Saturday! Magic Kingdom day! I’d bought a two-day ‘park hopper’ pass, so theoretically I could go to any of the four parks, but Magic Kingdom was what I’d planned. The way you jump the line at DW is called “Lightning Lanes”. You could buy a set of 3 timed entrees (one each) to a selected set of rides, you could buy 1 timed entree to one of the more special rides, or you could buy a ‘premier pass’ that allowed you (I think) 1 line-cut for any ride. This last was so expensive it was off the table, but it meant for the others I had to do some planning. I think the ‘set of 3’ rides for MK weren’t that interesting to me, so the only one I bought was for the Tron ride, with a mid-afternoon time slot.

Which meant that if I wanted to go on the apparently-very-popular Dwarf Mine ride, that would be my best target to zoom quickly towards when I got in the park. If you stay at a Disney property, you get to go in a half hour before the ‘outsiders’, so that would be 8:30. My plan was to start getting ready at 7-ish, try to catch the bus at 8:00 and see what happened. But I woke up at 7:00, quite a surprise for someone who’s been waking up at 5:15 pretty much consistently for months. Oh well, I gave myself a half hour for coffee and internet, then got cleaned up and packed up. I was bringing the free NYSC backpack I’d gotten somewhere along the way, with a water bottle, a raincoat and umbrella, chargers and purse things. It took me a while to find the bus stop, wasn’t an obvious route there from my building (there were four stops around the periphery of the resort, and I could have also easily gone to the one outside the main building, but this was the one recommended to me by the staff) – but the MK bus was right there when I found it.

Lots of families, lots of eager kids, lots of strollers. (the parks were an army of strollers and mobility scooters) First through security, where I got routed to the side to have my pockets and bag emptied. (I think it was the umbrella – it happened very time I had my backpack with me) Then I got to try out my magic band to get in the park, worked fine.

Powerwalked through and around all the families to the central hub and then up the 2:00 spoke to Fantasy Land, but I found myself in a crowd and it turned out they were waiting for the ‘rope drop’. So like, if you weren’t an early bird, they still let you in, but wouldn’t let you go anywhere fun until 9:00. So I had to backtrack to a different path they showed me and check in again as a special 8:30 person. That was weird. Then powerwalked to the Dwarf Mine ride, which already had a 45 minute wait, oh well. They are super-good, though, about making sure the bulk of the line is in the shade and has interesting things to look at and sometimes play with as you wait. And the ride was fun!

In my haphazard planning for the trip, I was like, “I’ll probably want breakfast in the park, but will want eggs. Hey, AI engine, where can I get eggs for breakfast in MK”? So I knew to go to the Friar’s Nook, a food stand pretty much right there by the Mine Train ride, and got a bagel egg sandwich and an iced coffee. The sandwich innards were adequate (egg, sausage, cheese), but the bagel was awful and didn’t hold the sandwich together well either. But it came with tater tots which were actually really good.

Then to explore – did a loop of Fantasyland, including the little-kids part and tried not to look like a creeper. Mommy, why is that middle-aged man alone in the kiddy park? (I did notice that often for rides, they’d put me alone in a compartment even if there was room for another, heh.) Ended up by the Haunted Mansion, and the line was short, so I did it. It’s a hoot (I’d done it before).

Then to Liberty Square. Not a lot there. I had no interest in doing the Hall of Presidents again, particularly with the latest robot they have, and the fun choral concert of Americana that C and I had heard in 1998 didn’t seem to be a thing. So onward. I didn’t want to go on the Tiana log flume ride (yet) because I didn’t want to get wet, and the Big Thunder Mountain roller coaster wasn’t running. I did go through the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse (which I’d never done) and did the Enchanted Tiki Room, which C and I thought was a hoot last time. (we’d seen the version with Zazu and Iago – they’ve since reverted it back to kind of the original)

Then to Tomorrowland, where I waited about an hour to do Space Mountain. It remains awesome. Although this time was fuzzled up because, although I had my knapsack under my legs and it wasn’t going anywhere, the water bottle in its side pocket came out and was rattling around the footwell for most of the ride. I was terrified it was going to break loose and hit someone else in the head. (from that point on, I learned to shove the water bottle in the backpack for those kind of rides)

After that, I went to the Laugh Floor show, which was kind of amazing. The Monsters Inc. characters did a comedy show, and it was really interactive with the audience. First of all, they would train the camera on random audience members (which you’d see on side screens) and put a caption like “wants to buy everyone churros after the show”. At one point, they showed me! with a caption of ‘really wants to get up and dance’, so… I got up and danced while the audience applauded, bowed and sat down again. But what was cool was even though the characters were animated on the screen, they still talked to the audience in a clearly not-prerecorded way. “what’s your name? Stan? Well, Stan,….” I looked it up and it’s all done with backstage live actors and motion capture and voice transformation technology. I was more impressed with the technology than the actual show, I will say…

So now I walk by the Tron ride, noting where it is for later and end up back in Fantasyland. Time for lunch! I went to Gaston’s Pub, where I got a “Ham sandwich”, but it was inside sliced puff pastry and had a big blob of melted gruyere on top. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a table and had to find a spot outside – and this sandwich, while tasty, was almost impossible to eat with your fingers – and I had no utensils. Ugh. It also came with chips, which I ended up shoving into my bag and eventually leaving behind in my hotel room. Hope you enjoyed them, housekeepers!

Then I went to Mickey’s Philharmagic, which turned out to be awesome. It’s basically a 3D movie, where Mickey’s about to conduct a concert, but Donald steals his Sorcerer hat and ends up inside various famous Disney scenes, like “A Whole New World”. It was beautifully done, the 3D effects were great, it was cool (yay) and I was really impressed. Although I was amused that it’s called Mickey’s, when MM is only in it for about 5 seconds, it’s totally DD’s show.

(maybe a good time to mention that I’m mostly indifferent to Disney as a brand, and people my age have never really seen Mickey Mouse do much of anything except shill product. But I was certainly around for the movie renaissance of Little Mermaid/B&B/Aladdin and am a big fan of Disney-owned franchises like Star Wars, the Muppets and Pixar.)

I was then going to go to the Country Bear Jamboree, as I’d never seen it and figured if I went here with other people, they wouldn’t want to. But a little consulting of the park app with wait times and knowing when my Tron time slot was, I ended up skipping CBJ so I could go to Pirates of the Caribbean. There was no Jack Sparrow the last time, of course. The wait was about a half hour, not too bad. It’s a lot of fun.

Then off to the Tron Lightcycle ride to use my one lightning pass. I had seen the original movie a bunch of times, of course, never saw the sequel. The inside ‘wait line’ section was super interesting, with lots of cool blue lights and computer graphics and neat environmental stuff. We had to actually leave our bags and stuff in lockers. The ride itself was uncomfortable (for me), because you have to ride it like a motorcycle – and it was pretty short – but it was very cool.

Re the pictures – the park actually used my Magic Band to track me and assemble the pictures it took of me, which I later was able to access on the app and online. There was only a couple I liked, and they were super-expensive to buy, but I appreciate that they did that.

While I’d been waiting to get on the ride, I was thinking about the lockers and wondering if there’d be people bumping into each other as ride exiters got stuff out and ride enterers put stuff in. And then I realized it was probably a wall of lockers with the entry hallway on one side and the exit hallway on the other, and the door you opened to put stuff in was opposite the door you opened to take it out again. And that is in fact how it worked.

I’d heard over the years that one advantage of staying in a Disney property is you can actually leave the park, take a break and come back, so that was my plan. I went back to the resort (big wait for the bus, unfortunately) and took a swim in one of the many pools, then cleaned up for dinner. Came back for my fairly late reservation to have dinner at Be Our Guest.

I love the movie Beauty and the Beast, but wasn’t expecting a lot except a sit-down meal at one of the few places in MK you could get a drink. The Hall and the Rooms are nice (they have it so it’s always snowing outside the windows, and they have The Rose in a side room) but fine dining this was not. They had specific cocktails, but I couldn’t go off the map and get a cosmo – I just had wine. It was a pre-fix menu. I started with the blue crab bisque, which wasn’t bad, but was a little scummy on top because it had clearly been sitting on a table with another hundred bowls of soup for a while. Then, with a glass of red, I had the filet mignon, which came with stuff, and also wasn’t bad, but wasn’t anything special. (I didn’t finish it). Dessert was the ‘blooming rose’, a little sculpture of a rose made out of ‘the grey stuff’, which a friend told me is basically a cookies-and-cream mousse. I do think it’s pretty funny that a throwaway line in the song Be Our Guest, “try the grey stuff, it’s delicious”, forced Disney to actually have to come up with a tasty grey food. Anyway, I liked it OK, but they’d offered a different option of chocolate cake with ‘grey stuff’ and I should have gotten that.

Anyway, although it was OK, I found the whole experience a little ‘cruise ship’ – in the direction of fine dining, but with too little personal attention and too much prefab food that definitely does not hit your table 30 seconds after it leaves the stove. Glad I did it though.

When leaving the restaurant, I caught the very end of the fireworks show, and saw Cinderella’s castle with cool projections. I could have stayed later for the light parade, but I thought it best to just head out, although I did poke around the Main Street stores on the way out. This time, the bus was there in a reasonable amount of time and it was all good. Back to the room, a little fetched ice, a bourbon and coke and to bed. I never did get to Tiana or the Country Bears. Next time.

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Next up: Epcot (briefly) and Hollywood Studio!