made our way to the bus area. We hopped on the bus to the TTC since it was already there and since we've never had good luck getting buses from MGM to our hotel. When we arrived at the TTC we hopped on a monorail to get back to the GF. We had a monorail car completely to ourselves, so enjoyed taking some photos in it.

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It was the salmon monorail, so we were of course not surprised that our ride back to the GF was not a smooth one! An announcement came on that the monorail was being tested, so we made a few abrupt stops and sat on the track for quite a while. To pass the time, we of course enjoyed a super-loud Jonas sing-along! We hoped there were people in the cars surrounding ours enjoying our performance. :rolleyes1

VBsHustla

08-08-2009, 08:14 PM

Safely back at the GF we did some souvenir shopping at the princess shop on the second floor, where Jen picked up some mugs for her bosses and an unattended little girl vigorously popped the bubble wrap that a CM was using to pop Jen's mugs! Jen didn't say anything, but the CM gave her a horrified look and moved the mug-wrapping over to an area inaccessible to the child. :laughing: Jen also picked up this cute lime green Mickey head, which she affixed to her bag. :thumbsup2

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We also enjoyed the GF’s lobby for a bit and then strolled around the beach for a few minutes.

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Next we relaxed in our room for a bit, with Laura and Liz enjoying some Disney Channel offerings and Jen enjoying sampling some H2O Spa products, which we are now obsessed with. :lovestruc We all changed into our Polynesian outfits (oh yes, we did, you shall see the proof soon enough), and strolled over to the GF's lobby to enjoy the orchestra for a bit before departing for our 'Ohana ADR (even though it was quite difficult for Laura and Liz to extricate themselves from a rousing ep of Wizards of Waverly Place).

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We had a lovely time enjoying the lobby and even had a great visit with our fav concierge CM Robin, who said she saw three princesses sitting there and just had to come say hello! :goodvibes She was delightful and wished us a great meal at 'Ohana with the ADR she had secured for us the night before. We heart kindly CMs like Robin! :hug: After enjoying some tunes we paid a quick visit to the Mary Poppins topiary in front of the GF. Liz was delighted!

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We then traveled to the Poly via boat launch (which took about five minutes, whereas the monorail would have taken at least 20 since it travels in the wrong direction when going from the GF to the Poly).

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VBsHustla

08-08-2009, 08:18 PM

We arrived at the Poly and enjoyed the grounds, and then were seated almost immediately upon checking in to 'Ohana, which was the first of many things we enjoyed about our ADR during the first dinner seating available. We had never been to 'Ohana and thought it was cute that our "cousin" showed us the kitchen and grilling area and presented us our friendship bread to bring to the table.

We really loved ‘Ohana! :love: We thought the food was fantastic, and we had wonderful servers. We particularly adored the salad, noodles, and broccoli. We had seconds of all of these dishes, and our servers said we were nuts! Guess they’re more used to brining seconds of the meat options. :laughing:

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The bread pudding was so delicious! We’ve since found a recipe for it, and have recreated it many times since our ‘Ohana dinner.

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Because Laura has a nut allergy, one of the ‘Ohana chefs came out to talk to her before our meal. It turned out that everything was safe for her to eat except for the peanut sauce that came with the appetizers (which we told them to just not bring out), and the bread and bread pudding, which could have come into contact with nuts. Well, come dessert time, the chef came out with this amazing special dessert for Laura! He was so nice and adorably enthusiastic! And Laura found the dessert – a high tower of lightly fried dough and banana, with ice cream – to be fantastic!

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The only thing we didn’t love about ‘Ohana was the entertainment. :lmao: We probably would have adored it had the singer woman not performed directly in front of our table every time, but as it was, we always had tons of kids leaning right on our table! We found it to be pretty hilarious, and were not really bothered by the children who were joining us for our meal, but it was just really absurd that as a table of only adults, we were seated right in front of the main kids’ entertainment area. We’d like to enjoy the festivities from a bit of a distance next time!

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After our dinner, it was only about 5:30, so we had loads of time to spend at the MK! We scuttled over via boat launch and got some Photopass pics taken in front of a nice crane-free castle.

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Then we headed back to Fantasyland in hopes of securing a Peter FP, but were thrilled to find that Fantasyland was virtually empty!

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We'd never seen Fantasyland like this aside from rope drop! So Laura and Liz hopped in the surprisingly short queue for Dumbo (Jen had to change her camera's memory card and battery so she sat on a nearby bench to do that) and enjoyed a lovely flight.

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Jen wandered around Fantasyland a bit.

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VBsHustla

08-08-2009, 08:20 PM

When we were reunited, we strolled over to the teacups, immediately entered our cup of choice and began taking an absurd number of pics in hopes of capturing a perfect in-action spinny one.

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All spun-out, we decided to make ourselves more nauseated by embarking upon a jerky journey to Space. We basically ran through the Space queue without stopping and got to enter our preferred less-jerky left side. We then decided to see if the rest of the park was as wonderfully empty as Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, and took a leisurely train ride over to Frontierland from Toontown, rather than our usual frantic run across the park.

It turned out that Frontierland was as empty as Tomorrowland and Fantasyland, and we were able to complete the mountain trifecta, riding Thunder and Splash mountains in almost no time (at about 6:30 pm)! :thumbsup2 We were loving this evening. :cool1:

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Next we wandered back over to Fantasyland and used the Peter FPs that we had collected when we entered the MK, then enjoyed a showing of Philharmagic. After enjoying some of our fav attractions, we were delighted to find that it was time for Spectro (sorry, no pics from this night)!

VBsHustla

08-08-2009, 08:28 PM

We had a grand old time watching and dancing along to our fav nighttime spectacular in our fav spot in front of the Confectionary. We then followed Spectro up Main Street and made our way back to Toontown, because why not visit each and every land in the few hours that we were in the MK? Really we wanted to see if the line for Minnie and Mickey would be acceptably short enough for us to wait in, but alas it was the only crowded spot in the MK so we skipped out of the judge's tent. As we were walking through and out of Toontown, we spotted Suzy doing a meet and greet outside of the main Toontown tent! We love Suzy, and all Cinderella mice! :banana: There were two little girls with Suzy when we walked up and no other line, so it was not long before we had what was probably our best character meeting ever! Suzy was just so pleased to meet us and was jumping up and down in delight pointing at our tiaras and then repeatedly hugging us. We're not really sure why she loved us so much (we might have mentioned that Jen is obsessed with the Cinderella mice, but we imagine characters are told these sorts of things all the time), but we loved that she did! :love:

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Following our animated meet and greet, we proceeded out of Toontown and took a spin on Pooh (with no line at all). Laura and Liz said this was the first time they had ridden without experiencing a heffalumps and woozles malfunction. Jen doesn't remember experiencing a breakdown in the heffalump room on each and every ride through (certainly on occasion though), but if you were a betting person you'd probably want to bet on Laura for recollections of most factual events. :laughing:

After our smooth ride through the Hundred Acre Woods we made our way to the hub a few minutes before Wishes. Since we had eaten our dinner and desserts so early, we were ready to enjoy a second dessert of Premiums! :mickeybar The only open Premium emporium was the hut at the end of the hub so we had to wait in a rather large line, but it was of course worth it! We also got the brilliant idea of having a Photopass guy snap a pic of us enjoying our fav treats in front of the castle, so after another rather long wait we whipped out our slightly melted premiums and posed away, much to the delight of the large crowd surrounding us.

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They thought we were just the weirdest things! :lmao: We were glad to have provided entertainment before the main event. If only we could have been as grand as our fav opening act Four for a Dollar. We've all got to have dreams.

Following our premium photos and our subsequently getting extremely chocolately whilst consuming our fast-melting Premiums, we still had a few entertainment-less minutes to kill before Wishes. So what did we do? Began a loud Jonas Brothers sing-along, obviously! :dance3:

While we were singing our hearts out, a small boy came up, slapped Liz's bottom, and then wandered off. We assume he was showing his appreciation for our performance? :rotfl:

Wishes was wonderful (holy moley, alliteration!) as always.

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After Wishes, we exited and hopped on a boat launch that luckily drove very close to the electrical water pageant, so we couldn't help but perform the tunes along with it! We had a grand old time on our little launch -- much better than the previous night's maelstrom--and were soon back home at the GF.

For reasons unbeknown to us nine months after our trip, we went to the GF's lobby (even though our room in Boca Chica was much closer to the boat launch than to the lobby). But thank goodness we made this strange detour because we were treated to one of the greatest musical performances of all time on the children's cartoon TVs- Stand By Me by three perfect singing frogs, which features Timon and Pumba! :cheer2: Laura and our brother Kevy discovered this gem on YouTube a few summers ago whilst working at our dad's office and watched it millions of times. We've since learned that the song is part of one of the straight-to-video Lion Kings sequels that we've never seen. The tune is hilarious and we're pretty much obsessed with it, so being able to sing and dance along to it in the GF lobby at midnight was the best! :banana:

With this last bit of excitement cementing the night as one of our greatest DW evenings ever, we went back to our lovely room and promptly went to sleep.

Up next: Our last day in DW. :sad1:

Trinity524

08-13-2009, 11:52 AM

VBsHustla

08-13-2009, 12:12 PM

Subbing, popcorn::

I see that you are about to go back! Are you staying at the Grand Floridian again?

I would also like to know where Liz got her sunglasses. I too am a red head and I find it hard to find sunglasses that go with my skin type and hair color!

TIA!

Thanks for reading! We're staying at the Poly this time, so maybe we'll see you there! The next trip is getting so close, and I've decided that I WILL finish this TR before we leave for the next trip! :rotfl:

I'll ask Liz about her sunglasses and get back to you, but I have an inkling they were probably Target originals, as that's where we all do a lot of sunglasses shopping! :laughing:

-Jen

VBsHustla

08-13-2009, 04:32 PM

Subbing, popcorn::

I see that you are about to go back! Are you staying at the Grand Floridian again?

I would also like to know where Liz got her sunglasses. I too am a red head and I find it hard to find sunglasses that go with my skin type and hair color!

TIA!

Jen was right! My eyewear :3dglasses was more than likely from Target!

I have gotten a few pairs I really liked from Anthropologie by a company called AJ Morgan, but I hesitate to bring anything but Target-originals to DW as sunglasses have a strange tendency to spontaneously melt in DW!

Target usually has a few brown pairs that should do the job. I've got some aviators to try out on our upcoming trip.

Thanks for reading! :banana:

Scott MC

08-13-2009, 07:04 PM

Yippee!
You're updating!
I so enjoy your trip report. :worship:

Trinity524

08-13-2009, 07:54 PM

Jen was right! My eyewear :3dglasses was more than likely from Target!

I have gotten a few pairs I really liked from Anthropologie by a company called AJ Morgan, but I hesitate to bring anything but Target-originals to DW as sunglasses have a strange tendency to spontaneously melt in DW!

Target usually has a few brown pairs that should do the job. I've got some aviators to try out on our upcoming trip.

Thanks for reading! :banana:

Sweet! Thanks! Hope to see you girls there...:banana:

VBsHustla

08-30-2009, 05:43 PM

September 2, 2008 - our last day! :sad1:

Today would be our last day in DW, which saddened us terribly. :sad1: With heavy hearts we dragged our heavy suitcases out of our room, through the main building, and out to the Magical Express area. Once we had deposited our luggage, we hopped on the monorail and arrived at the MK for our 8:05 am Crystal Palace breakfast! Looking back on this we wonder if anyone else is crazy enough to book a before-park-open breakfast on their last day (after late night packing and early morning last-minute packing). :confused3 We also wonder how on earth we got to this ADR on time. :laughing:

Anyway, we were indeed in the MK by 8 am and took a few empty Main Street pics. Unfortunately our little Canon PowerShots do not prefer the humidity, and refuse to take proper pics for about their first 15 minutes of use during each steamy DW morning. So all of our empty Main Street pics are terrible, like this one:

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Once we'd had our fill of condensation-ruined photos, we checked into the CP and were immediately seated. We had never been here, but had read great things about it on the DIS. We were not disappointed! The restaurant is lovely looking, it wasn't crowded or loud at all when we were there, the characters arrived at a nice pace and interaction was great, and the food was fantastic! :cheer2:

The food was standard breakfast fare, which was all fresh and great, plus puffed French toast that was superb! It was pretty much a zeppole with granulated instead of powdered sugar, which, as it turns out, is an excellent recipe.

Here are a few pics of our food and many pics of us (our fav, in case you haven't noticed) with some of our best pals from the Hundred Acre Woods.

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VBsHustla

08-30-2009, 05:47 PM

Once we'd finished our delightful meal at the CP, we made our way up to the Fantasyland rope drop, which was empty. When the rope was dropped a few minutes later, we paraded through to our top first attraction, Peter, and were kindly congratulated by CMs waving with Mickey hands along our journey for being the first visitors of the day to enter Fantasyland. :goodvibes

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We then achieved one of our fav goals of riding in the first Peter ship to sail that day. :woohoo:

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As per usual, we next proceeded to Dumbo and enjoyed a too-short ride after a not-too-long wait. Next up was a trip to see our good pal Pooh.

We then had a hankering for some Frontier frolicking, so we departed from the land of Fantasy. Jen came across some outlaws, but luckily Liberty Square had just the right restraints for them. :cool2:

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It was time for some scadoobaling, and Splash gladly obliged us by presenting to us a completely empty queue area.

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We got to run right through and place our request to the confused CMs that we would like only row three, explaing that, yes, we understood that the rest of our log would be empty and we could split up into rows one and two. Once we entered our ideal row, we spread a Dollar Tree poncho out on our seat (it was soaked since no one had yet ridden in that log this morning), sat down, and waved a fond farewell to the CMs who found us so very odd.

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Splashing around in our own log was perfection! We got to scadooble as loudly as we wanted to and to our hearts' content! Before the drop we even shrouded ourselves in an extra poncho and were able to remain quite dry (we cared so much on this particular ride since we'd unfortunately be flying home in these clothes in a few short hours, and wanted to avoid any grossness as much as we could).

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In addition to keeping us dry, our poncho blanket made us look really awesome in this photo of the three of us exploding out of the only occupied row in our log. If we ever need proof of just how awesome we are, here it is.

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Also the fact that we took a redneck photo of the Splash photo is pretty good.

Delighted with our ride, we proceeded to the exit and were even more delighted to have a dream come true - we were presented with dream ears!

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Lest you've forgotten how absurdly long this TR is taking to complete, let this artifact remind you that it was still the YOAMD when we were there. So, on this trip we had won dream FPs at MGM and now Mickey ears, and we'd also won dream ears during our trip in 2007, so overall we had quite good YOAMD luck.

With our ears securely on our heads, we hopped the train to Toontown and were delighted to find a finally acceptably small crowd in the judge's tent waiting to meet Mickey. We were soon ushered in for our meet and greet with Mickey and Minnie. We took some pics

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with our dream ears, which Mickey kept accidentally knocking off Jen's head with his own ears. We also switched to our tiaras for some pics since we wanted some pics of us in our signature look with the mice!

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Jen looks super-odd in this pic, but Mickey and Minnie look so adorable that she is ignoring that fact and including it here in our TR for your enjoyment.

After a lovely meeting, we decided to check on the wait times for the other characters. It turned out the princesses barely had any wait, so in we went! Princess meets are usually pretty awkward for us since we are the same ages as these CP princesses and they always stay in character and pretty much speak to us as if we were 3-year-olds, so this time we just played along and probably made things really awkward for them. We even copied their poses.

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We then skipped out of the character meeting spot and into the gift shop of the judge's tent, where we were delighted to immediately begin dancing to the High School Musical soundtrack we heard playing. There was no one in there, and nary a CM in sight, so we browsed and danced it up for a while.

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When we felt we were all danced out, we skittered over to the teacups for a spin. Dizzying, but worth it.

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VBsHustla

08-30-2009, 05:49 PM

Then we had a hankering for some piracy and its many shining rewards, so we headed through the hub to Adventureland, stopping along the way for some pics with our dream ears in front of the castle.

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We enjoyed a great ride on Pirates, and then got in some Frontier shopping. Jen and Liz used our remaining snack credits to buy our fav Frontierland cookies to take home.

Then we took in another top attraction, the Jamboree. Love those bears. :love:

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We also stopped by the Hall of Presidents to get some pics with TR in our new ears. And then we left.

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Next we decided to zip to the future, so we headed to Tomorrowland and enjoyed a rousing round of Buzz.

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After Buzz we debated riding Space Mountain, but it was getting late, so we weren't sure we'd have enough time to ride (though there was no wait). Instead, we of course opted for a ride on our favorite, John Carousel. Though we deemed we would not have enough time for a 30 second Space ride, we of course thought it appropriate to partake in this 30 minute attraction. :thumbsup2

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After wishing John and crew a fond farewell, we set out to finish our day in Fantasyland. We stopped by Pooh's playful spot for a pic.

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Then it was on to the carousel. There was an absurdly long line for it (there's never a line!), but we waited and enjoyed a ride.

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Next up was Philharmagic, which was also packed! But great, nonetheless.

We then attempted to use our FPs for Peter, which we wanted to be the last ride of our trip, only to be told that Peter had broken down!! What?!? We were outraged! :scared1:

VBsHustla

08-30-2009, 05:52 PM

At least Philharmagic is a pretty good last attraction, but it’s not nearly the same as Peter! Feeling forlorn, we made our way out to the exit of the MK. Jen stopped at Casey’s and got a hotdog with one of her two remaining CS credits, and we all stopped at a bench near the flagpole so Jen could eat and we could enjoy the sights and sounds of the MK one last time.

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Jen would like to publicly apologize now for this – she underestimated the time it would take to get back to the GF via the boat launch and then to collect the carry-on bags we had checked with the luggage room, so she insisted we stay at the MK longer than Laura and Liz wanted to. As a result, we didn’t get a chance to go to Saspy’s to use up the one CS credit we each had left – we’d been planning to get sandwiches to take with us to the airport and eat on the plane. Again, apologies to Laura and Liz!

Liz and Laura eventually forgave Jen and we reluctantly boarded the Magical Express bus once it arrived (far too early for our liking). We had an uneventful trip to the airport and back home. Thus concluded our amazing week at the GF, and began our longing to plan another trip. Luckily since this TR has taken so long to write, we can happily report that we will be returning to DW in a few short weeks! :cheer2:

We will be staying at the Poly, and plan to live-tweet our trip. So please follow us on Twitter @VBsHustla (http://www.twitter.com/vbshustla) (link also in our signature) for live crowd and weather reports, food reviews and pictures, and tons of atmosphere pics. We also plan to do a trip report and dining review, probably under the new username Jen recently adopted, UncleOrville. If you’re reading this, we’d be honored if you followed our next TR!

Thanks so much to those who followed along with our trip! If anyone comes across our TR after the thread has been closed and has any questions, please PM us – we’re more than happy to answer questions, share tips, or just say hi!

And remember, always walk softly and carry a big stick.