We were at EMM yesterday morning too, and we had a better experience than several folks, although I did feel like it was oversold. It sounds like we got lucky with our ride timing and missed most of the waits others hit, which were definitely unfortunate. We had done the old format last February and this was noticeably busier, for sure.
We drove to the TTC and they were running the resort monorail. We parked about 7:00 and we’re through bag check around 7:25 I think. A small delay at checkin, one CM’s iPad scanner didn’t seem to be working right. It was busy enough that they used both entrance gates instead of just the left, and we were fortunate to be in the first group told that, so we shifted over and were at the very front on the right. We were going to do a PhotoPass picture but it was so crowded by the time we got to a photographer we decided it wasn’t a great choice.
My youngest had been begging for the carousel all week (but none of us wanted to wait 30-40 minutes for it), and he’d been dragged around on other people’s schedules, so we promised him carousel and we did that and Pooh all together, both were walk ons. Little guy loved SDMT a few days ago but when we tried to do it all together he said “no rollercoasters, no!!”, so after that we split up.
We had expected SDMT to be close to walk on after we’d done all that but it was posted at 20—I suspect we hit the back end of the break down delay mentioned above, we waited about 10, going through standby which we’d never done before. Met back up at the carousel, where little had gotten 3 more rides, waited for them, then did Pan...walk on, but through standby. I was happy to go that way, I can’t recall ever doing standby before and I always hear about how great the queue is, so it was fun to see while speedwalking!
Big kid and I did SDMT 3 more times starting at 8:40, first was about 7 minutes, then a walk on, then about 5 minutes right ahead of rope drop. Little did tea cups and under the sea during that time.
Our plan was to RD Dumbo of all things, because we FP’d it earlier this week and the kids missed the play area. But they don’t open the play area until 10, so that was super quick. We did Barnstormer too while there, then went to breakfast.
Breakfast was busy but we had no problem finding a table and only waited a minute or two for our food—drinks took longer. We thought everything but the eggs was pretty tasty (I had to laugh at the poor CM carrying around dishes of just eggs right after 10, trying to give them away. No one wants the cold powdered eggs, folks!). We went back for seconds and requested just pancakes, bacon, and sausage, and they were happy to do that, just took an extra minute—saw lots of folks customizing like that. Fruit was running out but right around 10 they did bring out one last tray, which went fast. Plenty of pastries—the ones with chocolate (like the Cheshire Cat tails, without the pink and purple icing), were delicious. Coffee was drinkable but not great. I did prefer the old breakfast, but this wasn’t as bad as I had feared it would be.
We then moved on to our FPs, which I could have planned better—it was an insanely busy day and refresh wasn’t working as well as I had been counting on. But we enjoyed the event!
