Welcome Home...Three Years Later! A June 2021 PTR (Updated 6/21)

[cstorm65]

A nice mix of relaxing and park time - usually my favorite days! By Day 12 you'll be covering little things you missed and repeating favorites, so you can just go about things at such a relaxed pace. So wonderful.

I am also curious how things will be for our July trip without FastPass. I've never done Disney without it!

I know what you mean on no fastpass. I've been getting onto touring plans everyday just watching wait times and they're still fairly reasonable. Crossing our fingers things stay close to what they are now into our trip and I think we'll be fine! I have a hard time thinking they can let in much more capacity without bringing back fastpass...and no one knows if fastpass is even coming back, so that will be interesting!

 

[cstorm65]

Summer Trip - Day 13 Plans

We are almost through the planning process and moving on to our Day 13 Plans! I mean we will eventually get to the end of this trip! Haha

Day 13 will be another Magic Kingdom rope drop morning for us. Currently the park opens at 9:00, but if Disney does what they’ve done the last couple of months they will move that to 8:00 AM at some point of the next week or so. Anyways, rope-dropping Magic Kingdom is one of our favorite things. Seeing the castle without just huge crowds is magical!

We will probably take this rope drop and head to the Frontierland/Adventureland area of the park. Usually on our first rope drop at MK we go the opposite way, but on this trip both boys will be interested in Big Thunder and Splash, so we will definitely do both of those.

After some morning touring and hitting up some of our favorite rides we have a lunch reservation at a place we haven’t been to in about four years, The Plaza. The food here is not too bad, but pretty standard.

But the desserts that you can order from the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor are great! And...sitting to eat in an air conditioned restaurant just makes everything taste better! After lunch we will probably hit up a few more things in this park because right now we aren’t planning on coming back here today. The plan is just to hang by the pool at the resort the rest of the night and who knows, I may get a craving for another Bison Burger if they were as good as the reviews make them out to be!

That is it for Day 13, pretty simple. We will be back to plan our one final park day that we have left! I’ll leave you with some Magic Kingdom throwback pictures.

Up Next: Summer Trip - Day 14 Plans​

 

[cstorm65]

Summer Trip - Day 14 Plans

Well, I am back to plan our final full day of this summer’s trip. I have had a pretty busy week in trip planning world because all of the park hours have been added to, so I have been going through and making sure things are still where we need them. I will say, I don’t like the current setup. It is hard to change plans since I would have to change parks pass reservations. Then, on top of that, there are absolutely no dining reservations available. I was trying to find something to rearrange a Hollywood Studios day during our trip and I just searched all of WDW property for lunch and there were only 2 reservations at any restaurant whatsoever and those were in Disney Spring. I mean, no lunch reservations available and this was for a date that is still 25 days away or so. Crazy times!

Alright, on to the final day of our trip! If you’ve read any of our past trip reports you’ll know we always end the trip in the Magic Kingdom and this year will be no different. Especially since we are staying at Bay Lake Tower and have all of our Magic Kingdom days loaded up on while we are staying there the second half of the trip. So, we probably won’t have much of a plan for this day going in. It will really just be hitting whatever things the boys want to hit on our last day. I’m sure for what our boys like now it will be all of the mountains!

I’m sure there will be some Seven Dwarfs Mine Train in there too! We will tour the park in the morning until around lunch and head back to Bay Lake Tower to rest up for our final evening. I can’t explain how excited I am that the park is now closing at 10 or 11 PM during our trip. We just love the nighttime hours. Our boys take a nice nap on these days so that we can be in the park at night and there’s just something special about it. Not to mention it doesn’t feel quite as much like you're walking on the surface of the sun like it does during the day time!

We’ll come back to the park around 5 PM or so is how we normally do when we take a break and start off our evening with some dinner. We do like Pecos Bills, so that would be good for this dinner, although with all of the new changes this week we are holding out hope that Columbia Harbor House opens back up.

We will just soak up our last night in the Magic Kingdom and of this trip before starting our countdown to the next trip. I’ll end this update with some throwback pics of some of our last day visits to the Magic Kingdom during our past trips.

Up Next: Summer Trip - Day 15 Plans​

 

[brookelizabeth]

I mean, no lunch reservations available and this was for a date that is still 25 days away or so. Crazy times!

That's CRAZY! Ughhh. I hope that is one change they are able to make soon. Do you use any of the "dining finders" to help you in the search?

I can’t explain how excited I am that the park is now closing at 10 or 11 PM during our trip.

That is AWESOME! I haven't really paid much attention to the park hours for our upcoming trip, but I would LOVE to see them open late again! Is it just the MK that was extended?

great pic!!

 

[cstorm65]

That's CRAZY! Ughhh. I hope that is one change they are able to make soon. Do you use any of the "dining finders" to help you in the search?

I have used touring plans before for that. I may go in and put a reminder on it, I'm just not really sure what I want to do. This whole planning without FP and stuff like that is all new to us and I don't really know what to do with so much unknown!

That is AWESOME! I haven't really paid much attention to the park hours for our upcoming trip, but I would LOVE to see them open late again! Is it just the MK that was extended?

MK is the only park that was extended a lot. I think DHS is still 8 pm and Epcot was already at 11 pm, but MK moving to 11 pm is awesome!

great pic!!

Thanks! Thanks for reading along!!

 

[cstorm65]

Summer Trip - Day 15 Plans

Ok, we are moving on to the final day to plan. We are getting soooooo close to our trip! It almost doesn’t seem real after so long away from “home”!

We will obviously have to get up this morning and make sure we get our bags all the way packed and over to bell services to store before we do anything. We tentatively have penciled in on this day to go to Hollywood Studios, but really it is just a backup day just in case we don’t get a Rise of the Resistance boarding group any other day or if the boys just really want to do that ride again. So, we will see what everyone wants to do. We may end up completely changing plans and getting a park pass to somewhere else if we got to do RotR a couple of times previously, so we will see.

I did go ahead and get a reservation at Oga’s Cantina this morning. I was a little late on deciding to get this and by the time I got to it our departure day was the only day I could find a reservation. Personally, I just like to walk around on our last day and just enjoy our final amount of time in the bubble! I’m not sure what we will eat for breakfast, but if we do end up at Hollywood Studios I promise you we will get in a final ride here:

And most definitely a final ride here...I know this is a really old picture! haha

We will need to be back to Bay Lake Tower by around 2:30 as our Magical Express bus will probably come around 3:00 or 3:30 to get us to the airport. I’ve heard about crazy at airports recently, hopefully we don’t encounter anything like that! We have to catch a connecting flight in St. Louis before getting home to Oklahoma City pretty late. That would be a wrap on another trip though. Hopefully it won’t be a sad ending as this trip is just the first trip of our annual passes, so we will be back! I’ll leave you with a final set of throwback pictures...we are down to just seven days to go!!!!

​

 

[StarWarsMomofGirls!]

I hope you guys have a GREAT trip!!!!

 

[cstorm65]

I hope you guys have a GREAT trip!!!!

Thanks! We will have a good one. So much unknown, it's almost like a first trip again! haha

 

[StarWarsMomofGirls!]

Eight Spoon Cafe opened YESTERDAY!!! No shrimp mac and cheese, but pulled pork mac and cheese...

Seriously every day it seems like something new is opening!

 

[cstorm65]

Ok, so....I've gone missing for the longest time I ever have on here, mostly because of how crazy things were coming out of covid with life & work & family! But, I finally feel I've caught up and am just now back into a normal routine of life again, which is a GOOD THING!! So, I have started a trip report for this trip. Would love to have anyone come join that was following along here.

Escape to Our Home Away from Home After Three Years - A July 2021 Trip Report​