You've been married 25 years, what are you going to do now? Go to Disney World!

[lovesdumbo]

I've never noticed the Victory Garden. I'll have to look for it next trip!

 

[MrsHeg]

The Fantasmic dinner package was definitely worth it, not having to wait in that line for standing room only, our seats were pretty good,

And the house was packed,

I took several pictures but I've never been able to take good pictures of Fantasmic,

 

[MrsHeg]

We started making our way to the exit before the show was over, we wanted to beat the masses, as you exit the theatre you come out right in front of the TOT entrance so of course we had to stop in,

After dropping in to the Tower Hotel we stayed to watch another set of Mulch, Sweat and Shears, a couple of the band members had been replaced, guess it was their night off, but we still enjoyed it. It was time to call it a night, we were going back to MK Friday morning, I hadn't been on Splash nearly enough this trip so it was time to fix that problem.

 

[MrsHeg]

Friday morning, our last full day, , our plans were to do what I call the Mountain marathon, basically we get there at rope drop, grab a fastpass for Thunder, ride Splash, then over to Thunder, grab a fastpass for Splash as soon as it's time, and just keep riding until it gets too backed up. This only works for us on non EMH mornings as Frontierland isn't open for morning EMH and by the time they open it crowds of people head that way. I'm not sure what the problem was but there wasn't any water flowing down the front of Splash today either,

After our mountain marathon was over we headed toward Fantasyland, stopping by Haunted Mansion,

I had to see Philharmagic one more time so that's where we went next. By this time it was time for lunch, we decided to head over to the Boardwalk and have lunch at ESPN, so we took the bus over, we got right in with no wait, and of course we shared Nachos for an appetizer, I had the chicken ceasar salad and Grumpy had the chicken sandwich, the service was decent, not great but not bad either, the food was good, especially the nachos. I'm sure we'll be back there again. We took the boat over to DHS, but we didn't go in, we headed back to OKW for our daily afternoon break. Since we were leaving the next day we needed to start packing and get things together for the next morning.

We talked it over and made the decision just to stay at the resort and not head back to a park that evening, I wanted to do laundry because I didn't want to take all that "funky" laundry home. So we did laundry by the main pool and watched Cars on the outdoor movie screen, with some drinks from Goods to Go. I'm glad we did this because it was really nice to unpack clean clothes and just put them away when we got home, we did have a few things that we took home in the pop up hamper, but not much.

Dinner was a sandwich in the room and we called it an early evening, our final morning would be at DHS, we had fastpasses from our DVC tour burning a hole in Grumpy's pocket, so our plan was to head to RNR, grab a real fastpass and then ride Tower, with instant fastpasses it wasn't necessary to do the TSM run.

 

[MrsHeg]

Well like the saying, "All good things must come to an end", our trip that we had waited so long for was coming to an end. We were up early, cleaning out the fridge, loading the cooler and packing up the truck, we had pack the suitcases the night before so it didn't take too long. It was time to take our final bus rige to DHS, and visit our Tower a few more times, it was Saturday so there were "Citizens" out in force,

Melvin McCheesmo,

The real Public Works Boss,

I don't know her name, but I loved the way her dog's outfir matched hers,

We headed over to TSM, the standby wait was posted as 65 minutes, but from the looks of this that had to be wrong,

When we came out it was 35 minutes which was more like it, once again our scores are low but mine is higher than Grumpy's,

The Green Army men were directing traffic,

 

[MrsHeg]

It was now time to return for our RNR fastpass, here's Grumpy ready to take off,

And our final Redneck photo of the trip,

 

[MrsHeg]

We had an ADR at Sci Fi for lunch, it was for six as Grumpy's sister and family were originally supposed to arrive the prior day, but had to cancel their trip due to BIL's father passing away, he had taken off to be with his dad and his employer wouldn't allow him to take off for the vacation, so they will be rescheduling at a later date. We checked in and it was no problem switching from 6 to 2,

This is a great place to cool off and relax,

And don't forget the movie clips,

We both ordered chili as an appetizer, and not two minutes after they brought out our apps our entrees followed, we sent them back as it was too soon and their definitely isn't any extra room on the table.

They brought them back out later, I didn't take many pictures, but Grumpy had the ribs, I order the turkey sandwich,

Which I sent back, the bread was stale, I changed my order to the chicken sandwich instead, it came out fairly quickly, it was ok. Even though I had to send my entree back we'll be back to Sci Fi again.

 

[MrsHeg]

After lunch we ran into a few more Citizens,

Here's Bucky,

And Paige Turner,

We had one more instant fastpass so we went on TSM one last time, our scores never loaded, this was all that came up,

But I did beat him again!

It was time to hit the road, so we took the bus back to OKW, iced down the cooler again and headed out, this is always a sad sight,

We weren't on the road long before we ran into some bad weather,

This slowed down our progress, but we still made decent time. We stopped for dinner in Lake City, and made it to Tallahasse for the evening, we weren't in our room long when the heavens opened up and there was a horrible lightening storm, good timing on that one. The next morning we got up and headed home, ending what turned out to be a great trip, and it's not so sad, we'll be back in November!

 

[MrsHeg]

Some final thoughts,

I don't think we'll be planning another trip in July, the heat and crowds were a bit much, the tour groups were everywhere, and we never witnessed any behavior issues, but there were just so many of them, if you were in a standby line and they entered with their fastpasses you were going to be waiting quite a while.

Going off site for a few meals worked really well for us, and I'm sure we'll make that a tradition. I didn't even realize it until after we were home but we spent 11 days there and had 0 counter service meals, and honestly we didn't miss them.

When we stopped for groceries at the WalMart on I535, I found a section dedicated just to Disney merchandise, they had quite a selection at half what you might pay in the parks, of course I bought something for the baby.

Thanks for reading along

 

[let'sgo]

What a great trip! I enjoyed reading along.