We're Being Optimistic! We Leave This Month!!!

[AwkwardTurtle]

Paid off our flights today! It's not really that exciting, since we had the money in our vacation savings account before we booked them (I like to put everything on my Disney Visa, then we use the points for food and Wine ) But it's still nice to get it taken care of and get my credit card balance back down. With Max being out of work for so long, and my job does not really pay that much (especially considering we live in Orange County), the credit cards were our frenemies. So I really like seeing the balance go down, not that anyone cares about my personal finances...

ALSO. Because I have a sickness, I bought another Disney shirt today. It's the Limited Edition Fantasyland poster series shirt featured on the Disney Parks Blog today. I am so excited for it, and I will totally be buying the "it's a small world" shirt when it comes out next week. Here's the link http://www.disneystore.com/disney-parks-special-events/mn/1009902/ in case anyone else needs to feed their Disney shopping obsession. You're welcome

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

So I have been making some changes! I did end up cancelling Le Chefs. The more I looked at the menu, the less I was excited about it. I really like the escargot, which they usually do at the Food and Wine booth, and I figured why spend the money on something I'm not super excited about?

I ended up making a reservation at Via Napoli in its place, but I'm not sure about that one either! Changing dining gives me something to do though, so it's all good.

I also did, in fact, purchase the "it's a small world" anniversary tee. And they had a bundle deal if you got both small world and the carousel of progress shirt, soooo........

I have so many Disney shirts, it's absurd. And by absurd, I mean TOTALLY AWESOME.



In Disney related news, although not really having anything to do with this trip report, I've got some fun Disneyland trips on the horizon! This is the last weekend in the season for the Remember, Dreams Come True fireworks show, which is my absolute favorite, so we'll be taking a trip to the park on Friday to see them. We're also planning a super epic Disneyland day for my birthday in a few weeks, so I will try to have some pictures here. I know I will throw a bunch up on Instagram though, I'm HyacinthHippo on there for anyone who might be interested. There are a lot of pictures of my cat Toby doing this:

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but that's because his fluffy belly is irresistible. I promise there are Disney pics also

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

This is kind of a small thing, but I found out that my vacation time was approved for our trip! That's always a relief.

 

[MarbleBob]

Subbing in. Looks like you guys have a fun trip planned! I enjoyed reading your intro too. My favorite rides are Spaceship Earth and People Mover too. Unfortunately, People Mover will be closed when we visit next month. Oh well...

Anyway, looking forward to following along with your PTR.

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

Subbing in. Looks like you guys have a fun trip planned! I enjoyed reading your intro too. My favorite rides are Spaceship Earth and People Mover too. Unfortunately, People Mover will be closed when we visit next month. Oh well...

Anyway, looking forward to following along with your PTR.

Thanks for joining in! That is sad about People Mover but it means that you'll just have to plan another trip

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

So while I’m (not so) patiently waiting for September to come around, I’ve been spending a lot of time at Disneyland. When we go, usually we’ll just go for a few hours. My birthday was last week though (yay, I love birthdays!) and we decided to spend the whole day at Disneyland. I took a ton of pictures, so here’s a little mini Disneyland trip report. I hope you enjoy it!

BUT FIRST. A few notes before we get started. Obviously, we go to Disneyland a lot, so we don’t have that same need to ride everything on every trip. Also, we’ve been doing a low-carb diet sort of thing since January, and as part of my birthday we ate all the carbs we could find. So there’s a lot of snacks in this trip report, since we basically planned the day around food Also, all pictures were taken with my Galaxy S4, because I didn’t feel like dragging an actual camera around.

Now, on with the show!

We started the morning off bright and early, because I wanted to have breakfast in the park. I LOVE breakfast. Especially breakfast potatoes. We were slightly delayed leaving the apartment (I couldn’t decide if I wanted to wear my Princess Aurora shirt or my Pinocchio tank top. It was a very important decision), but we made it to the parking structure only a little bit behind schedule.

It was here that we had our first bit of birthday magic – literally the best parking spot we have ever had! We were on the Donald level in the first row just past the escalators. I know this is a Disney World board, but just think of the closest parking ever, and that’s it. It was amazing, especially because we frequently get the worst parking spots. We walked from the parking structure, and soon we were headed through the main gates to our breakfast destination of Riverbelle Terrace, where we ordered these delicious things



That’s the Mark Twain (one of my favorite writers), or scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes and a biscuit with your choice of sausage or bacon. Max and I both chose sausage, and then ate a lovely breakfast on the patio overlooking the Rivers of America. It was an awesome start to the day.

After breakfast, we decided to take a trip on the Wildest Ride in the Wilderness.



I love Thunder Mountain. It was down for forever being refurbed, but I think it was worth it.







We waited about 20 minutes, maybe 25, before we boarded our trains. This was the perfect amount of time to let breakfast settle. I was actually pretty happy with the wait times this day. With it being Mother's Day weekend, I wasn't really sure what to expect, but it wasn't too bad. The weather was also pretty nice, not too terribly hot or windy.

After we escaped the exploding mine, we walked around to my favorite land – Fantasyland! There was one attraction I was dying to ride.

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

Peter Pan’s Flight is one of my favorites. Since my absolute favorite, “it’s a small world,” was still closed, I knew that I really wanted to ride Peter Pan. A lot of the times we skip it, since it always has a line, but today we decided to brave it. I think the wait time was around 35 minutes, which isn’t really that bad. I do wish we had FastPass for it out here though!

I took a bunch of pictures while we were going through the queue. One of the things I love most about Fantasyland is all of the themed weather vanes.



I also took a picture of us!



I look silly in a lot of our pictures, because I can’t both frame a shot and smile at the same time. I’m a simple girl, what can I say. Max looks super sleepy, but that’s because he was.



I was able to grab a shot of the Evil Queen glaring at us from Snow White’s Scary Adventure. It’s a little bit hard to see, but I promise that she’s up there in the window! Honestly, I barely noticed the wait for Peter Pan. There’s so much to see in that area, and all my favorite classic music, and if I ever started to feel antsy, I just looked over at the line to meet Anna and Elsa, and felt much better about our wait time.

Here are a few more photos from our wait. These are from the mural on the main wall.









I love pretty much everything about this attraction. It never fails to make me happy, and today was no exception. It's so simple, but that's what makes it perfect, I think. One of my favorite Disney artists, Peter Ellenshaw, did a lot of the original design for Peter Pan, which explains a lot, I think.

While Max had been waiting on line for breakfast at Riverbelle earlier in the day, I had grabbed us a FastPass for Indiana Jones, and it was coming up on time to use them. First though, we needed to make a stop for a snack, and continue my birthday celebration of eating all the carbs.

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

We're at the 99 day mark!

 

[MarbleBob]

Into the two digit numbers. Yahoo!

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

Dining update!!

I've been very not excited about our reservation at Via Napoli for some reason. I really want to try it, but, as someone who learned to cook from their Italian Nonna, it kills me to pay so much for food I can make myself. I couldn't figure out what else to change it out for though. So I keep looking around and hemming and hawing, and after talking with friends and making Max look at menus, we decided to try for Le Cellier.

Between the app and the website, I've been checking pretty often for reservations, but there's only been a 4:05 dinner reservation. This is WAY too early, especially considering we have a 12:55 lunch at Sci-Fi. Anyway, I was just able to snag a 6:55 dinner! And it only took me a couple of days of checking, so I'm feeling pretty lucky.

I had a supremely crappy day at work today, after a pretty long week, so it was nice for something good to happen.

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

So I hadn't paid much attention to the Frozen Summer Fun things, but now that it's been extended, I'm trying to figure out if there's anything we need to do from it. It's looking like it shouldn't impact our trip plans much. While our planned Hollywood Studios day is the 28th, so the last day for Frozen, I figure most of whatever extra crowd it attracts will be there for that, not for regular Hollywood Studios things. It actually makes our lives easier, because they've added a second Fantasmic!. We love love LOVE Fantasmic! at Disneyland, and while we'd like to see the Disney World version, it's not really a huge priority. I think we both ranked it about a 6 out of 10 on the scale of how much we wanted to see it.

We still would like to see Fantasmic on arrival night, but if that doesn't work out we will definitely be able to catch the second show on the 28th. Yay for time changes working in our favor!

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

So our flight got pushed back from 8:20 to 9:00. I'm super annoyed, because I thought 8:20 was late to begin with. Now we aren't scheduled to land in Orlando until almost 5:00pm. Booooooo.

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

It's September now, which means WE GO TO DISNEY WORLD THIS MONTH!!!!!!!!!!

I'm so excited. All the last minute details are coming together. I'm mostly set on clothes I think, just need to decide if I want to do any more Disney Bounds - those I will need to shop for. Magical Express tags are here, my Disney Visa Rewards Card is here, Magic Bands have shipped so they should be here soon. All that's left is to order Memory Maker, and to try for a Be Our Guest lunch fastpass. And also try not to go crazy waiting.

 

[ardent2]

Hehe, wow I can tell how excited you are! Hope you enjoy your trip a lot!

 

[AwkwardTurtle]

Hehe, wow I can tell how excited you are! Hope you enjoy your trip a lot!

Thank you! We are very much needing a vacation over here, so there's extra excitement. Plus, vacation is my absolute favorite thing in the world, and then a Disney vacation is one of my favorite types of vacation, so all things considered it's going to be an amazing trip.