Heat, Humidity, and Our Favorite Disney Dog Was a Thug! LINK TO NEW PTR!!

[wiigirl]

Great update!

 

[RGirl]

Guess they found the Yeti that was roaming the park How exciting that you got to do EE twice!!!! Yay for Willow Faith is finally tall enough to ride EE, so needless to say she's one happy little girl. Unfortunately, those rides don't agree with me anymore. Not sure what's happened The older I get, the worse I feel when I get off one of those things Usually I'll ride something like that once then let hubby and son pick up my slack. And so not surprised about the rude people....broken down rides bring out the worst.

Oh no! I keep worrying about when I am going to start feeling like that. I love doing the "big" rides and haven't had problems yet. But I'm 44 now! I'm really surprised I can still do them without feeling sick or dizzy or anything. I'm glad you are at least able to ride once!

On a different note....how's y'alls weather? Crazy cold here for South Georgia. Of course "cold" is subjective depending on where you live My sister in CT said it was -12 yesterday and snow....just doesn't sound like much fun to me.

We had a really weird and abnormal cold spell about a month ago with temps below zero (which we normally do not see). It's been okay here since - actually, it's raining ice right at this moment - so nothing like the CRAZY weather most of the country is having. Yikes!!!

Great update!

Thanks!!!

 

[shan23877]

Not sure why I never comment on your TR??? 'Cause I'm terrible?

Yay for sticking it out until EE was up and running! Love the princess poses!

So glad you got to meet Russel and Dug together!

 

[chattadisser]

Willow's Yeti poses are too funny! I'm just hoping I can talk my two into riding it this weekend!

Christine

 

[BeckyEsq]

Still really enjoying your report!

 

[RGirl]

Not sure why I never comment on your TR??? 'Cause I'm terrible?

Yay for sticking it out until EE was up and running! Love the princess poses!

So glad you got to meet Russel and Dug together!

You ARE terrible!!!!

EE and Dug gave us a great start to the last day.

Willow's Yeti poses are too funny! I'm just hoping I can talk my two into riding it this weekend!

THIS weekend????? WOW! I hope you have (are having) a great trip! Can't wait to hear about it when you return.

Still really enjoying your report!

Hey there!!! It's great to "see" you again.

 

[RGirl]

Dinos, Yetis, and Ice Cream!​

By the time we exited the train after our second EE ride, the stand-by time was posted at 30 minutes, so we decided to do something else. Last time we were at WDW, Willow was tall enough to ride Dinosaur for the first time - it is the only ride that she has NOT liked. So she was bound and determined to give it another try this time. I have never liked this one either - too loud and jerky. But I was willing to give it another try too. So that’s where we headed next. (I think we were actually able to pick up another set of EE FPs before we headed out though.)

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There was only a 5-minute wait, so we quickly made our way through the queue.

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We actually both liked this ride a LOT more this time. We actually thought we would come back at some point today to ride again, but we never did get around to it.

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For some reason, Willow wanted to do Dino-Dumbo next, so we did.

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Willow stopped for a photo op.

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And then our first set of EE FPs was due, so we headed back!

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But, as you can see, the stand-by wait was only 15 minutes!

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So we decided to ride stand-by first! This was the only time that we encountered a truly in-your-face line-cutter. This woman with her son (probably tween age) started winding her way past families - we’re talking during the inside portion of the queue here - saying she needed past because her other son was up ahead. Several of us pointed out that we would be MORE than happy to let her son come back to join her. She wasn’t interested in that solution to her dilemma, however. It was funny - no biggy since the line was so short, but I can totally see how people get super-aggravated by this stuff. Anyway, we were having fun!

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This is one of the scariest things I have ever seen - I could seriously have nightmares about this thing.

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Yep - another great ride for these girls!

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Once we exited the train, we jumped in the FP line.

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This time we both got the memo to act scared.

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Our next set of FPs wouldn’t be due for a bit, so we decided to head back to one of our favorite places - Camp Minnie/Mickey - to see if we could meet up with Pocahontas since we had missed her the other day. On the way, we actually used a couple of snack credits! (Yeah - we had one more full day at WDW, and we still had 25 snack credits to use up. ) Willow got a Mickey bar, and I got a frozen lemonade slush thing. Both treats were tasty and nice and cold!

Up Next: A Few More Characters

 

[shan23877]

You ARE terrible!!!!

 

[shan23877]

I've never even mentioned Dinosaur to Maddie. She'd hate it.

Love your Dinosaur ride photo. Everyone in your car looks so bored besides the guy in back who thinks he's on a roller coaster and his wife who appears to have lost something.

Also, you look great in the photo

Awesome that you got so many rides on EE! (and more to come?) The scared pose is great.

I hope you found Pocahontas!

 

[nolacindy]

Animal Kingdom is growing on me, still not my favorite but I do love me some Yeti!

Oh the line cutters I can handle just about anything but this. Just this past weekend I confronted someone that blatantly opened the rope on Jungle Cruise and just got in line behind me. She swore she and her family were there the whole time. No!

One of these days someone is going to slap me for opening my big mouth! Oh and I made a child cry on Toy Story Mania because his mom was trying to cut line and I wouldn't let them get past to get to his dad. I'm okay if a child has to go get out of line to potty and then come back but when she said my husband went ahead and got in line while they went to a character meet and great..... not going to happen. Either everyone gets in line at one time or the party ahead can wait for the others!

Off my little soap box.

 

[DisneyJo]

How great you got to ride EE so many times and I love all your poses

Queue jumpers annoy me so much too, if it's just one person fair enough but when you get a whole group trying to get through that's not on, the people ahead should step aside and just wait gggrrrrr

 

[RGirl]

I've never even mentioned Dinosaur to Maddie. She'd hate it.

That's hilarious! Willow truly hated it last time. I was shocked she wanted to try it again.

Love your Dinosaur ride photo. Everyone in your car looks so bored besides the guy in back who thinks he's on a roller coaster and his wife who appears to have lost something.

I know!!! That must have been the least scared Dinosaur vehicle of all time!

Also, you look great in the photo

Thank you.

Awesome that you got so many rides on EE! (and more to come?) The scared pose is great.

We really fell in love with that ride!

I hope you found Pocahontas!

Me too!

Animal Kingdom is growing on me, still not my favorite but I do love me some Yeti!

Yeah, if it weren't for EE, AK probably would not have catapulted as far up in our list as it did.

Oh the line cutters I can handle just about anything but this. Just this past weekend I confronted someone that blatantly opened the rope on Jungle Cruise and just got in line behind me. She swore she and her family were there the whole time. No!

Wow!!! That is just astounding - who DOES that??

One of these days someone is going to slap me for opening my big mouth! Oh and I made a child cry on Toy Story Mania because his mom was trying to cut line and I wouldn't let them get past to get to his dad. I'm okay if a child has to go get out of line to potty and then come back but when she said my husband went ahead and got in line while they went to a character meet and great..... not going to happen. Either everyone gets in line at one time or the party ahead can wait for the others!

Off my little soap box.

It really is mind-boggling. I think a lot of the people who do it really believe it is perfectly okay.

 

[RGirl]

How great you got to ride EE so many times and I love all your poses

Queue jumpers annoy me so much too, if it's just one person fair enough but when you get a whole group trying to get through that's not on, the people ahead should step aside and just wait gggrrrrr

We sure did become big EE fans this trip.

Yeah - I don't get the line-jumping thing. They really seem to think what they are doing is perfectly okay - never mind all these people who have been standing in line for however long. So odd to me!

 

[Tiggerrn2]

Wow!! Quite an EE filled morning! All of your photopass pix turned out great. In some of ours, we were cut off and they just got our legs. Of course, since I didn't look at them until we got home, I didn't notice this problem in time to fix it.

All caught up again.

I notice you leave soon for CA! Are you staying at the DL Hotel? We stayed there the summer of 2011. They were redoing the Peter Pan pool at that time so it was sort of anticlimactic. Everything was such a mess. But we sure did enjoy the on-site guest perks that summer. We each received 2 FPs for any ride of our choice each day of our stay plus early entry each day. We entered through the Grand Californian early for our CA day (after we'd done some DL time before it to hit the good rides and collect some FPs for later) and rode the Little Mermaid (it was brand new that summer-so glad I didn't need to wait in a line for it because I really would have been sad and disappointed), Soarin and then headed straight to the rope for the dash to Toy Story. We were also able to secure our FPs for World of Color before everyone else entered the park. That really made our on-site stay worth the money!!

Can't wait to read what you have to say all about it when you come back.

 

[dizneeat]

Yeah! I am all caught up again!

Miss Willow Pocahontas is just too cute. I love that outfit.

Great morning - having breakfast with Minnie and then a fun time at AK. Great that you got to ride EE so often.

 

[RGirl]

Wow!! Quite an EE filled morning! All of your photopass pix turned out great. In some of ours, we were cut off and they just got our legs. Of course, since I didn't look at them until we got home, I didn't notice this problem in time to fix it.

All caught up again.

Oh, that's awful about your PP pics!!! I guess we were pretty lucky!

I notice you leave soon for CA! Are you staying at the DL Hotel? We stayed there the summer of 2011. They were redoing the Peter Pan pool at that time so it was sort of anticlimactic. Everything was such a mess. But we sure did enjoy the on-site guest perks that summer. We each received 2 FPs for any ride of our choice each day of our stay plus early entry each day. We entered through the Grand Californian early for our CA day (after we'd done some DL time before it to hit the good rides and collect some FPs for later) and rode the Little Mermaid (it was brand new that summer-so glad I didn't need to wait in a line for it because I really would have been sad and disappointed), Soarin and then headed straight to the rope for the dash to Toy Story. We were also able to secure our FPs for World of Color before everyone else entered the park. That really made our on-site stay worth the money!!

Yes! We are leaving SO SOON!

We are staying at the DLH - same as our last trip there. We really enjoyed our stay there as well. I am a little curious to see how the need to meet the Frozen sisters and get to CarsLand before RSR is too backed up will affect how we do things. Mostly, I think we're just going to take it easy and have fun! I may do a little pre-trip update here in a moment.

Can't wait to read what you have to say all about it when you come back.

Thanks! Still not sure what I will do. I'm leaning towards just tacking it onto this TR if there is enough interest.

Yeah! I am all caught up again!

Karin! You're back! Oh, I hope you had a great trip. I will head over to the cruise board to check out your TR tonight.

Miss Willow Pocahontas is just too cute. I love that outfit.

Thanks! I loved that costume when I got it for her - I was so glad she wore it!

Great morning - having breakfast with Minnie and then a fun time at AK. Great that you got to ride EE so often.

It really was a great way to spend our last WDW day.

 

[RGirl]

So I thought I would take a minute before I get the next update posted to say ONE WEEK AND 4 DAYS until our birthday trip to Disneyland!!!!!

Time has gone way too fast! Willow does not know that we are going for her birthday yet, although I think she suspects something. My plan is to throw her off the trail with other things. Her birthday is next Sunday, and she knows that we are going out to dinner with her grandparents as we always do. But I am trying to arrange with my friend (who happens to be her BFF's mom) for Willow's BFF and mom to come over here for a movie night, pizza, and birthday cake on Saturday - without telling Willow until they show up. She LOVES having her BFF over, and the two of them are insane for Girls Night with me and BFF's mom. So I think she may just think that that IS her big birthday surprise.

Then, on Sunday, when we are out to dinner, I will give her a present, which will be two new autograph books and a note that says, "Pack your bags - we're going to Disneyland on Wednesday!" Monday is a holiday; she's super-excited about Tuesday because she gets to take birthday cupcakes to her class, and then Wednesday we'll head out. So it will be a week-long birthday extravaganza of sorts.

On the Disneyland front, I noticed that the 25%-off resort rates had come out for winter. So I called to see if that rate would save me any money over the AP rate I had booked. I had tried to do the math myself , and it really didn't look like it would save much, but I figured it was worth calling. Well, it was totally worth calling! The nice CM said, "Sure I can look into that, but first let me check to see if there are any new AP discounts." Turns out there was a new AP discount!

So I am now paying less than I was, and we have been upgraded to a pool-view room and will be given two anytime FPs. Pretty cool! I'm glad I called.

 

[RGirl]

A Few More Characters​

After our Everest Extravaganza, we were headed to Camp Minnie/Mickey again to track down Pocahontas - one of the three characters we had missed out of all the characters at AK on our first visit to the park this trip. And we were in luck - Pocahontas was about to come out when we got there, so we got right in line. Today Pocahontas was very beautiful, but she was the most out-of-character character we have ever met - she kept talking to the PP photographer about her concerns that she was getting ant bites and such - and not like she was Pocahontas worrying about ant bites (which is kind of hard to imagine) but like she was a young woman from the city worried about ant bites . Willow didn’t notice though, so it was all good.

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After her meeting with Pocahontas, Willow really wanted to go pay her old friends Chip ‘n’ Dale another visit. So what the heck? We did, of course! In fact, Willow even wanted them to sign yet another autograph page. Of course, they were super-excited to see Willow again!

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There was no stopping these three with the poses!

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And the goofing around.

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I do not know WHAT was going on here!

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Willow had wanted to see Donald again as well, but when we finally finished up with Chip ‘n’ Dale, his line had gotten really long, and our EE FP window was open. So we skipped out on Donald and headed back to EE.

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Up Next: A Few More Characters Cont.

 

[RGirl]

A Few More Characters Cont.​

Willow was still pretty excited about this ride.

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This would be our last ride of the trip, and we had a great time! Plus, we actually managed to coordinate our “scared” look for our picture.

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After our last EE ride, we were actually a little bit hungry, so we stopped at the Y&Y CS spot and got some super-tasty fries to share. We thought we would enjoy these and then head out to Planet Watch for the first time ever and meet Rafiki so that we could say we had met every character in AK! It took us a long time to find an empty table, but we finally did. And we really enjoyed this treat.

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This was a neat area we had never seen before.

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This guy kind of freaked me out though. (I’m really not a bird person. )

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Once we were done with our fries, though, we were done. Neither one of us really had the energy to head out to Planet Watch. We were beat. We knew we had to pack as we would be checking out of the BW the next day, Willow could use a rest, and we had an early dinner ADR. I let Willow decide because I would totally have sucked it up if she was going to be upset not to meet the final AK character. But she was pretty done too - she just wanted to go back to the resort. So we headed out of the park a little before 1:00.

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Our great bus luck continued on our last day, and we were on a bus within minutes of leaving the park.

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We were back at the BWI at 1:28.

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Our Mousekeeper had once again arranged all the stuffies and blankies in such cute ways.

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Willow watched Stacey AGAIN and then fell asleep. I packed.

Up Next: A Final Royal Dining Experience

 

[dizneeat]

How funny that Pocahontas was scared of ant bites.

But the two Pocahontas girls look super cute together. And Chip and Dale are hilarious.
To be honest I do not blame you one bit that you left AK. It is so hot there in the summer you are brave to stay as long as you did.
And packing is never fun, not even if your next stop is the Disney Fantasy.