steve_rob
Mine? Mine? Mine? Mine?
- Joined
- May 23, 2002
- Messages
- 1,460
# Day 6 - 8th October (Not a good food day) #
Although it was only Wednesday, this was when we started to notice the crowds growing for the Columbus Day weekend. We were doing MGM Studios today, but before we entered the park, we had a little business to attend to - with it being my birthday on the Monday, we made reservations at Guest Services for Whispering Canyon Cafe for that evening. As I was about to walk away, I noticed the girl behind the desk slip Erika something, saying "keep it safe till the 13th"... I'm sure most of you can guess what it was (if not, you have to wait until I get round to typing up that day's events!)
As soon as the rope dropped, I went to get Fastpasses for Indiana Jones (we'd missed this due to lack of time last time, so wanted to be sure) and followed Erika to RnRC and ToT (hey, I'm getting the hang of these acronyms!). As I'm a fast walker, it's easy for me to catch her up, so it's why I'm always in charge of Fastpassing attractions.
Rode Aerosmith twice in succession and sang along with Love in an Elevator both times - don't think anyone can hear you anyway, but if they did, my apologies! As we went to ToT, we saw that the queue time was already 45 minutes. Considering it was only 9:30 and RnRC was just 10 minutes, we though this funny, but then remembered that they had announced before we'd left that half the lifts would be down this week for the ride upgrade.
Now I hate drops (would NEVER do something like Dr. Doom at IOA for example), but just because of the themeing, I can be persuaded to go on this. Still takes some talking in order to make me though. Plus the ads on the billboards for the new ride system all the way down I-4 were so cool - tag line "Tower Of Terror 4 : Great News - We Made It Worse" - that I just had to. We dropped a total of five times by my recollection, the biggest being about seven floors, most just two or three, plus shot upwards once. Scared the crud out of me.
Then it's time for Indy, followed by Great Movie Ride and Star Tours. Before you know it, it's lunchtime. We went to Backlot Express and I had the chicken strips. Big mistake. For the next hour, I had horrific heartburn. I was in pain everytime I took a deep breath. While queuing for the Muppets I was in agony. The last time I had heartburn this bad was also in Florida two years previous. We'd just eaten at the Nascar Cafe where I'd had, you guessed it, chicken strips. Yet I've never had that problem in the UK, so I can only guess there must be something they put in the batter over there that strongly disagrees with me.
After laughing my way through the pain at the Muppets, I started to feel better and we moved on to the Tram Tour, which is a LOT shorter than usual due to the rebuild work going on in preperation for the Motor Stunt Show (or whatever they're going to call it) and then did One Man's Dream, where I though the exhibits were more interesting than the film which was meant to be the main bit of it. I then did Millionaire on my own while Erika shopped (she's not a big quiz show fan), but didn't get anywhere near the leaderboard, mainly because of the predominance of US based questions. The two guys who made the hot seat both hit 32,000 before bombing out, but it was a good laugh to watch.
We then went back to do some re-rides, but by now the queues were getting horrendous - 60 minutes for RnRC and 90 for ToT, so we decided to get dinner straight after. When we were at Guest Services earlier, we asked about the Fantasmic Dinner Package, but even at that time they were almost all gone (we were offered a 3pm eating time!) so we decided to take our chances and make our own arrangements. So we ended up at the Sci-Fi diner and had great fun watching all the B-movies on the big screen from our 'car'. Unfortunately, the food wasn't quite so good. We both went for the catfish, and while I thought it was okay (but a bit bland), Erika didn't like it at all and ate only about three bites. The waitress though was wonderful about it and offered us whatever we wanted from the menu as a replacement (Erika just went for a vanilla milkshake in the end) and when we got the bill, it only had one main course charged to it.
By this time, there was just over an hour and a half to Fantasmic, so we though we'd head there via Sounds Dangerous. That way, although the best seats dead centre would have gone, we'll still get a fairly good one. I rushed ahead to claim our spot and arrived at the theatre 75 minutes before show time.
Oh.
No seats.
Well, there were some in the far corner, but by some I mean about ten left and there was already a queue of 100 stretched across the back of the arena to reach them.
I looked at all the other seating areas and could not see a space - it looked like they'd already done the "please fill all available space" bit as everyone was already pretty well tightly packed in.
So with an hour and a quarter still to go, it was standing room only, and that was disappearing FAST. Now, I wouldn't mind standing THROUGH Fantasmic, but my legs were aching and so to stand for that long before even getting to see it was never going to happen. I fought my way back to the ramp and met Erika halfway down to tell her the bad news. Amazingly, none of the staff at the bottom knew how full it was and they were telling everyone still coming in that there was still plenty of room. We let them know, but I don't think the message got through, so we started telling people as we headed out - the fact was that the standing section would have been FULL by the time we'd reached the bottom of the ramp at the rate it was filling up, so there was no point anyone else going up there.
Neither of us could understand how it got so full so long before time (neither of us had seen it like that before) but my theory was that people we saying to themselves, "it's 6:30, let's go do RnRC and ToT one last time, then head to Fantasmic" but when they got there and saw both of those rides with over one hour queues, decided to skip them and just sit in Fantasmic for the last 90 minutes instead.
Disappointed we didn't get to see it this time as I loved it last time round, but we decided instead to do Downtown Disney on our way home and spend a silly amount of money in the Christmas shop!
Although it was only Wednesday, this was when we started to notice the crowds growing for the Columbus Day weekend. We were doing MGM Studios today, but before we entered the park, we had a little business to attend to - with it being my birthday on the Monday, we made reservations at Guest Services for Whispering Canyon Cafe for that evening. As I was about to walk away, I noticed the girl behind the desk slip Erika something, saying "keep it safe till the 13th"... I'm sure most of you can guess what it was (if not, you have to wait until I get round to typing up that day's events!)
As soon as the rope dropped, I went to get Fastpasses for Indiana Jones (we'd missed this due to lack of time last time, so wanted to be sure) and followed Erika to RnRC and ToT (hey, I'm getting the hang of these acronyms!). As I'm a fast walker, it's easy for me to catch her up, so it's why I'm always in charge of Fastpassing attractions.
Rode Aerosmith twice in succession and sang along with Love in an Elevator both times - don't think anyone can hear you anyway, but if they did, my apologies! As we went to ToT, we saw that the queue time was already 45 minutes. Considering it was only 9:30 and RnRC was just 10 minutes, we though this funny, but then remembered that they had announced before we'd left that half the lifts would be down this week for the ride upgrade.
Now I hate drops (would NEVER do something like Dr. Doom at IOA for example), but just because of the themeing, I can be persuaded to go on this. Still takes some talking in order to make me though. Plus the ads on the billboards for the new ride system all the way down I-4 were so cool - tag line "Tower Of Terror 4 : Great News - We Made It Worse" - that I just had to. We dropped a total of five times by my recollection, the biggest being about seven floors, most just two or three, plus shot upwards once. Scared the crud out of me.
Then it's time for Indy, followed by Great Movie Ride and Star Tours. Before you know it, it's lunchtime. We went to Backlot Express and I had the chicken strips. Big mistake. For the next hour, I had horrific heartburn. I was in pain everytime I took a deep breath. While queuing for the Muppets I was in agony. The last time I had heartburn this bad was also in Florida two years previous. We'd just eaten at the Nascar Cafe where I'd had, you guessed it, chicken strips. Yet I've never had that problem in the UK, so I can only guess there must be something they put in the batter over there that strongly disagrees with me.
After laughing my way through the pain at the Muppets, I started to feel better and we moved on to the Tram Tour, which is a LOT shorter than usual due to the rebuild work going on in preperation for the Motor Stunt Show (or whatever they're going to call it) and then did One Man's Dream, where I though the exhibits were more interesting than the film which was meant to be the main bit of it. I then did Millionaire on my own while Erika shopped (she's not a big quiz show fan), but didn't get anywhere near the leaderboard, mainly because of the predominance of US based questions. The two guys who made the hot seat both hit 32,000 before bombing out, but it was a good laugh to watch.
We then went back to do some re-rides, but by now the queues were getting horrendous - 60 minutes for RnRC and 90 for ToT, so we decided to get dinner straight after. When we were at Guest Services earlier, we asked about the Fantasmic Dinner Package, but even at that time they were almost all gone (we were offered a 3pm eating time!) so we decided to take our chances and make our own arrangements. So we ended up at the Sci-Fi diner and had great fun watching all the B-movies on the big screen from our 'car'. Unfortunately, the food wasn't quite so good. We both went for the catfish, and while I thought it was okay (but a bit bland), Erika didn't like it at all and ate only about three bites. The waitress though was wonderful about it and offered us whatever we wanted from the menu as a replacement (Erika just went for a vanilla milkshake in the end) and when we got the bill, it only had one main course charged to it.
By this time, there was just over an hour and a half to Fantasmic, so we though we'd head there via Sounds Dangerous. That way, although the best seats dead centre would have gone, we'll still get a fairly good one. I rushed ahead to claim our spot and arrived at the theatre 75 minutes before show time.
Oh.
No seats.
Well, there were some in the far corner, but by some I mean about ten left and there was already a queue of 100 stretched across the back of the arena to reach them.
I looked at all the other seating areas and could not see a space - it looked like they'd already done the "please fill all available space" bit as everyone was already pretty well tightly packed in.
So with an hour and a quarter still to go, it was standing room only, and that was disappearing FAST. Now, I wouldn't mind standing THROUGH Fantasmic, but my legs were aching and so to stand for that long before even getting to see it was never going to happen. I fought my way back to the ramp and met Erika halfway down to tell her the bad news. Amazingly, none of the staff at the bottom knew how full it was and they were telling everyone still coming in that there was still plenty of room. We let them know, but I don't think the message got through, so we started telling people as we headed out - the fact was that the standing section would have been FULL by the time we'd reached the bottom of the ramp at the rate it was filling up, so there was no point anyone else going up there.
Neither of us could understand how it got so full so long before time (neither of us had seen it like that before) but my theory was that people we saying to themselves, "it's 6:30, let's go do RnRC and ToT one last time, then head to Fantasmic" but when they got there and saw both of those rides with over one hour queues, decided to skip them and just sit in Fantasmic for the last 90 minutes instead.
Disappointed we didn't get to see it this time as I loved it last time round, but we decided instead to do Downtown Disney on our way home and spend a silly amount of money in the Christmas shop!
