A little late, but happy birthday, Rebecca!
Here are a few observations from our trip to the World from which we got back Saturday. . .just in time for three solid days of rain, fog, and low 60s as the high temp. Thankful for the rain, but really? Three days? Tomorrow will be the fourth.
BLT - Loved it! Though it's not as welcoming as our beloved Lodge, it's still a wonderful resort. You simply can't beat the convenience and location. The CMs there were superb, and the BLT pool is way better than Hidden Springs (sorry!).
Crowds - Typical for this time of year, but we were a bit surprised they weren't worse at MK during the mornings. Crowds the first couple of hours at MK each time were as small as I've ever seen. . .unless you were in New Fantasyland. There is a mad dash from rope drop to SDMT, although they now walk you down Main Street all the way to the Castle before letting you loose. Beyond NF, you can just about walk onto most other rides for the first two hours or so. At the other parks, the crowds were more concentrated throughout the park; forget about TSM unless you have a FP or are willing to wait at least 45 mins at rope drop. We made rope drop at DHS one morning, headed straight to TSM, and the line was already past Wandering Oaken Trading Post and was posted at 60 minutes for standby.
Food - Overall, no worse than last time which is to say that the dumbing-down of the menus hasn't grown significantly worse. There are still quality meals out there, but you have to search for them. Sometimes, you find them in the most unexpected places. For example, the best meal I had was at Kona which hadn't impressed me in the past. However, their lamb chops were perfectly cooked, plentiful, and accompanied by superb sides. . .and they're cheaper than most other places serving lamb.
Magic Bands - Ours worked mostly as advertised except for a few instances. I kept getting flagged the first three parks into which we went, but after that third time, my band worked fine. Luv's band worked great for two days, then she was flagged twice before they went back to working well. My daughter had no issues. They're a pain to wear, and sometimes you have to take them off to make them seat properly on the reader, but overall they did work. I give them a B grade.
FastPass+ - Honestly, we had no issues. All our FPs were as we had reserved them, and we even changed our last day's FPs roughly 36 hours out and had no issues. On some levels, I like having guaranteed FPs at a time we chose. On the other hand, attempting to gauge your time between rides and balance that with other activities takes away some of the spontaneity. We also learned a good lesson: always use your Tier 1 FP in DHS on TSM if you love that attraction. That same day of the 60-minute wait after rope drop (which we didn't do), RnR was a 20-min standby, and that's what we had chosen as our Tier 1. Live and learn. We had one rough spot with SDMT in MK the first day. We arrived and it was shut down due to weather. An hour later we came back only to find there was a technical difficulty. The CMs said not to worry, that our FP time would be good whenever we came back later that day, but we were distrustful. However, sure enough, a few hours later we came back and the FPs worked perfectly.
MyDisneyExperience App - We found it useful, and the wait times were fairly accurate. HOWEVER, people really need to get their noses out of their phones and iPads and tablets to watch where they're walking. I can't tell you how many times we had to dodge people engrossed in some electronic device. The worst offenders were parents attempting to guide huge strollers AND look at their phones, pads, or tablets.
Okay, that's it for now. Off to finish dinner!
It was down during our FP time in June, but we left the park before trying to ride again. Hopefully we will ride it next month! Have fun!
at your stinky splash mountain remark, it's so icky haha! Nice to hear you enjoyed BLT. Our older son would like to try it some time.
rolleyes
From our room
The birthday boy and girl, CaptD and TammyNC
Yea! Corinne. So very glad your wait list came through for you! We'll be there 4-13. What are your dates? It's never too early to plan a meet
