Trip 1 - Day 1
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Agenda for the day:
- Flight in
- Check in to Beach Club Villas
- Head to EPCOT to check out Flower & Garden Festival
- Hop over to Animal Kingdom for dinner at Tiffins and to see Rivers of Light
Fastpasses Used:
- Soarin
- Spaceship Earth
- Living with the Land
- Expedition Everest
- It's Tough to be a Bug
- Kilimanjaro Safari
On arrival day, I could barely sleep the night before. I was so excited to be back at Disney, our favorite place on Earth, and I was terrified that if I overslept we would miss our flight. So around 2AM - we left our home in Central PA and headed towards BWI Airport in Baltimore. Before I knew it, we were on our flight.
...and just a couple hours later - we landed in Disney around 8:10am and made our way to the Magical Express. DME was fast and efficient at getting us to Beach Club. When we checked in to Beach Club, our rooms weren't ready yet so we dropped our luggage with Bell Services and made our way to International Gateway. We activated our Annual Passes and we were inside EPCOT around 10:15am.
Our first fastpass was scheduled for Soarin' 10:25am, so we made our way there. Upon entering The Land pavilion, I was a little nervous about the crowds. The place was packed! However, we scanned our magicbands and didn't need to wait very long before we took a quick trip around the world. We got sent to Concourse C and we were seated on the far right. While the ride is always fantastic, I never quite realized how distorted some of the images can get when you are on the end of the row.
After Soarin' we started to get hungry and made our way to some of the Flower & Garden booths we passed by on our way in. We visited Northern Bloom and tried the Beef Tenderloin Tips and the Seared Scallops - two dishes that caught our eyes when we were looking at the F&G menus and planning our trip. The seared scallops tasted fine and were good value for the price, but not as good as some of our favorite seafood places back home. The beef tips had a mushroom sauce that tasted amazing but the beef was slightly tough and overcooked. We also enjoyed a beer flight at Northern Bloom. None of the beers stood out, but we found that the flight did have a great variety of heavy/light beer and hoppy/non-hoppy beers. Because my wife and I don't like the same type of beer, we were able to each find something we liked on the flight and it is always fun to try something new. While making our way back to Future World for our next fastpass, we stopped at the Urban Eats booth and I ordered the pork tenderloins. The cashier told me that the pork was his favorite dish at the festival and he was right! The veggies, the sauce, and the pork itself were all fantastic and provided exactly what I was hoping for when I ordered the dishes at Northern Bloom. We would be back multiple times to Urban Eats over the course of our visit because we liked the dish that much!
Our next FP was for Spaceship Earth. At first, the FP line looked pretty long, but after a short wait, we were on the ride. My wife is a history teacher this ride is one of her favorites. SSE is definitely a Disney classic, for us. While we were waiting to board our ride vehicle, I checked the
MDE app and was able to move my Living with the Land fastpass up to an earlier time. So after SSE, we started to make our way back to The Land pavilion. On the way, we stopped to visit a friend from San Fransokyo...
Baymax had a short wait so we decided to stop by and give him a fist bump before heading over to Living with the Land.
After Living with the Land, we visited some friends over at the Disney Chase Visa Meet & Greet. We loved the interactions we had last year so it was so much fun to do this again. I liked the new space over by the Imagination Pavilion, but it was a bit hard to find.
We had two dogs at home that we were missing very much during this trip so it was nice to relieve our separation anxiety with some nose scratches with Pluto.
After meeting Minnie and Pluto we headed over to the Gran Fiesta Tour with the Three Caballeros, another one of our favorite rides. These smaller rides usually have a pretty short wait and give us a nice break from the hustle and bustle of the park. After riding the boat ride in Mexico, we grabbed some margaritas from the Mexico pavilion and enjoyed a leisurely walk around the rest of World Showcase.
We stopped and made reservations for the Twinnings Tea Tour on the way into Epcot, thanks to a tip from DisUnplugged, but we had some time to kill so we just enjoyed looking at the topiaries and checking out the F&G booths while we were waiting for our tour at 3:30.
As we reached International Gateway, I received a text telling me that my room at Beach Club was ready. Since we still had about 30-40 minutes before the Tea Tour, we stopped at Bell Services, collected our bags and made our way to the room. When we got there, none of our magic bands would open the door, so I called Disney support through the MDE while my wife made her way down to the Front Desk. When she got there, she found out that their was a problem with our magicbands and they needed to be manually reset by the front desk to open the room doors. She got hers reset and they gave us 3 extra fastpasses because of the inconvenience while I was still on hold when she got back. So we dropped our bags in the room and raced back to the UK pavilion for our Tea Tour.
We got to the tour just in time. I probably shouldn't have cut it so close, but it was so convenient to be able to pop in and out of Epcot through the international gateway. Our tour was educational and interesting. I'm not a tea drinker by my wife is - and even though the tour was free, we got a variety of tea samples at the end and I still had a good time.
By the end of the tour, it was around 3:50 and we had reservations at Tiffins over at Animal Kingdom at 5:10. We raced to the front of EPCOT and bought Express Transportation, since we were cutting it so close and I wanted to try it out anyway and we were almost immediately placed on a bus to Animal Kingdom. We had the bus completely to ourselves.
On the way to Animal Kingdom, I checked MDE and saw that there was a Fastpass available for Expedition Everest immediately. I grabbed it, hoping that we would have time to ride before our dinner reservations. Because the busses drop you off at the back of the park, near the safari, we raced over to ride Everest and got off around 4:58 (according to the photos in MDE).
We raced over to Tiffins and got there just in time. The host stand in told us that our table wasn't quite ready so I asked if we could grab drinks at Nomad Lounge. She told us that wouldn't be a problem and we would receive a text when our table was ready. We headed back to the lounge and it was very neat. We each grabbed drinks and spent a few minutes looking around before we got the text that our table was ready. Once we were seated, we were given menus and told about the options available since we ordered the Rivers of Light dining package. We didn't take pictures of the food but my wife got the Lobster-Popcorn Thai Curry Soup and I got the Apple Walnut Salad. We each got the Wagyu Strip Loin and Braised Short Rib entree. For dessert, we chose the chocolate ganache and the sorbet tasting. Everything about the meal was fantastic. We both enjoyed the flavors in our appetizers, entrees and desserts and we left feeling very full. I'm not sure if they do this all the time but we were also given a lotus flower popcorn bucket at the end of our meal so we could get 99 cent refills for the rest of our trip. The lotus flower also glowed in coordination with the show. I just need to reiterate - this was a great first dinner to start the trip.
After dinner, I got a 5th Fastpass on MDE for It's Tough To Be A Bug. We had never done this ride/attraction before so we wanted to make sure we experienced it. It was pretty similar to Mickey's Philharmagic and Muppetvision 3D but it was cute and a fun way to relax after dinner. After the show, I grabbed a 6th FP for the Safari and we had just enough time to ride before we needed to get to Rivers of Light. The animals were VERY active so we were very happy with our decision to fit this in. After we were done racing around the park for all of these experiences, we made our way over to the Dinoland section of Rivers of Light.
I initially had high expectations for this show. We saw Jungle Book: Alive with Magic when we visited last June. The theatre at Animal Kingdom is really neat and I was excited to see Disney go all out with their latest technology. My wife absolutely loved the show - which is interesting because she isn't a huge fan of Illuminations or the other nighttime spectaculars. I was impressed by the tech, but think that the story was very abstract and could use some work.
After Rivers of Light, we decided to try to use Express Transportation to save us some time and get back to Beach Club. When we arrived at the kiosk, we said we would go to either Hollywood Studios or Epcot, whichever bus would be there sooner. They recommended we take the Hollywood Studios bus. When we got on the bus, we were the only passengers and we told the driver we were using the bus to try to beat some of the lines and get back to Beach Club faster. He told us that he checked to see if he could just take us directly to Beach Club, and he would just drop us off there since that bus was the last express bus of the night.
So we had a very busy day with a lot of running around, but we had a fantastic time on the first day of our trip.
