The Many Adventures of an Aussie Disney Honeymooner

[pkondz]

My favourite Disney parade is HKDL's Flights of Fantasy, which I was surprised has the same tune as DLR's Soundsational! The hot air balloon theme puts it over the line for me though - it makes for some really lovely floats.

Well, I have no clue about any of that!
I'll take your word for it.

With our spare $100k USD

Great! Send a photo of it in your living room.

I looked up the menu to remind myself what it was, but it just says 'champagne presented 3 ways', so I guess we'll never know!

Heh. "champagne 3 ways"... one with red food colouring, one with blue, one with none.

Honestly, I would have preferred the experience without the princesses. But I get that the kids would love it.

I'm right there with ya.

 

[zanzibar138]

Well, I have no clue about any of that!
I'll take your word for it.

Here's some of my favourite photos from over the years:

 

[pkondz]

Here's some of my favourite photos from over the years:

Thanks for those!
Pretty impressive!

This one cracks me up!

 

[zanzibar138]

Chapter 6: In which we get two rooms and nearly see a parade

6.13. I get by with a little help from my LL​

You may remember a few days we had booked some LLs for EPCOT. It was the only way I figured we were going to get to ride anything with the wait times we’d seen! I’d booked a throw away for close to 10:00am – can’t remember what for but I figured it wouldn’t really matter if we didn’t make it. I think Spaceship Earth was booked for around 12pm, so we didn’t rush too much.

We started the day by sharing a brekky platter from the Contempo Café.



Then we hit the monorail.



It was the busiest we'd seen it at that time of morning, and as usual, we had just missed the monorail from the TTC. We still managed to arrive at EPCOT by about 11am, so we were pretty happy with that effort! It wasn’t worth rushing to try to get to our throw away LL, so we just hung out towards the front of the park for a while filling in time. I tried to book another LL after our first window closed, but wasn’t able to. I had read that I would, but it didn’t surprise me that I couldn’t, so I didn’t worry too much more about it. There was no chance of getting Frozen by that time anyway!

We got straight in line for Pluto. It was an estimated 20 minute wait, but we didn’t really have anything better to do lol! As often seemed to be the case for us, Pluto went for a break just before we got to him, and after our last experience at MK, we were a bit nervous about how long we’d be standing there waiting. We got chatting with the CM, who happened to be from Australia too, and just a couple of minutes later saw Pluto making his way back. He was very excited to discover that we’d just gotten married!



We still had heaps of time after meeting Pluto, so we just hung out a bit more, looking at some of the shops. We bought a pack of cute Chinese fan mystery pins, and were excited to get Minnie and Dale (photo taken later).



I’d suddenly realised in the last couple of days that my shopping opportunities were getting kind of limited, so I had another wander around the Creations shop while Ben sat on a bench. I saw a couple of ‘maybe’ items but nothing that really stood out. I did see this cute Figment artwork in the area though, which I assume was something to do with FArts.



Finally it was time for our very first LL! I think Spaceship Earth was up to about a 30 minute wait by then, so we still felt it was worthwhile. After we checked in, I immediately checked for LL availability, hoping that we might get lucky with Frozen, but not to be. Instead, I booked one for Soarin’, since that was another one I thought Ben might enjoy.

The line was very fast moving of course and soon we were boarding our ride vehicles. I really had no idea what to expect from Spaceship Earth, but I found it to be quite an enjoyable ride was glad we’d made the effort. We did get stuck for a few minutes on the way up, so I took the opportunity to get a quick photo.



The little digital activity on the way back down was a fun extra.



We also spent a few minutes checking out the activities at the end. It was quite busy in there, and we couldn’t really be bothered waiting for anything, but we did try the 3D operation game which was a bit of fun.



Our LL for Soarin’ wasn’t too far off, so we exited Spaceship Earth and started heading in the direction of the Land.

Continued in next post…

 

[zanzibar138]

As we walked past the CommuniCore Hall, we noticed there was only a 10 minute wait for the character greeting! We’d only ever seen quite long wait times there, so took full advantage and headed on in. We were so glad we did – it turned out to be some of the best character interaction we had on the whole trip! With short wait times, the characters were quite happy to take their time and each had a great ‘conversation’ with us and posed for several photos.



Goofy was very approving of Ben’s choice of ring (we won’t tell him I chose it myself lol!).





Minnie was cute as ever too. She was having all these great interactions with us and then suddenly realised her handler was distracted and hadn’t been taking any photos, so she just stood there tapping her foot until he suddenly realised lol!





We still had plenty of time before our LL, so we grabbed a drink from the little kiosk. And now that Ben had discovered pins, he was keen to check out what they had there. We came away with another mystery pack of the fan pins, which turned out to have… exactly the same 2 pins that we already had

I noticed the JAMMitors setting up, so we found a bit of wall to perch on and watched for a few minutes while we had some of our drink.



Next stop… the Land!



We still had a few minutes until our LL, and it was definitely lunch time, so we checked out the options at Sunshine Seasons and decided it would be a suitable lunch stop after the ride. In hindsight, we probably could have check out Awesome Planet, but it’s not something I feel too bad for missing.

We ended up checking in for Soarin’ a few minutes early, which was fine. The wait time was up to nearly an hour, so we were very happy to walk straight through most of the queue. We probably waited about 10 minutes all up. Although we were sightly to the side, I was very happy to get the first row, as I’ve always been in the back before. We both very much enjoyed it, and it was actually one that Ben would have been keen to do again (but always had too much of a wait!).



We finished up our time at the Land by sharing a Mongolian Beef and chocolate mousse from Sunshine Seasons, accompanied by adult beverages.



We left feeling nice and refreshed for the next part of the day.

Continued in next post…

 

[zanzibar138]

Next, we were headed to World Showcase. On our way, we passed by the colour by numbers mural again. This is as close to finished as we saw it.



On our way through, we stopped at Disney Traders and got some Pandora charms – just a couple of the park exclusive ones. It’s a terrible photo of some very pretty charms! In hindsight, we actually should have done a quick detour to the Canada pavilion via some of the art stalls too.



Moving along, we were headed to Norway to wait it out for Frozen, since we’d chosen to prioritise Ratatouille for our LL. It could have been worse. The wait time was about 50 minutes when we got in line. The outside part was getting slightly uncomfortably warm (I have no idea how people cope in the height of summer!), but went fairly quickly.



The inside part was much more comfortable and had all the cute theming to look at along the way.





It was a cute little ride and I’m glad we made the effort for that one too. Ben enjoyed it, even though he looks like he’s meditating in the ride photo lol!



Ben also enjoyed some of the photo opportunities in the area.



We continued around World Showcase, taking the time to look in some of the shops and check out some of the theming and views over the lake.





We finally made it to France, where we managed to find Ratatouille tucked away at the back (I would not have realised it was there if I wasn’t looking for it!). Again, we were a few minutes early for our LL, but were let through anyway. This was a super quick LL – we basically just walked straight through the queue and onto the ride! Must have been good timing. We both really enjoyed the ride, despite the fact that Ben had never seen Ratatouille and it had been a very long for me and I’d forgotten a lot of the movie. It was another one that Ben would have been keen to do again if it hadn’t always had such a long wait!



And with that, we concluded the ‘ride portion’ of the day.