January 4, 2018 - Part Two
After that much needed nap, we both woke up feeling much better. We got ready, and decided to head out hours earlier than we needed to for our evening plans – we wanted to see how the lines were for merchandise at the race expo today (since we didn’t want to wait 2+ hours yesterday).
We arrived at the ESPN Wide World of Sports and it was so quiet! There were no lines anywhere, and we were able to easily just walk into the area with the merch. Seriously – if you’re not running the 5K during Marathon Weekend, there’s no need to go to Race Expo on the Wednesday!
I didn’t take pictures of our purchases, but I bought a generic RunDisney hoody, Luke picked up a few shirts specific to this race weekend and we picked up the sneaker Christmas ornament. We weren’t in a rush, and just took our time looking around. Eventually we made our way back to the buses – but instead of going back to OKW we caught a bus heading for the Contemporary!
We were so excited about our evening plans – we were celebrating our upcoming wedding by splurging on Highway in the Sky for ourselves! But, we arrived early at the Contemporary and were feeling a bit hungry, since we’d only ate snacks in our room up to this point of the day, so we headed to the Contempo Cafe (
review here). We killed enough time and it was eventually time to head down to the Wave to check in for Highway in the Sky (HITS) (
full review here!).
HITS ended with the 9pm Magic Kingdom fireworks viewing from the 5th floor of the Contemporary. We still had energy from our nap earlier in the day, so we decided to walk over to Magic Kingdom to enjoy a few hours in the park (they were open until midnight that night).
My photos from this night ended up out of order, and I didn’t take any notes this night – so I can’t remember the exact order of attractions we hit up during these few hours. But I do know we went to visit a few princesses. Some of these pictures make me laugh so hard – so awkward at times hahahaha
At one point, we went on Pirates of the Caribbean. I had to take a few pictures of the auction scene, since this was before the Redhead scene was changed, but it was known that it would be changing soon.
We also made it on The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh. I’ve always loved all the 100 Acre Wood characters, and even though this attraction is nothing special I really love it.
We decided to try something new to us, and went to Enchanted Tales with Belle. As we entered the queue line, a cast member stopped me – and handed me the red card! I was the chosen one! It’s kind of stupid how excited I get about this thing haha –
Also – it was still cold, in case you couldn’t tell by how bundled up I was haha.
This is such a cute little… show? Attraction? Whatever you call it – go see it at some point! Now that I actually have a daughter, I’m really excited to take her to this one day! I didn’t really take any pictures, because I think it’s weird to take photos of other people’s children – but I did take this one of the wardrobe –
And Luke took this quick video of the wardrobe talking –
We ended our night with a ride on Haunted Mansion, one of our favourites!
(I love the Tangled washrooms at night! So pretty!)
Luke took this video of the “Kiss Goodnight” shortly after midnight –
As we were leaving, we stopped in a few shops along Main Street. This was when Rose Gold was the hot “it” colour, and the cast members were actually rolling out an entire rack of Rose Gold spirit jerseys in preparation for the next morning. These things were impossible to find at this point, so I was really excited to see them and I definitely left the store with one that night!
It was quite late by the time we got back to our room at Old Key West, but I had a very important task to attend to before heading to bed – putting together our welcome bags for our wedding guests! The first guest (my Dad) would be arriving the following evening, with the large majority arriving the next day. It was almost time to actually kick off wedding week!
I pulled out everything we had for our welcome bags – some of it we had lugged with us from Canada and some we had purchased on our Walmart run at the beginning of our trip. We had tossed around a few ideas for actual bags to put everything into, but we had already gone over our budget for welcome bags so we ended up just asking for extra Disney parks bags at a gift shop earlier in the week, and once we explained what they were for there was no issue giving us a stack of them. Score!
We had shirts made for everyone (you’ll see them later in the trip!) –
This picture was of the Rubbermaid tote we’d been storing all the wedding stuff in back home – part of the reason we needed to check four full sized bags on our flight! We had a lot of stuff to bring with us!
I laid everything out on the spare bed, separated by person/couple – turns out we had a lot more than I thought we did for these bags!
Here’s a close-up of my Dad’s stuff so you can see everything we had – custom shirt, Body Glide, hand sanitizer, wet wipes, bandaids, Disney pens (some people also got Disney notepads/sticky notes), a couple packs of gum, Brita water bottle, a few bottles of water (we bought multiple cases at Walmart – it’s so cheap in the States!), travel pack of Q-Tips (we mainly bought these because of the cute Disney tin they came in), travel-sized Kleenex, Tylenol and snacks (chips, chocolates, granola bars – Disney themed of course, and water flavour pouches). There were also nail files for all the females, and a necklace for each of my Bridesmaids/Maid of Honour (they actually ended up wearing them on the wedding day)
It was really late by the time we finally crashed for the night (like 2:30am). I also didn’t realize how much my life was about the change the next morning…
I know, right?!?!?
- a pre-honeymoon I guess? Haha - it was really fun to build up the anticipation for the wedding day though!
