Day 3
Okay, hopefully this day wont be quite as long as the last one! After our exhausting and very hot experience yesterday, we decided that today either wed take an afternoon break right after lunch, or leave immediately after dinner. Ah, the best laid plans!
I will say that Epcot is much less exhausting than MK is, at least in times of heat. Now we definitely walked more on this day we did two complete loops of World Showcase, in addition to criss-crossing Future World a couple times, and of course its a larger park. But we spent so much time indoors that it didnt seem nearly as bad. And once again we were at the park turnstiles before 8am, having eating our hearty breakfast of a granola bar yet again.
However, this time around 8:30, a couple of the CMs came over to us and asked us if we wanted to be the Family of the Day! Well, of course we did! Not sure exactly what it entailed, but it had to be more fun than sitting at the turnstile! So they brought us into the park. Asked us if we wanted a picture in front of the ball without anyone in it:
Then we basically just chatted with the CMs for the next few minutes all of whom were new to their jobs as part of the college program. One went to college just a few miles from our old house in Michigan so we discussed that. They then gave us a fast pass good at any one attraction in the park, and a "Family Reunion" pin - (not sure why on that one!). Meanwhile, the park is getting ready to open. So they introduced our family and had us do the countdown (5,4,3,2,1!) and then we were on our way. Not as exciting as some of the other opening ceremonies/Families of the Day Ive read about here on the boards, but still made us feel special.
We had been planning on both heading to and riding and FPing Soarin, but we figured since we had an extra FP now, that he could go ride Test Track and Id just get Soain FPs and meet him over there and we could get on to Mission Space faster. I join the Soain Stampede along with another dad who is arguing with the CM about why he cant run, other parks allow people to run, Disney is stupid this way, etc. Okay, whatever! I have no trouble keeping up with the CM, and getting the FPs quickly, but a much more challenging time fighting my way up the escalator and out of the masses of people still entering the building! I zip over to Test Track, where Stephen comes off just a few minutes later. We decide to head right to Mission Space and although we get there with NO line, end up waiting quite awhile for enough people to come to fill an entire cycle of simulators (Im thinking 32 people, but people were straggling in a couple at a time so it took awhile). We ride, and run back over to Test Track to do single rider.
Oops want to grab another FP first. Put the tickets in and were too early! Check the clock and we have a minute to wait. I cant tell you how many times we did this during the week my watch is fast and Disneys is slow and I kept forgetting to account for this. So unlike the idiots you always read about blocking the FP entrance while they wait for their FP time, we were the idiots standing between the FP machines and the FP entrance where we could see the clock and waiting for it to change so we could get more FPs!
Anyway, we got in the single rider line (no wait at all) and zipped through without having to even watch the preshow briefing. We end up in different cars (never once did we end up together all the times we rode single rider), and I end up with a mom and son (who is probably ¼ inch over the 40 inch height restriction). The car pulls up, mom climbs in, son climbs in, I climb in, and we all buckle up, at which point the mom realizes her son doesnt have a shoulder belt, like she and I do. She gets very, very upset about this, and even tried unbuckling her and her sons belts. Meanwhile the car has started moving forward. I quickly try to tell her this is far worse than not having the shoulder belt, its not a bad ride, the shoulder belts are probably only there to keep people from leaning out of the cars, etc. But she was very upset the whole ride.
I tried to calm both of them down by telling them what would be happening next (especially the sudden stops!) and assuring her that the final lap was only one lap and wasnt much different than being in your car on the freeway. They both did fine on the ride, and when she got off, she commented on my DIS shirt, pointing out how much shed learned from the DIS, but that NO ONE HAD EVER TOLD HER NOT TO PUT HER SON IN THE MIDDLE ON TEST TRACK! Okay, she was still not happy about that one!
One more Test Track story I want to share here since it really, really annoyed me. It wasnt on this time through, but later in the day (dont remember exactly which of the many times we rode!). The regular line those times (this happened twice while we were there) was probably 60 minutes. But I was SO frustrated by families with young kids who (cut the line) went in the single rider line. Then when they got to the front threw a complete hissy fit when the CM tried to split them up from their precious angels who couldn't possibly ride without mom and dad. BOTH times this happened, the CM just gave in and let the family ride together. Probably wouldn't have left such a bad taste in my mouth if one of the time I hadn't seen the mom give a smirk and thumbs up to dad as soon as the CM let them through. What's the point of the 17 "your party will be split up" signs if they don't bother to do that?
All right, enough venting! From here we went over to Nemo I guess thinking there might still be lines for it like we saw in 2007.
No line, and quick ride later, we were in the aquarium. Looked briefly, and then entered the waiting area for Crush. This is a cute show, but was much more fun back in the small venue they used to have it in during 2005. This time it just seemed like a madhouse, with kids scrambling everywhere, and the CM quite rudely telling them to stay off the green, parents keep back, not in the front, clear the aisles. The first time we saw this it was more of a casual conversation between the kids and Crush. Now it just seemed canned and rushed. Okay if you hadnt seen it before, or had kids who were Crush fans, but I wouldnt go back again. We headed out of the Seas:
And back in to use our Soarin FPs Id gotten at ropedrop. But of course its time to get another set first. Well, actually, not, we have to wait that minute or two first! We ride, and check in at the tour desk to confirm our Behind the Seeds tour on Saturday (just making sure it would still go with the boat ride closed!).
Well, of course at this point, Stephen is starving. And were right by Sunshine Seasons. And they have all these delicious looking pastries! Yes, we realize its just an hour until our lunch ADR, but we have to get something! So we grab a blondie, which Stephen hasnt tried before (I think its kind of a peanut butter brownie). Head from here over to the Imagination ride, which surprisingly has about a 5-10 minute wait. We decide we arent in a rush, and wait a bit and ride. Again determine this is a fairly corny ride, that was much better a decade or so ago, but at least its cool, and they still have the good song!
On that note, a separate quest we were on at this point was to find the CDs that had the soundtrack from Soarin on them. While we were waiting at the turnstiles, he was listening to that track over and over in the background and each time telling me as the music changed, what the scene would be during the movie at that time. He really, really wanted to get it. We asked at the ride/gift kiosk outside of Soarin and they told us we were looking for a red CD case, that would have 2 CDs in it, with music from all the parks/attractions. We stopped in Mouse Gears (on their recommendation) quickly and confirmed that they did not in fact have it, had never heard of it, and told us to try Downtown Disney.
Next we headed over to Club Cool to get a bunch of the sample drinks! I remembered Id really liked the one from Mexico the last time, and still did. I think that one was either watermelon or strawberry I know there were two I liked. Stephen liked one (dont remember from where) that he insisted tasted like Mountain Dew. Since I dont like Dew, I found it fairly disgusting, but he was happy drinking it. We grabbed a (tiny) glass to go, and headed back over to Test Track for a quick single rider ride. Just a FYI, we almost always found the single rider line to be shorter than the FP line, so if youre willing to ride alone, this is definitely the way to get extra rides in. In the future, Id do FP once a day for this (to get the ride photo scanned on my photopass account) and just stick with the single rider. Im guessing this is when we encountered the lines dont apply to me people!
Well, by now it was getting close to the ADR time, so we started to work our way to World Showcase. Oh, first we passed the Kim Possible kiosk, so we had to grab our FP for that for later in the day. Stopped briefly in the UK to get a picture of Stephen:
We get to France about 11:50, and go inside to check in for the ADR. They look at us strangely and tell us to wait outside and someone will be out there shortly. We wait there with another family for a few minutes:
Finally, the hostess comes out with a list on a clipboard and mans the little stand outside. We allow the family who was waiting to check in, and the CM has no record of their ADR. Finally writes their name in, along with their (theoretical) ADR time, and number of people. We check in, and the same thing happens. More people are waiting by this point, and I hear the next few also told they dont have their ADRs either. Hm...I think somethings wrong here. This was the only place we werent checked in on a computer of all our ADRs and it didnt seem to work. Meanwhile, the waiters near the door are starting to call people in (all of us even without ADRs) and I see someone rush out to hand the hostess a new sheet of paper! Think someone got the wrong list!
However, were seated quickly, and have a beautiful window seat, with a great view!
Stephen checks out the menu and were happy to find out from our server that the Chefs menu is included at lunch time. Id read some conflicting reports on that on the DIS, so I wasnt sure. We were really excited because the choices we wanted were on that list anyways, and now we could get the yummy French Onion soup (that we both like) too!
I did a good job taking pictures here (this is about the last time!):
Stephen orders the ham and cheese sandwich (okay, Im not even going to try for the French translations) and I order the quiche, both of which come with a salad (so we get soup, salad, entrée AND dessert...which turns out to be about 2 too many courses for me!). Well, the soup was delicious. And they brought bread as well, and pretty much by the time Id polished off both of those, I was done.
And then our main courses came:
Okay, I managed to eat maybe half of the inside of my quiche. Stephen ate half of his sandwich, and both of our salads ( I took a bite just to try it). This was kind of disappointing after months of drooling over this menu being just way too stuffed to even eat all of it, let alone enjoy it!
Next we each tried one of the desserts that came with the Chefs meal the Crème Brulee and the Profitolores (sp?):
Neither of these were exactly what we were expecting, although we may have been just too full to enjoy them. Ive never had Crème Brulee before, and it pretty much tasted to me like the burned outer shell of a marshmallow toasted over a campfire, with a bland pudding inside. Similarly, the other dessert, which looked like a hot fudge creampuff, was also fairly bland. I ate the big blackberry (best part!) and Stephen picked at a bit of the rest of it but wed just had too much already!
Oh, one more tip Id read on the boards before I went and turned out to be a lifesaver (and the best 25 cents I spent for the trip) was to bring the pink sweeteners (Sweet and Lo I think?!) which are the only kind I like in iced tea. I thought the iced tea at all of the table service restaurants was really, really good, and usually went through about 3 glasses each meal. But they only had the yellow and blue sweeteners which I think totally change the flavor of the tea. I bought a Ziploc baggie full of them at a garage sale before we left and it was a great investment for me for the trip! You could of course stock up at a local restaurant easily too! Incidentally, I tried the tea at a CS restaurant once and ended up spitting it back into my cup, rinsing the cup out (luckily we were at AK without lids) and getting Sprite instead since it was that bad! I never found Caffeine Free Diet Coke anywhere, but did find Sprite Zero most places which works for me in a pinch!
Finally Remy came by. This isnt a big deal, but was really cute. The Server bringing him around wasnt as stuffy as Id read some of them were, so it was more just a cute interaction. I wouldnt go just for this, but I would definitely go back again for the food and the service. And next time we wouldnt get a blondie an hour beforehand. And I wouldnt eat all the soup to save room for the rest! If we were paying a la carte the soup would have been easily enough to share.
So now we needed to do some walking to digest all of that food, right? We decided to head over to Italy (our Kim Possible kiosk check in location) while waiting for the next show by Miyuki, the candy lady. Well, Stephen checks in and the college aged CM there and he have about a 10 minute conversation about iphones (evidently he either saw Stephens or vice versa). Finally as people are getting backed up waiting for their Kimmunicators, I kind of step in and we choose Japan for our first location and were on our way.
Okay, the Kim Possible missions were a lot neater than I thought they would be. Of course it was too hot to really enjoy them, but in the cooler months, theyd be awesome! I thought youd mostly just find things and enter them in as you walked around the pavilion, but the first clue led us to a special location and something appeared inside and smoke filled it an all (dont want to give too much away):
Next we went to another location that had a boring looking rock, but when we used our Kimmunicator:
It just all seemed to be things like this something actually happened and it was a lot of fun. Well, of course we eventually saved Japan, just in time for the Candy Lady! Wed read about this during the past many years, and she was on vacation during our last trip, so we were determined to see it this time. We got there a bit early, but off to the side. It really is a lot of fun and simply fascinating to watch. Again though it would have been much more fun if it were 20 degrees cooler! But its amazing how quickly she can turn a lump of white blobby stuff into a complete animal. Literally within the first step or two you can already see it. She made about 5 different animals for the kids waiting:
Then on the last one, asked Stephen what he wanted! He was so surprised (didnt think he really had any chance of being picked with masses of young kids around) that he just said a porcupine! She made his, which I videotaped all of really neat! Since the show was over then, his didnt as much of a chance to dry (she was using several fans) and she told him to keep it in the bag upside down. But you know how kids are he wanted to look at it and take it out, and the next thing we knew, it was all droopy:
Stephen compromised by then EATING (gasp!) Porkie! Since I could tell he wasnt going to make it through the rest of the day, I gave up on my thoughts of bringing it home. Stephen said it was really good, which surprised me since I had read the opposite on the boards!
Anyways, at this point we were heading over to our next Kim Possible mission back in France. This one seemed quite a bit longer, and it was starting to rain fairly steadily at this point, so it wasnt quite as much fun. I still was amazed by many of the effects though. When we were done here, we decided that was enough missions and followed the instructions to the secret turn in location (even that was cool!).
We decided to head over to the American Adventure and hope to catch the show at 3:30 (it was around 3:15 now). But when we got there, we found it was actually at 3:45. I never found out where you were supposed to find the timing for this show it wasnt on Steve Soares website or on the Times Schedule we got at entrance. We went inside and watched the Voices of Liberty for a few minutes and I told Stephen he could stay there and Id run over to Norway and get us a FP for Maelstrom. In case youre wondering, thats a long walk/run, especially in the rain, and especially wearing
Crocs, that slip quite frequently! But I got back in time and asked a CM about getting the reflective captioning. On our last trip here in 2007 it wasnt working, so I was hoping to use it this time, but they explained that the building had been stuck by lightning so it wasnt working. For 2 years? Anyways they offered me a penlight and script (which I used the last time) but I thought Id seen it enough to be able to follow it (Im hearing impaired). Didnt turn out to be the case and I wish Id accepted the script, but it made it really hard to watch at the same time last time.
We left America and worked our way slowly over towards Norway, just checking out the different countries as we went. We got there and there was a 30 minute line for Maelstrom, and with the FP we literally walked right on. Directly through the line and onto the boat without stopping. We determine that although this is an okay ride, we certainly wouldnt wait 30 minutes for it!
Edited to add that I forgot to put in a story from here. At this point Stephen was still working on collecting all the Pirate Character collection pins. He had them all displayed on his fanny pack, and had them all except Mickey, which he was keeping his eyes open for. Well, when we came off Maelstrom and through the very crowded gift shop (that exit is incredibly poorly designed) apparently I "bumped" him and he caught his Minnie Pirate pin and it got knocked onto the floor, pin part up. A young boy went sprinting by, stepped on it, and took off with it on the bottom of his shoe! Stephen tried to chase after him, but he was trying to catch up with his family and Stephen lost him quickly in the crowd. Of course all of this was MY fault, so before we did anything else, we headed over to the gift shop right where you enter World Showcase, en route to Canada. He finds a CM with the Minnie pin and asks her to trade. She explains that her lanyard is one of the colored ones only for trading with young kids, but tells him to wait a minute and she'll see if another CM in the back "happens" to have that same pin (luckily it wasn't crowded in the shop). Soon after another CM comes out with a regular lanyard, which coincidentally has that same pin on it, so Stephen manages to trade and all is right in the world! Oh, and a bit later that evening he managed to find the Mickey at the pin trading area in the middle of Epcot. We also invested $8 in locking pins there so he didn't lose any more. We have a zillion of them at home, but I hadn't planned on him wanting to wear (or get) any pins there so didn't bring any. Guess I know better next time now matter how old they are!
So now its time to head back into Future World. We head in, yes, once again Test Track is closed (yes, its raining, remember?!). We grab ANOTHER FP for it (I really dont know why) and go back to ride Spaceship Earth in English this time fortunately. Yes, that is a cool ride! Spend a little bit of time exploring Innoventions and decide to start working our way back around to Japan for dinner at Yakitori House. Which would be better if we were at all hungry.
Again we work our way CCW around the lagoon. This time we take a little more time to stop in a couple of the pavilions and by the time we get to Japan, Stephen at least is somewhat hungry. He LOVED the ginger salad here last time, but they wont allow it as a snack credit (even though its under $4), so he orders the chicken ginger salad as a CS meal. He decides he doesnt want to try the ginger cake, so gets the prepackaged cookie for kids.
I order the Tempura Shrimp Udon, which is probably the best thing I ate all week. Except Im totally stuffed at this point. I ate the shrimp, and as much of the noodles as I could, and all the broth (which was really good). Then gave up. I tried one bite of the ginger cake (which I thought looked so good) and decided the chocolate chip cookie might have been a better option! It just had a really strange flavor. Overall its such a bummer that all the good food places are in Epcot we could have eaten here every day for both CS and TS and been happy, but didnt have park hoppers and wanted to hit some other parks!
Ugh remember the plans to go back early and/or take an afternoon break? Yep, its after 7pm by this point. And we still have 2 sets of Test Track FPs, a set of Soarin ones, and that special FP for Family of the Day! Well, we might as well head to TT first. We ride quickly twice there (well, its not quickly, but as fast as we can!) and head over to Soarin. By the time were done there its getting close to 8:30. We examine our special FP and decide well try to save it for our next day at Epcot and see if they take it then (nothing on it says only valid that day, although it does have a date on it). Oh well, were exhausted! On our way out of the park we check the two gift shops near the front of the park, but still no CD with Soarin on it not even sure it exists by this point!
We head back to Pop. Again we dont take the direct route, and this time we come back via Downtown Disney. Nope, dont ask me, ask my navigator! We get back to the room and decide we should at least check out the food court and store and buy a few postcards. Quick stop there, didnt bring enough money (75 cents per postcard?), back for a quick swim (yes, its raining again were wondering if well ever get to swim when its warm and sunny instead of dark and raining), pack everything up and call it a night.
But wait first an even funnier story. Many, many months back (around April), I was involved on a thread on TGM. I met someone online who saw I was from Green Bay who was on both the DIS and TGM (jajone Jennifer). We contacted one another and it turned out that we lived just a couple miles apart and our kids were in the same school district! She was taking a mother/daughter trip (and leaving her other two kids home) and I was doing a mother/son trip and doing the same (yeah, unfortunately her daughter was only 9, but Stephen cant have all the luck!). We were both heading to Pop Century, and they were arriving just two days after we were! We emailed and even got together several times before the trip to discuss planning and just share the excitement in general.
Well during the day today, she is texting me and asking our room number after theyd checked into their room at Pop. Totally coincidentally we ended up with connecting rooms!!! Wed requested only top floor, quiet area (no section); meanwhile, theyd just requested 50s section! So we ended up together, on the top floor, in a quiet area, of the 50s! I ask you, what are the odds of that?! (Or do they segregate people from Green Bay to one section of the hotel that Im not aware of?!) The connecting room with Jennifer and her daughter:
Pretty neat, eh?
All right, so it wasnt shorter than yesterday, but maybe there are fewer pictures at least?! Thanks to anyone whos hanging in and still reading!
