Tuesday 9/2/2008 was an early EMH day at Epcot, opening at 8:00 a.m. After our disaster bus experience of Monday night, we were implementing our plan to drive in early and leave the car there until evening. We got to the Epcot lot about 7:40, and parked very close in (we’re
AAA members, so were able to use the diamond parking.) Our favorite scene at Epcot: SSE:
At rope-drop, DH was our "runner" to go ahead of me with our cards to get Soarin’ fastpasses. As always, castmembers paced the crowd to keep everyone going the right way, with no running but the faster walkers do get ahead, so DH was towards the front of the pack. By the time I got down the stairs in The Land building, he was just taking the second fastpass ticket from the machine. It was about 8:05, and the Soarin standby line said 10 minutes, so we pocketed our Fastpasses, and hopped in line...which actually wasn't a line, it was a walk. As in pretty much a walk-straight-through where it should have been a line. Then about a 5 minute wait in the last holding area, so really about 7 minutes from the time we walked into the stand-by line until we were being shown into our row of seats. Our Fastpasses were for 9:00 a.m., so after our 1st ride, we had some time until our next Soarin', so we went over to the Living With the Land ride. We like this ride...it's one of those comfortable, vaguely-interesting, somewhat entertaining attractions that are just nice, ya know. And "nice" rides are good sometimes, especially interspersed between crazy wild & crazy exhilarating rides. Pace your excitement, kind of. We had the boat all to ourselves…that has never, ever happened before!
By now, it was almost 9:00, so we went back to Soarin’ and used our Fastpasses. So we had done Soarin' twice in just less than an hour. Never thought we'd see the day we could say that. Then we got
another set of Fastpasses (can you tell we really, really, like Soarin’?
) The new FP return time was 10:15. The standby time said 30 minutes at this point, although I guess I'm not sure that was true...I've been in a 30 minute wait line there last May, and seems like that line extended at least half-way down that long ramp. The stand-by line we could see ended at the top of the ramp. Maybe it was 30 but I'd guess more like 20. Personally I wonder if they don't automatically adjust the time upwards when certain circumstances change...like at 9:00, the park opened to the public so automatically bump the wait time to account for the new crowd influx. Except, on 9/2, there was no large influx of people when the park "opened" at 9:00. There were dribbles of groups of people coming in.
But we didn't want to wait, anyway, since we'd already ridden twice & had another ride coming up. It was only about 9:15, though, so we crossed over to see what the line was like at TestTrack…and it was a walk-on at about 9:30 on an EMH morning...unbelievable! We walked straight through all the holding areas. The only thing that slowed us down was a family in front of us that apparently had never been there before, so they wanted to stop & look at all the car stuff all over. We managed to get past them eventually. Took about 6 minutes from when we walked in door until when we climbed into the car, and away we went. Lucky for us, our car "passed" the test
Love that ride, but it's kind of hokey, too, with the supposed "testing" it does. Fun, though, lots of fun...needless to say, I
like hokey, LOL. And a walk-on. No fastpass needed. Wow, so far, everything we’d heard about post-Labor Day crowds was working out!
After Test Track, we walked passed Mission:Space. Wait time posted was 10 minutes. We skipped it, though...it's not a fave and we'd just done it in May. The we wandered through the Innoventions buildings a bit. We just walked through, glancing at the displays…we’d skipped it entirely last May, so we were a little curious. Looks like it'd be really interesting if you have school aged kids, but we didn’t see a lot that caught our attention.
So, by now it was shortly after 10:00 a.m., and we were off to use our Soarin’ Fastpasses. Crazy fun! We rode the #1 headliner at Epcot 3 times in 2 hours 15 minutes (along with 2 other rides and a 10 minute walk-through attraction, too!) Last May, we didn’t manage to ride Soarin' more than once each day we went to Epcot…fastpasses were gone by 11 a.m., stand-by was at 60 minutes just 15 minutes after park opened, etc. When we rode at 10:15 a.m., the stand-by posted wait time was still just 30 minutes. That was 2.25 hours after EMH started, and 1.25 hours after the park opened to the public. We are so loving these small crowds...and this was an early EMH day at this park. In May, early EMH meant hit as many rides in that early hour, because you'd have a packed park 2 hours into the day...here you couldn't even tell it was an EMH day at all.
So, anyway, we decided 3 times on Soarin’ was probably enough for the morning (I can hardly believe I said that, LOL.) So we decided to head over to Ellen’s Energy Adventure. This is another hokey attraction, and I know it always scores really high on the list of “best places to take a nap break in the park” but we actually like it (my DD would undoubtedly point this out as a symptom of fogeyness. Oh well.) Was actually quite enjoyable to sit in a fairly comfortable seat in the air conditioning and be mildly entertained by the amusing Miss DeGeneres.
By now of course, it was well after 11:00, and the World showcase was open. It was about lunch time for us, since we'd been at the park since 8:00. We were following our quest to try the new and unusual (for us), so the plan was to eat at the Tangierine Café. We knew we wanted to leave Epcot via the bakery in Norway, so we decided to head over to Morocco via the scenic route through the side with Canada, UK, France,and so on.
As we walked, we were very puzzled about why the whole place seemed to look so radically different than we remembered…we knew they hadn’t refurbished and redone the World Showcase recently because we were just here in May. So why did it look so different? Then it hit us…because we could
actually see all the details on buildings, the shrubbery & gardens, etc.…we could also see vast quantities of bare pavement & lots of empty benches. Everywhere we looked.
Before, it had always been so full of people we’d missed seeing a lot of stuff. You know when it’s crowded, you spend a lot of time watching where you’re going, because if you don’t you’ll run into someone. So while you’re walking from place to place you don’t get to see much. Well, that Tuesday it was so empty, you could wander at a leisurely pace & gawk to your hearts content. Was amazing.
When we went through Gr. Britain, the Shakespeare-acting gang was putting on their little theatrical…there were about 3 people watching them. Three. There was actually room for at least 5 people on the bench right in front of the show. Every time we’ve seen the acting troupe, there’s always been a huge crowd. So we watched for a couple of minutes, but hunger was calling, so we continued on. (Actually felt bad for not staying, since by leaving, we reduced the audience by about 40%.) But it was time to forge on to Morocco and a fine lunch at Tangierine Café. (Dining review post #30.)
After lunch, we headed over to the American Adventure. We hadn’t done this our last two trips…both times we just missed getting there for show times, and had been on tighter schedules to get a lot done. It had been at least 10 years since we’d watched this, so had forgotten quite a bit of it. We arrived just in time for the last song by the Voices of Liberty singers - just in time to be seated for the show. We pretty much enjoyed watching the American Adventure, but don’t think it will go on my must-do-every-time list any time soon…a little bit of scrubbed-until-it-sparkles American history goes a long way, ya know. (although I wouldn’t mind hearing more of the singers on another trip.)
Well, by now it was around 1:30, and we’d been going since 7:00 A.M. And it was getting very hot, again. We’d been very lucky with the weather so far that week: there’d been times with a lot of ugly-looking clouds, a little wind now & then, and about 2 minutes of cloud-spit during lunch that same day. And it was hot. But other than that extremely minor precipitation so far there’d been no tropical storms, no hurricanes and virtually no rain since we arrived Sunday morning. We knew we’d be back at Epcot that evening (after having dinner at the Contemporary Resort) so we decided it was time for our daily park-break. We headed out of Epcot, leaving by way of the Kringla Bakery in Norway to obtain our next set of scrumptious baked goods. We took the bus back to Pop. For once there was virtually no wait for our bus, and only about 5 people to go, so thankfully we had seats. We left the car at Epcot so we’d have an easy exit later that night.
