Just Slap a Band-Aid on it and Everything Will be Fine! 2025 Food and Wine Trip Report! (Updated 12/3 x2!!)

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I love when housekeeping does cute stuff in the room. That was one of the highlights of trips as a kid ... coming back to the room and seeing what they'd done with my stuffed animals (plural - I insisted on traveling with all of my favorites ). Love the La Cava cup. So funny on Guardians. There's a song I haven't gotten but I don't want to speak it into the Universe because I don't care for the song and don't want it!

Me too! I miss the towel animals they used to do. In 2013 I had my own room so throughout the trip housekeeping turned the bed I wasn't using into a jungle of towel animals (and a birthday cake), it was so cool!



I'm really hoping we finally get Disco this next trip on Guardians. I don't think it'll top September as my favorite song, but it's driving me nuts that after years of going we still haven't gotten it!

 

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Day 3, Part 5: Animal Kingdom!​

We last left off taking a break back at the hotel after a fun morning in Epcot.

Around 3:00 I called for a Minnie Van, and got one right away, and by 3:30 we were pulling into the Animal Kingdom!

Our first stop of the day was the store to pick up our AP magnets. This was super fast, and afterwards we browsed the store a bit, but didn’t find anything we wanted to pick up.

We then decided to stop by the photopass photographer right in front of the ToL. There was a pretty decent line, but since it shared two photographers it went fast. I liked this photographer since he also asked us to do individual shots. Most of our photopass pictures are of the two of us, but it's nice to get individual shots occasionally!







Next up we headed over to where the special AP pictures were supposed to be taken, but found that they already closed for the day. That’s unfortunate, I can see closing it down closer to closing time, but it was only like 3:45 at this point. Oh well!

As we were wandering off I saw the Halloween Pluto sipper I had wanted to get at one of the carts, so we stopped to pick one up.

It was just about time for our LL for Everest at this point so we made our way over there. On the way we stopped for a quick photopass picture!



We were a few minutes early, even for the 5 minute grace period, so we stopped to watch the ride for a bit before make our way over to the LL.

We scanned in and made our way through the queue, but were stopped at the LL/Standby merge point. There was a backup, so we were held there for a while. This wasn’t too bad though, we ended up chatting with the CM the entire time, and she was so nice and told us a lot about the operations behind EE. Love getting the insider info!

The line finally did start moving again so we made our way through and soon were on!



I really love this ride.

By the time we got off, we were into our return time for Dinosaur so started to make our way over there, but on the way saw that the Nemo show was about to start, and mom decided she’d rather see that instead of Dinosaur, so we changed plans on the fly and headed into the Nemo show!

We’ve never seen this before and it was really good!

Now, I will admit, I was very worried about the timing with this sudden change, but I didn’t want to say anything to my mom since she tends to worry a LOT, and I didn’t want to ruin the show for her. So throughout the show I kept checking my watch and calculating just what time we needed to be out of there in order to do our next plan and make our dinner reservation.

We went to the 4:30 show of Nemo, which was supposed to get out at 4:55. Now, we had a FoP LL from 4:30 to 5:30, but we also had dinner reservation at 5:50, and since the park closed at 6, I didn’t want to chance being too late for dinner.

Based on where we were sitting in the theater I thought it would take us at least 10 minutes to get out, but was surprised, and relieved, when the show ended and it turned out we were sitting directly next to a side exit! SCORE!

As we were exiting, I told my mom we had to move with a purpose, which unfortunately got her super stressed. Oops! I figured if we arrived at FoP by 5:10 we should be ok with making our dinner reservation.

We made great timing, and scanned in at FoP at 5:05! Thank goodness mom and I are fast walkers! The ride, per usual, was great!

Now, not to toot my own horn, but I called the timing of this PERFECTLY! I had predicted we needed to scan into FoP by 5:10 to make our dinner reservation at 5:50. We ended up scanning into the LL at 5:05 and made it to the door of Tiffins for dinner at 5:45. Man I’m good at timing estimates!

Oh, and leaving FoP we had a bit of a disaster, which led to the title of this trip report (more on that in a bit)! As we were walking down the stairs after the ride, my mom suddenly realized her purse strap had broken! It turns out there was a little pin that held the metal pieces together that had fallen out at some point.

My mom wanted to run back to the ride to search for the pin, but I told her the chances of finding this ½” long super thin pin was slim to none, and they weren’t going to stop FoP just for us to search for it.

She was not very happy about this, but I assured her we’d find a solution. I even offered to let her use my purse since I also had brought a loungefly backpack with me I could use instead, but all she wanted was to fix her purse.

Oh well, that was a later problem, we had dinner to get to!

Next up: Tiffins!​

 

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Day 3, Part 6: Tiffins!​

We arrived at Tiffins at 5:45, and were quickly seated in our favorite room.

Since they removed the octopus from the menu, it took us a bit longer than normal to figure out what to order this time around. We did mention to our waiter that we would love if the octopus would come back, and he said that a lot of people have said that, so hopefully they’ll bring it back eventually!

Anyways, to start we decided to get the dumpling to split.

I also ordered the red wine flight, and mom got a beer. At first she didn’t want to get anything, not to drink or eat, she was really really upset about her purse breaking. So upset she refused to talk about anything BUT her purse. I promised her that I would take a look at it when we got back to the hotel and I was sure I could figure out a temporary fix, I am an engineer afterall, troubleshooting problems is my bread and butter! So she finally relaxed about the purse, to the point we could make jokes about it! Phew!

The appetizer was brought out soon after along with our drinks.





The dumpling was ok, my mom wasn’t a huge fan, I liked it but I love dumplings. It was a bit of an odd combo with the seared tuna on top of it, but the individual flavors were good. We still think the octopus was a much better appetizer.

For entrees, my mom ordered the pork duo, and I got the short rib but subbed the beef tenderloin again.





The pork duo was phenomenal! I can’t believe this is the first time either of us ordered this.

The beef was good, but they reduced the portion size compared to when I had this in June. In June the potatoes had to be served on a side dish and was a much larger portion, but in September they put them in a much smaller dish, and the steak and sides was a smaller portion, it all fit on the same small plate. And the plate in September was smaller than the plate in June!

Anyways, we still enjoyed dinner, the flavors were great!

We did decide to get dessert as well, this time we split the crème brulee!



This was really good!

We wrapped up with dinner at 7:30, so 1.5 hours after the park closed. It was weird walking out and it still being light outside, but there being absolutely no one around! There were of course CMs and security standing along the exit path to make sure we exited, but it was very odd being so alone and still daylight!

We got to our bus stop just as a bus pulled up, yay! We did have to wait about 10 minutes, but finally the bus left, and once again we had the bus to ourselves!

Once home we swung by the front desk to see if they had any safety pins or anything we could use to fix my moms purse. She didn’t have a pin there, but offered to have a sewing kit sent up which had pins in it, so we gladly accepted. She also gave us a paper clip just in case. We then headed upstairs to grab our reusable mugs then back downstair to fill them up.

We got back to the room a few minutes later to find the sewing kit had already been delivered! Wow, that was fast!

The safety pins in the kit were too small for moms purse, so I ended up using the paper clip to secure moms purse, and even “sewed” a few threads through the hole to give it some extra strength. It wasn’t the prettiest solution, but it worked!

The only problem with it was the ends of the paperclip were poking my mom when she wore the purse, so she decided to slap a Band-Aid over the fix and it worked! And that is how the title of this trip report was born Throughout the rest of the trip anytime something not great happened we’d joke we just needed to slap a Band-Aid on it and everything would be fine!

We ended up resting a bit before heading out onto the balcony with some wine and chocolate to enjoy the fireworks again!
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https://flic.kr/p/2rJLTCG

What a perfect end to the evening!

Next up: A Morning of Rides!​