Alrighty then, let's talk about day four in the Parks.
You've probably figured, I am the planner and documenter of these joyrneys. I have been surprised at how this new
Genie+ system has changed how I plan and tour the parks. In the past I would focus on one half of the park per day. We wouldn't worry about the rides that we were missing, because you could do as many fast passes as the system would allow.
Sometimes we'd go on a ride several times using fast passes as long as they were available and not worry about rides on the other side of the park. Now with Genie+ only allowing one ride with
Lightning Lane per day we feel compelled to use all of the Lightning Lanes because if you don't use them they are lost to you.
This means that even though we do focus on one half of the park per day, every afternoon we feel like we need to take a journey over to the other half of the park to hit their Lghtning Lane rides. That might be the only chance to ride the bigger rides more than once per trip. I think we probably walked a lot more this trip than we have in the past because we spent a lot more time zigzagging all around the park to use all the Lightning Lanes.
In the past we could more easily plan which LL to use based on which rides were in our general area.
That being said, I was really surprised at how this new way of zigzagging the parks and doing all of the major rides in one day has almost forced into doing more rides in one day than we would have. We found that on our very first day in DCA we did almost everything that we really wanted to do, so our second day in DCA, yesterday, was almost wide open to do whatever.
We pretty much discarded the plan and made a new one on the fly. We did the same three rides yesterday at rope drop that we had done our first day in DCA: Radiator Springs, Web Slingers, and Guardians. We got all three of those in before 9:45 in the morning. Then we jetted over to Incredicoaster and rode that on standby. We went next door and stood in line for Toy Story Mania. We walked down to Soarin' and did that with a fast pass. After Soarin' we did Grizzly River Run as a walk on since the line was very short (cool day).
We went over to the Redwoods Trail and walked through that to see what it was all about since this is new since our last trip. Around 3:00 we walked over to Wine Country Trattoria and had Italian food on the terrace. It was really tasty! By the time I stood up I thought I would fall over because my feet hurt so bad. I had to walk it off! I can't remember the order of the rest of the day but we did Grizzly one more time Monsters Inc, The Little Mermaid, and a lightning lane for Guardians of the Galaxy.
Earlier in the day one of our lightning lanes turned into an anytime pass so we did lightning lane one more time for Guardians! We wandered through Avengers Campus looking for strange new snacks of the alien variety.
We got this chocolate raspberry bun I can't remember its name, a shawarma chicken wrap with yogurt sauce, and a giant pretzel at Pym's test kitchen.
Around 8:00pm we found that we had done everything you wanted to do, snacked all we wanted to snack, and were ready to leave. Our feet were shouting at us and we were satisfied. So we left the park for the last time on this trip. The only thing we didn't get to do was ride the monorail, but we think we will go over to Downtown Disney today and find out if there's any way that we can ride a loop without a park ticket. If we cannot then we have a reason to come back next time! There's always something you don't get done.
Thanks for reliving our journey with me! This is my final post since the day will be lazy and unplanned and tomorrow is just our journey home. I'm happy to answer any questions about how the trip went, what was running and what was not, etc.
Enjoy YOUR journey to Disney. Take care!
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Em and I have decided that the very best pin boards are in DTD and at the hotels! We found most of our good ones here on day 1 and today. We bought some souvenirs and we ate
at Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen (oh my!). Here are some pics from today. Enjoy and ta ta!
Fireworks from the deck of the Desert Inn. If you can't be in the park, at least you can watch from up high!
