Awesome place to see Wishes

[Klayfish]

Our first day of vacation was this past Friday. We started our trip in MK, as we always do...it's tradition. We accidentally stumbled on a great place to see Wishes, or maybe more accurately rediscovered it. We're not night owls by nature, but since I had to work until 4pm on Friday (with gratitude to my employer for letting me work remote), we had no choice but to do a night trip. In all of our past trips to WDW, we had NEVER done a MK park closing. We've always been the rope drop and done by 4pm crowd, or if we did an evening, it was from 3pm to fireworks and then bolt for the exit. On Friday, park closing was 11pm, so we decided to just do it. Watching Wishes wasn't in our specific plans. But we found ourselves with a few minutes to kill and we were right near 7DMT (our next FP+). We decided to walk to the carousel and hang out there while we ate ice cream. We wound up watching Wishes from right behind the stroller parking area near the carousel. Specifically, we were standing/sitting on the short wall about 25' behind the strollers...heading toward where Storytime is. While we couldn't see Celebrate, except for what wrapped around the side of the castle, the view of Wishes was spectacular. You need to have your head on a swivel as things happen all around you, but it was incredible. Yes, I would still say that in front of the castle is the best view, but if you don't want to deal with the crowd, this is the next best place. There was nearly no crowd there and you could stand, walk, turn around with ease. We hadn't seen fireworks from there since about 2008(?), when Dumbo was back there.

And park closing was fun, as that was a new experience for us. The last thing we got on was Small World. It was almost eerie to get on it with nobody else around. The boat in front of us was empty, the standby line was empty, our boat was only 1/2 full, nobody was in the restaurant with the windows facing the ride when it first launches (forget the name). It was very strange.