How Many ADRs Can We Fit in One Week?: April 2015 TR- Finished 7/3!

[DisneyMandC]

Hi all, and welcome to my first ever trip report! This trip report is for our April 12-19, 2015 stay at Animal Kingdom Lodge. I hope everything turns out okay with this, it seems like there’s so much to do with getting the pictures right! Please forgive me if I post this and nothing shows up that’s supposed to be there! I’ll get it right eventually, with some guidance


A little bit about me and my husband, Chris.


I’m Melissa, and I’ve been a huge Disney fan my entire life!

I took my first trip to Disney World when I was 6 months old and went every other year with my family growing up until I was about 9. We stayed at Wilderness Lodge a couple times and the Fort Wilderness Campground in an RV. We went again for a big 10 day family vacation when I was 16 in 2005, staying again at Fort Wilderness Campground. It was this vacation where I was really able to appreciate not only the magic of Disney in terms of Mickey Mouse and Princesses, but also how incredible it is when you really look at the details of Disney World and the manpower it takes. I’ve been an “adult” Disney addict ever since then, but unfortunately only made it back for a couple very small Disney vacations since then.


My husband, Chris, had gone to Disney when he was younger, but had never stayed onsite. We went to Disney for one evening of Mickey’s Christmas Party in 2008, which we loved, and again in 2012 for three days staying offsite while Chris worked in Orlando. This is the trip that really got Chris hooked on Disney and determined to come back! After spending three days just in the parks, he was determined we would come stay there for our own vacation.

We had one more mini-visit to Downtown Disney in fall 2014, again while Chris worked in Orlando. It was tough not to go to the parks, but we knew we wanted to save our money to have the best vacation possible in spring 2015.

And finally, it was here—our Disney vacation. Oh yeah... AND OUR WEDDING! I should mention that this trip was our HONEYMOON! Here we are on our wedding day on April 11! All photos by Brittany Claud Photography.

We are so fortunate to have had beautiful weather on our big day. We got a lot of questions while we were on our honeymoon about whether we had gotten married at Disney World, but unfortunately a 150 person wedding at Disney World was a little out of our price range! Plus I always wanted to get married in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia. We have been together for 8 years and our wedding was what I had always imagined it would be.

I'll be back soon with more, I just wanted to post this for now to make sure I had done things right! Please let me know if you have any tips for me! I've already written a good deal, I'm just still trying to organize my pictures. Hopefully I'll get several more installments posted on this long Memorial Day Weekend! Thanks for reading!

Table of Contents:

The Details
Are We Staring At a Parking Lot?
Day One at Magic Kingdom: Where We Wander Aimlessly
Day One at Magic Kingdom: Can I Order Another Charcuterie Plate?
Day Two at Hollywood Studios: Where We Get Fooled by an Alcoholic Beverage
Day Two at Hollywood Studios: Where We Almost Become Permanent Guests at the Hollywood Tower Hotel
Day Three at Epcot: MIIIIIIIINE. Mine Mine Mine!
Day Three at Epcot: OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT MANATEE
Day Three at Epcot: Two Charcuterie Plates in 48 Hours? Yes, Please.
Day Three at Epcot: Two Charcuterie Plates in 48 Hours? Yes, Please. Part 2.
Day Four at Animal Kingdom: Find ALL the Hidden Mickeys!
Day Four at Animal Kingdom: Make Sure You Pat Dug's Head!
Day Five: Resort Hopping
Day Five: Where We Go Everywhere
Day Six: Keys to the Kingdom
Day Seven: Look, There's No One Here! Oh wait...
Day Seven: "Due to Unforeseen Circumstances..."
Day Eight: Until Next Time

 

[DisneyMandC]

The Details


Since Chris had never actually stayed at Disney World before, and because it was our honeymoon, we knew we wanted to go all out. Or, well, as much as we could within our budgetary constraints! Chris had had his eye on Animal Kingdom Lodge for a while, and during our day trip to Downtown Disney in fall 2014, we stopped by AKL to check it out. I had never been in AKL before, and we were both blown away. Plus, Chris said he wanted to be able to “have a giraffe put it’s head in our room everyday.” So after that visit, we came home and started planning to book the honeymoon!


Can I just say how thankful I am for the amazing cast member I spoke to when booking our honeymoon? After pricing it out online, we determined that it was not in our budget to stay the 8 days/7 nights we had planned in a Savannah view room at AKL. Plus, we wanted to do the Disney Deluxe Dining Plan. I know that would seem extra extravagant to some, but we are big foodies and wanted to eat a lot of the signature restaurants for our honeymoon, so it was worth it to us. I know a lot of people feel differently about the value of the Disney Dining Plans, but I am a big fan. Note the title of this trip report—we had a lot of ADRs we were planning to book!


But back to the Savannah View Room... we just knew it wasn’t in our budget to stay the whole time, so we decided to do a split stay between a Savannah View Room and a moderate resort. I decided I’d call and sort of price out the stay and figure out the logistics of this plan. When I connected with a CM and told him it was our honeymoon and we wanted to split stay, he told me he wanted to talk me out of it. I thought that was odd, but figured I’d listen to what he’d have to say about it, knowing full well that he would be probably just try to upsell me on the “magic of the savannah view room” for our honeymoon, or something like that. Instead, he told me that he typically stayed at AKL when he stayed on property, and knew that there were many standard rooms that had excellent views of the animals, but were not “savannah view” because they did not have the required 180 degree view of the savannah. He told me that he could book us a standard room and add a note on our account requesting a room with a view of the animals and add that it was our honeymoon and we wanted to have a magical experience. When he quoted me the price of the standard room there for 7 nights, I couldn’t believe it. It would work with our budget! I decided to take a leap of faith and trust him that we would hopefully get a room with a great view of the animals. You’ll have to keep reading to see if our wish actually came true.


So for all of the details of our trip, we ended up getting an 8 day/7 night stay at AKL in a standard room, the Deluxe Dining Plan, and Parkhopper passes. We also decided to splurge and get Memory Maker. It probably isn’t something I’d normally do, but we have a good track record of traveling places and not actually getting pictures of us together. I figured our honeymoon was the one trip where it would probably be nice to have pictures of us together, so I decided to go for it! You’ll see plenty of those pictures scattered through here. And this will likely be my only picture-free post, though I don’t believe we got many (if any) pictures form the trip down there. Other than that, you’ll be seeing a lot of photos, and particularly a lot of photos of food! Steer clear if you hate that sort of thing!

 

[jandlinz]

Beautiful wedding pictures! Congratulations! Can't wait to read all about AKL.

 

[yeheyprincex2]

aww, congratulations on your wedding. Great start to your story, hope you get the pixie dust and get the Savannah view. You guys remind me of me and my DH first Disney onsite stay. It was at AKL and we loved everything about the resort. I hope to make it back there again one day, my DH really likes PORS and we have stayed there these past few trips.

 

[potsiemom]

congrats on the wedding cant wait to read all about it

 

[luvmymouse]

Congratulations! I'm betting that the CM and Disney worked some magic and you had a great room at the AKL! Definitely no split stays for a honeymoon. Can't have that!

I love AKL! Can't wait to hear more! Don't keep us waiting too long now...

 

[DisneyMandC]

Thank you all for the kind comments! I am putting together pictures right now and will be posting in just a bit! Trying to get through all of Day One today. Who knew I'd have so much to say?! This might end up being a very long trip report! I just feel like I want to get everything down so that I have a great written out journey of our honeymoon

 

[mom2cgj]

Congratulations! I'm going to go with yes - you got a great view!

 

[DisneyMandC]

Are We Staring at a Parking Lot?

I’ll be honest, as we got closer to the big day, I was super excited... and maybe a little bit more about Disney than the actual wedding! Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled to finally be marrying the person I’d been with for 8 years, but I was so looking forward to us finally getting to experience a full Disney vacation together that we had talked about for so long. We were basically at maximum excitement level when our Magic Bands showed up. After that, we only had to wait for April 12 to come!

We had a lot of friends and family warn us that we should wait a day between the wedding and when we would leave for the honeymoon so that we would be well-rested and not exhausted from the wedding. But the good news is we had an afternoon wedding and were out of the reception at 6:30, so we weren’t up partying all hours of the night! That made it much easier to get up the next morning for our 7 AM flight.

Rise and Shine! 4:00 AM and it’s time to head to the airport! I can’t even pretend like I was unhappy to get up at that hour though. We were both so excited that we were finally heading to Disney World that we could barely stand it! We left our hotel at 4:30 in the morning to get to the airport at about 5:00 and get through security. Fortunately, security at our airport never takes too long, so we were through that in no time. One of the many things I love about Richmond is that we now have Southwest Airlines at our airport featuring direct flights to Orlando! We jumped on our 7 AM flight and arrived in Orlando at 8:59 AM.

This was my first time experiencing Disney’s Magical Express, since my family had always driven to Disney World. I had flown into Orlando before though, so I was familiar with the “mini-monorail” as I like to call it. No pictures of it from our trip, but I know everyone here knows what it looks like! We had about a 15 minute wait for DME, which we didn’t mind. It was still only about 9:30 at this point, so knew we would have plenty of time to revel in our first day!

Once we sat down on the bus and the Disney video started playing, I was in full excitement mode! Chris and I were also very anxious to see if we were really going to get a good hotel room. Since it was so early, we knew we were unlikely to actually be able to see our room, and would just need to drop off our carry on bags at the hotel and head out. We were all prepared to do this, when all of a sudden the almighty text message came through- OUR ROOM WAS READY! Room 3382 was our magical number. I immediately started trying to pull up maps of AKL to try and see where the room was and if we would be able to see animals. Despite having read the AKL post on this forum, I still wasn’t super familiar with the layout of the rooms and savannahs. I could see that the room was far from the lobby, and knew that it wasn’t facing Arusha. I was afraid this would mean we were staring at a parking lot. As we tried to see where the room would be on our tiny iPhone screens, we looked up and all of a sudden

WE’RE HOME! I couldn’t believe I was finally seeing those purple signs again and that I would FINALLY be staying here after ten years! Our bus made two quick stops at Pop Century and Art of Animation before we headed on to AKL.

At this point, we were at peak excitement. We had done the online check-in, so we knew we could just head straight to our room. We walked into AKL, quickly took in the beauty of the lobby, and headed straight back to our room. I was so nervous walking all the way back there (and it was far) thinking we were going to be staring at a not-so-magical parking lot for our entire honeymoon. I scanned my MagicBand (it worked!), the door opened, and...

We named the one on the left Marge. The one on the right is Steve.

FIVE GIRAFFES WERE STANDING RIGHT OUTSIDE OUR WINDOW. I thought I was going to cry. I threw my carry on bag down and immediately ran out onto our balcony. We were absolutely blown away. I silently thanked that amazing CM for helping me when I called and getting us the absolutely perfect view for our honeymoon. We loved it!

We thought the room itself was great as well. And yes, we did have two queen beds instead of a king bed on our honeymoon The reason behind this is that when it came time for online check-in, I was too scared to check the options for a king bed or room close to the lobby or anything like that out of fear that it would interfere with the requests the CM had put on our reservation for a view of the animals. So I really cannot complain at all about our room being the absolute furthest from the lobby and having two beds. It was actually kind of nice though, because we threw all of our stuff on the other bed.

After staring at the giraffes for quite a while, we decided it was finally time to get our butts in gear and head to our first stop—Magic Kingdom! We assembled our necessary items into our backpack and headed back to the lobby, stopping on the way to take more pictures of animals out of the windows. Once we reached the lobby, we stopped at the front desk to ask about getting our Amazon Prime Pantry box delivered to our room. We knew we wouldn’t be doing many breakfasts on our dining plan and instead saving meals for signature meals for dinner, so we ordered some breakfast foods and waters to be delivered to the hotel. We also asked about getting our “Just Married” buttons to wear around the parks! I was pretty excited about these, and had read a lot about getting some extra pixie dust for wearing them. I had planned to do the whole “kiss every time someone congratulates you” thing, but this turned out to be harder than expected with how many people congratulate you! We put on our buttons and headed out the door for our first day in the World as husband and wife!

 

[LaLaLaLeigh]

Congratulations! Your wedding pictures are gorgeous! Excited to follow along...

 

[DisneyMandC]

Thank you all! Now for an embarrassing question, how do I make a table of contents on here?! I want to go back and add one to the end of my original post and provide links to each update like I've seen others do, but I can't figure out how to specifically link to each of my own updates, and not just a page generally. Thanks for your help! Furiously typing away on Magic Kingdom, Day One over here!

 

[mom2cgj]

Thank you all! Now for an embarrassing question, how do I make a table of contents on here?! I want to go back and add one to the end of my original post and provide links to each update like I've seen others do, but I can't figure out how to specifically link to each of my own updates, and not just a page generally. Thanks for your help! Furiously typing away on Magic Kingdom, Day One over here!

Don't be embarrassed - it's not as easy as it used to be and took me a while to figure it out, too. To link to your specific update, after you post it, click on the little number at the bottom of the post (your last update was #9). It will open that particular post and you can copy the link from your browser. Then highlight the text where you want the link to be, click the link button, and paste in the address.

Congrats on your AMAZING view!! That is beautiful! AKL is on my wish-list for an adults only trip some day. For now, we are value people with the kids for the fun themes.

 

[DisneyMandC]

Don't be embarrassed - it's not as easy as it used to be and took me a while to figure it out, too. To link to your specific update, after you post it, click on the little number at the bottom of the post (your last update was #9). It will open that particular post and you can copy the link from your browser. Then highlight the text where you want the link to be, click the link button, and paste in the address.

Congrats on your AMAZING view!! That is beautiful! AKL is on my wish-list for an adults only trip some day. For now, we are value people with the kids for the fun themes.

AH HA! Thank you! That makes sense! I'm trying to finish up Day One of my report now and then I'll work on hooking in that ToC!

Thank you, we had such a great time at AKL! Don't blame you a bit for value resorts. I had told DH that we could stay at a value since I know that I at least am a "park person" and am not going to spend time in a pool or in the room except to sleep. But since it was our honeymoon, we decided we should really go all out. Of course, after this trip and checking out Boardwalk and Beach and Yacht Club, now we really want to try those! I would ultimately love to stay at every Disney resort though!

 

[luvmymouse]

Yippee! I just knew they would work that Disney magic for you! You got your giraffes, too! They're my DD(17) favorite animals there! Her room is now jungle themed because of AKL.

I'm guessing you mean RIC airport in VA? We always take that early nonstop flight to MCO and it's usually the cheapest if you book early! Isn't it awesome to leave home and actually be at WDW in a matter of hours? We live near Charlottesville.

Can't wait to hear more!

 

[DisneyMandC]

Yippee! I just knew they would work that Disney magic for you! You got your giraffes, too! They're my DD(17) favorite animals there! Her room is now jungle themed because of AKL.

I'm guessing you mean RIC airport in VA? We always take that early nonstop flight to MCO and it's usually the cheapest if you book early! Isn't it awesome to leave home and actually be at WDW in a matter of hours? We live near Charlottesville.

Can't wait to hear more!

Yes, we take RIC! We live just south of Richmond. Love those nonstop flights! I had flown AirTran to Orlando before and had to connect through ATL, which is always miserable. I don't think I've ever connected through ATL without having to sprint through the airport to my next flight. We booked with Southwest several months out for this trip and I think paid maybe $300 total for both of us round trip? Can't remember exactly now, but we were happy with the prices. And you can't beat free checked luggage!

 

[LaLaLaLeigh]

Yes, we take RIC! We live just south of Richmond. Love those nonstop flights! I had flown AirTran to Orlando before and had to connect through ATL, which is always miserable. I don't think I've ever connected through ATL without having to sprint through the airport to my next flight. We booked with Southwest several months out for this trip and I think paid maybe $300 total for both of us round trip? Can't remember exactly now, but we were happy with the prices. And you can't beat free checked luggage!

As someone whose local airport IS ATL, I have to say that I get irritated enough when my flight is leaving from a distant gate... I can't even begin to imagine the chaos of connecting through here.

 

[DisneyMandC]

Day One at Magic Kingdom: Where We Wander Aimlessly

Plans for the Day:

ADRs: Liberty Tree Tavern 12:55; Be Our Guest 8:10
FP+: BTMR 1:50; SDMT 3:05; Space Mountain 4:40

I was a little concerned about heading to MK on a Sunday when I knew people were still leaving from Spring Break, but we always went to Magic Kingdom first when I was growing up, and I felt like that was where I had to start. We headed to the bus stop to get on the MK bus. I was little concerned about staying at AKL and only having bus service, but I have to say I have no complaints about the bus service from AKL at all. We never waited more than 5 minutes for a bus. In fact, the longest we waited for a bus was actually from the Poly later in the week, and even that was only about 10 minutes.

It felt like we were at MK in no time. I couldn’t believe we were finally home. As it turns out, neither of us got pictures as we walked into the park. I think we were both just trying to soak in finally being there. Walking into Town Square is also where we got our first congratulations! This CM must have had some eagle eyes because we were at least 20 feet away from him while he was standing at one of the carts selling merchandise at the entrance. But he practically yelled “congratulations” at us, so we told him thank you and did our first “congrats” kiss. We were pretty excited! Thanks, nice CM!

At this point, it was about 11:00 or so and we had been awake for over 6 hours already. We decided we needed to refuel, and knew just the place. Now, I know this is a contentious topic for some, but we are big fans of Starbucks. I was hesitant when I originally heard about Starbucks coming into the parks, but I have to say we were both really impressed with how it was done to fit in the theming (especially in HS, as I’ll discuss later). We decided to get some frappuccinos and use our snack credits. When Chris went to order his and asked for a tall, the CM told us we could get a venti with a snack credit. WHOA. I somehow missed the memo on that! Since neither of us would be able to drink our own venti, we decided to split one. We were now refueled.

One of the main reasons we were really excited about the Starbucks is because of their You Are Here mugs. Chris would always buy a mug from wherever he traveled to for work, so we had already amassed a small collection. He was so excited when I told him they had Disney mugs! He's not really one to buy a Disney t-shirt or anything like that, so I knew this would be a great souvenir for him to bring home. We checked out the Magic Kingdom mug while we were in the store and decided we would purchase one later on in the week since we weren't sure if Starbucks could actually ship it back to our room.

We headed right into Tomorrowland to check out the wait time on Space Mountain, my favorite ride in MK. It was at about 40 minutes, and we didn’t feel like waiting that long since we had a FP for later in the day. We decided to make our way back towards Liberty Tree Tavern and see what we could do in that area before our lunch. We sort of meandered around for a while with no clear direction, just taking in the sights and sounds. I know that’s heresy to some, but I just found the DIS right before our trip and had never heard of Touring Plans! We spotted Haunted Mansion only had about a 10 minute wait time, so we decided to get on that. I’ve always loved HM, and we loved checking out the new line.

This is also the time when we decided to pull out our Hidden Mickeys book! I had looked for hidden mickeys on my trip in 2005, and had explained the concept to Chris when we were there in 2012. I knew that he would love finding all of them, so I purchased the book for him for Christmas. This proved to be a great investment. We had a blast looking for hidden mickeys on our trip. I felt like we found a ton, but when I went back and added up the point values for the ones we found, I realized how many more we had to go! I’ve decided I’ll buy a new book for each trip, and we can continue going through the ones we haven’t found. We did try to find some of the hidden mickeys in the actual ride, but it’s harder than you think. We did of course spot the always-present dinner plates put together. We decided to get our first Photopass photo after this. I loved the scanners the photographers had for your Magic Bands. We found that these worked perfectly every single time.

We were getting semi-close to our ADR time after this, so we decided to just stop in some stores and do a little shopping before lunch. We both got really into pin trading while we were on our 2012 trip, and I had brought along the pins and lanyards we had gotten from that trip. I decided I wanted to get some sort of wedding pin to commemorate our trip and found the perfect ones to go with our buttons. My "Mrs." pin is not pictured here

I also found this Dug pin and HAD to have it! I am a huge Up! fan, as will be evident by my later pins. Sorry for the blurriness.

We had killed enough time at this point that we decided to go ahead and see if we could check in early at Liberty Tree Tavern. Neither of us had eaten there before, but thought it looked pretty good. We managed to get in early and loved hearing the reservation called for our party from the “colony of Virginia.” We found a hidden mickey while we were waiting too!

We both thought the food was excellent. I can’t remember what Chris got, but we both had clam chowder as an appetizer, and I just got a salad. There is apparently a very excellent dessert there we should have tried (the ooey gooey cake, maybe?) but we were too full to do anything more than enjoy some berry sorbet.

We redeemed our first set of meal credits and headed off to our first FP+, BTMR! This ride holds a special place in our heart from our trip in 2008 when Chris’s little brother was with us. He was about 11 at the time and did NOT like roller coasters (I hesitate to use the term roller coaster to actually describe BTMR). We managed to convince him to get on it and he screamed like a little girl the entire time. We laughed through the entire ride. We still tease him about it to this day! Needless to say, we enjoyed our ride this time and took a second to chuckle at his past fear.

When we got off BTMR, we had some time to kill before our FP+ for SDMT, so we decided to check out Tom Sawyer Island. Neither of us had done this before, or if I had I was so little that I didn’t remember it. We both thought it was nice, probably not something we would do again, but we enjoyed it simply because it sort of took you into its own little world. I also saw some parents relaxing in the shade there with a toddler to nap, which I thought was a very smart idea. We spent a little bit there exploring, then got back on our raft.

You can see here if you look closely that I've already amassed quite a few Up pins!

On our way back to SDMT, we stopped in on the holy grail of rides – It’s a Small World. Oh yes. The music. I feel like you have to do it though. It’s just SO Disney, how can you not? We got that incessant tune stuck in our heads, picked out some hidden mickeys, and then headed over to do the teacups.

Now I am NOT a fan of spinning. But Chris loves the teacups so I agree to go on them. I always try to steer him towards that one teacup that’s not on the spinning platform, but he knows my schemes. I let him take a picture for proof and then yell at him when he tries to spin the teacup. Fortunately, this is a short ride.

After our spinning adventure, it was time for us to head to the newest attraction- Seven Dwarves Mine Train!

 

[DisneyMandC]

As someone whose local airport IS ATL, I have to say that I get irritated enough when my flight is leaving from a distant gate... I can't even begin to imagine the chaos of connecting through here.

It's not great, I'll say that! I remember when I flew through ATL for our 2012 trip I was alone and my flight out of Richmond ended up getting delayed due to weather. What was a two hour layover in ATL turned into approximately 20 minutes by the time I landed. And of course I landed in A and was flying out of E or something, which doesn't even make sense because that's the international terminal I think? I was scared that the train would be too slow so I just ran from one end of the airport to the other. Note that I am not a runner haha. But it was the last flight to Orlando that night and I was NOT going to be late to Disney!

 

[LaLaLaLeigh]

It's not great, I'll say that! I remember when I flew through ATL for our 2012 trip I was alone and my flight out of Richmond ended up getting delayed due to weather. What was a two hour layover in ATL turned into approximately 20 minutes by the time I landed. And of course I landed in A and was flying out of E or something, which doesn't even make sense because that's the international terminal I think? I was scared that the train would be too slow so I just ran from one end of the airport to the other. Note that I am not a runner haha. But it was the last flight to Orlando that night and I was NOT going to be late to Disney!

Oh, man. DH and I flew out of E once to NYC, and it sort of felt like we were just going to be walking to NYC instead of flying. Just the WORST. But at least we had plenty of time and didn't have to pull a 'Home Alone' sprint all the way there!

 

[DisneyMandC]

Day One at Magic Kingdom: Can I Order Another Charcuterie Plate?

Next up, SDMT! Man am I glad I got a FP+ for this! Holy lines. I don’t think I ever saw the wait time drop below 45 minutes all week. We got on almost immediately with our FPs. Chris mentioned to me on the way over to it that he’d heard it was very short. I have to agree that it is really short. Despite that, I did enjoy it though. I really thought the theming on it was great, and it seemed like everyone in our mine train was singing “Hi Ho” when we were in the mine. We also found our own hidden mickey in it that wasn’t in our book yet, so we thought that was great! I loved looking in the house at the end to see Snow White dancing with the dwarves too. Probably not something I’d wait in a long line for (although I did just that later in the week), but I did enjoy it.

We decided to head to Tomorrowland now and check out a few attractions before our FP for Space Mountain. Stitch’s Great Escape had a zero minute wait, so we thought that was perfect and walked right in. We discovered why it had a zero minute wait after it was said and done... yawn. Won’t do that again. Now granted I did the Alien ride when I was young, and was TERRIFIED. Screaming and crying sort of deal, and I was not one of those kids who was scared of rides and things like that. But Stitch was just so bland and boring. I kept thinking something good would happen, but it never did. Oh well.

We hopped on the Peoplemover to add some excitement to our lives next. Ok, so maybe not a thrill ride, but we did enjoy it. I had never done it before, and we enjoyed hearing about the different attractions and riding through Space Mountain. It was a nice little break for our feet too.

Now it was on to the BEST ride- Space Mountain! I’ve always been a huge fan of Space Mountain, ever since I was little. Sure, it’s rough. It jerks you around. You have no idea if your head is about to collide with another piece of track. But I just love it. Walking through the line to get to it and hearing that music just instantly makes me feel like I’m 6 years old again. I was so worried when they redid the line that they were going to change the music and take out the old images of the astronaut, space ship, and space station that move when you walk by them. I’m glad they’re still there!

After we were done blasting off, we decided to head back across the park to Adventureland. It was about 5:15 by this point. I felt like we’d managed to get a lot accomplished considering we didn’t start our day until 11:00! On the way, we stopped to get our fourth FP+ for Space Mountain, again, and get our picture in front of the castle.

I hadn’t been on Jungle Cruise since I was little, and didn’t remember anything about it. I normally wouldn’t really care to ride it, but since it was closing the next day for refurbishment, I figured maybe we should get on it. The wait time was 50 minutes when we got to it though, so we decided to check out POTC since it had a 20 minute wait and see if the wait time had dropped at all after that. We picked out a couple hidden mickeys in POTC and in the gift shop afterwards, and headed back to Jungle Cruise. We were down to 40 minutes, and decided it was now or never. It was a long wait, longer than 40 minutes, but we enjoyed the corny jokes and the tour guide was really nice.

By the time we made it through both of those rides and out of Adventureland, it was now 7:15! We headed back to Tomorrowland for Buzz Lightyear. I don’t care what anyone says, we LOVE this ride! We found some hidden mickeys in the line, and then took hold of our blasters, where I was determined to beat Chris. Somehow, he got the best of me this time.

When we got out of Buzz, we hopped on Space Mountain with our FP. We had been directed towards the line on the left for our first ride, and were directed to the line on the right this time (omega, maybe? Can't remember which one is which). We determined the line on the right was the much faster coaster. We then decided we better head towards our very special dinner, but not before getting a picture in front of Prince Eric’s Castle!

I can’t tell you how excited I was to eat dinner at Be Our Guest. We had not booked our trip more than 6 months out, so I didn’t have the opportunity to book ADRs as soon as they opened up at 180 days. That means I managed to get all of mine through sheer luck, basically! The 8:10 time for dinner on that Sunday night was literally the only time ALL WEEK that I was able to get. We were thrilled to kick off our week with a new restaurant!

I’ve heard some complaints about the forced perspective of the Beast’s castle. I have to say, I thought it was brilliantly done. We loved it. When we posted a picture of it on Facebook, Chris’s brother texted us to ask if they’d opened a new castle there. We didn’t have to wait too long before being taken to our table. I hadn’t made any requests, but I was silently hoping that we would be seated in the ballroom... and we were!

It was so beautiful. I just loved looking around in there and seeing the snow out the back windows. I especially loved seeing the dessert trays wheeled past me... YUM. Soon our waitress came and I ordered some hot tea since I was actually a little chilly. I didn’t even think about it or make the connection until she put my pot of hot water down and told me I had my own little Mrs. Potts! I cracked up, we both thought it was hilarious.

We both ordered and had an amazing meal. We shared the charcuterie plate for the appetizer, which was AMAZING. I am a big fan of charcuterie, and may have had more than one charcuterie appetizer on our trip. I thought this one was the best of them though. I could have just ordered another one for my meal and been happy. Chris had the strip steak and I had the shrimp and scallops in the puff pastry. I’m not really a big fan of scallops, but these were cooked so perfectly that I found myself wishing there were more of them on my plate!

We also got our first sprinkling of pixie dust (ok, if you don’t count the amazing room!)- a free sample of The Grey Stuff! We thought it was excellent and tried to pinpoint the flavor. We thought perhaps it was just vanilla, but I was later told it was cookies and cream, which seems accurate thinking back on it. We of course still had our own desserts to order though, so we both went for the chocolate cupcakes. Evidence of the grey stuff is visible in the background.

I have to say, I truly thought this was a great meal. The food was delicious, our service was excellent, and the atmosphere was incredible. I have to ask though- the babies on the ceiling. Whose babies are these? They are clearly based on someone's children. Does anyone know the stories? Maybe imagineers' children? Let me know if you know! Anyways, we checked out the other two rooms briefly before we got our picture with the Beast.

It was now about 9:45 and just starting to rain. We hadn’t really planned on hanging around to watch Wishes, as we had plans for that on Wednesday night. We wanted to grab a pair of bride and groom ears before we left the park though, so we stopped into Fantasy Faire. The two CMs working there were so nice and asked us all about the wedding. We ended up getting our names embroidered on the back of the ears too, and it only took them about 10 minutes! We went outside to watch Wishes from behind the castle while we waited. It wasn’t the best view, but it was still magical nonetheless. That soundtrack just can’t be beat. Chris got some good pictures of the fireworks with our new camera while we stood there.

The rain was starting to pick back up though, so we went back in to grab our ears and then decided to go ahead and walk back towards the entrance to try to beat the crowd leaving. We basically booked it through the Emporium, so we didn’t check out any of the souvenirs. I knew we’d be back another night though, so I wasn’t worried.

At this point, we had been awake for over 18 hours and had been basically been running on the pure adrenaline of Disney excitement for a good chunk of that, considering we had only gotten married and dealt with the exhaustion of our wedding day the day before! We decided to get on the bus back to AKL. I can’t even remember the ride back there, and I know I crashed as soon as we got in the room. Tomorrow was another fun day!