Trip Report The Two Goofs Holiday Special!- Now with February updates!

Hello again my friends. We’ve just returned from our short, action packed, trip to the world. We had the hap hap happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap danced with Danny fu- oh wait, wrong thread! Anyways we had a great trip!

When: December 6-9

Where: Grand Floridian

Why: Because we wanted to, and we were celebrating six years of wedded bliss!

Who: Myself and my wife, A.

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Featuring appearances by Bucky the popcorn bucket, The Orange Bird backpack, Chewbacca, Scrooge McDuck, Whoopi Goldberg, Creepy dancing reindeer, Sant Claus, @Nunu, and many more!

So just sit back, relax, and maybe try to stay warm if it’s -4 degrees outside(looking at you @ajrwdwgirl!).

Travel Day/ Day 1. December 5-6.

I had been working nights all week and A works during the day, so we didn’t get to spend any time together this entire week. This isn’t unusual for us, but it did make packing a bit tricky, as we had trouble keeping up with what was in which suitcase. Also being a man, I didn’t actually pack my suitcase until about an hour before we hit the road!

We handled a few errands at home and were westbound on the interstate by about 6:30 that evening.

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Our usual rest stop on the way to Dallas. Anyone who’s ever visited one will know why, it’s like the Disney World of gas stations! 🤣 It’s hard to tell from this photo, but that store is around 60,000 square feet of pristine clean awesomeness! It has 84 gas pumps and over 70 restroom stalls!

Anyways, we arrived at our good friends’ place on the outskirts of Dallas at around 8:30. We were sleeping here for the night to avoid leaving our house in the middle of the night,or paying for a hotel near the airport. We quickly went to bed for a few hours rest, and were up and ready to head to the airport around 4 the next morning.

We got dropped off at the airport around 430 for our 6 am flight. Normally this would leave plenty of time for a nap in the terminal, but for some reason security at Love field this day was SLOW! First they stopped the line to bring in the dog, but then when the dog arrived, they only let people through 2 at a time. We ended up being in line for nearly an hour. Fortunately we still had time to grab a bite at whataburger for breakfast, and catch a small nap at the gate.

Our plane boarded on time, and we were in the air a little ahead of schedule. We had the smoothest, fastest flight we’ve ever had to Orlando. With a strong tailwind, the flight tracker showed ground speeds of nearly 700 mph! We were at the gate an hour and 40 minutes after takeoff. Our chief flight attendant was the absolute best we’ve ever seen. He was a huge Disney nut and was super pumped to be working the Orlando flight(he even wore his ears), his safety spiel was hilarious, and as we taxied the runway at MCO he played a little Disney trivia with everyone. When he gave his farewell message, people were literally screaming and cheering for him!

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This was painfully accurate today, but we didn’t mind too much!

We were the last stop on the magical express, but we finally made it to the grand a little before 11 AM!

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The lobby is absolutely beautiful this time of the year!

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The gingerbread house is really incredible to see! This was my favorite of all the special lobby decorations that we saw!

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We grabbed a snack and headed outside to enjoy it.
 

Nunu

Wanderluster
Premium Member
Friday December 6 continued.

When the show was over most people made a mad dash for the exit. We decided to hang out around echo lake to Let the rush die down at the bus stop.View attachment 433491
The tree looks so beautiful at night!
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There were several other couples hanging around enjoying the night. We all sort of took turns taking pictures for each other! Glad I’ve never had a fear of talking to strangers!

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There was a slight chill in the air. We didn’t mind at all!

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We made it to the bus stop about 40 minutes after park closing time. The bus wasn’t very crowded. We got a great view of the Christmas party fireworks finale on our way back to the grand.

We were both feeling a little hungry. We headed to gasparilla grill and split a pizza.

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Tasted better thank it looked. I was glad that the QS place was open 24 hours, great for a late night snack and a drink!

We finally made our way to our room, which we hadn’t seen yet. We were in boca chica room 8414. We appear to have been upgraded to a deluxe room!

Some room photos for @Nunu

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We had a great first day, and we were just getting started!
Oh!, I love your room! :inlove:
It looks even better than what you described to us. Thank you for the photos!, you know I like me some Disney room pictures! :geek:
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Saturday December 7.

We woke up at 0630 and rolled right out of bed. We had been keeping up with the what was going on with the boarding groups for ROTR. Ideally we would’ve gotten to the park around 6-630, but we were too tired from our travels to get up quite that early. We rolled out of bed and were in a Lyft for DHS by 0650. There was no line at bag check or at the park entrance, and we were through the gates at 0719. I quickly checked the app, ever hopeful there would be boarding groups still available.


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Success!

Thankful we didn’t get up early for nothing, we decided to head to Andy’s lunchbox for breakfast. Unfortunately the place was a madhouse! We decided to wait a while on breakfast.

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Notice A has on a long sleeve shirt. It was pretty chilly that morning!

Smugglers run only showed a 15 minute wait so we made our way into SWL.

Side story time. As we were walking into Galaxy’s edge, I noticed the walkway was a little wet. About 3 seconds later my feet stared slipping. After a few seconds of fighting it I knew I was going down. Let’s just say this much man doesn’t fall softly.
I was embarrassed to say the least. Also there were about 20 CMs standing directly behind me at the entrance to the land. Not one of them turned around to offer to help me up. Luckily I felt ok and was able to get up on my own.

We made it to smugglers run and waited about 20 minutes.
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We finally got pilots! Let’s just say things did not go smoothly! I was the up and down pilot. We crashed multiple times. I must say the controls were pretty delayed in their response, which made it pretty difficult to maneuver. Still was a great experience though, and our fellow passengers didn’t seem to mind how awful we were doing!

After millennium falcon I noticed my back was starting to hurt a bit. Guess my fall was worse than I thought. We decided to leave and grab food outside the park. We were out the park before official park opening time.

We took the skyliner over to Epcot. My back was really starting to hurt and I was becoming concerned. We walked over to yacht club and grabbed some breakfast sandwiches and I bought some aleve at the gift shop. This seemed to help a little, and we checked out the decorations around the resorts.

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I thought the YC tree was really nice.

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The Christmas village was pretty impressive!

We also checked out the beach club carousel.

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It was Peter Pan themed!
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I am made of similar ingredients! We were only able to find 19 of the 20 gold mickeys.
 

Swissmiss

Premium Member
Yikes - I hope your back is doing better. I had a similar fall recently - it had been raining and I know to be careful about wet leaves on the sidewalk but unfortunately did not see the teeny tiny minute remains of a leaf (I don’t even think it was the size of a dime!) and I went straight down. Right next to all the rush hour traffic. And I don’t know how, but I ended up with a deeply implanted splinter in my palm - which took the nurse in the medical service at work about 5 mins to get out. I was very glad that I had an appointment scheduled the following day to see my osteopath, so my aches were luckily short lived.
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Yikes - I hope your back is doing better. I had a similar fall recently - it had been raining and I know to be careful about wet leaves on the sidewalk but unfortunately did not see the teeny tiny minute remains of a leaf (I don’t even think it was the size of a dime!) and I went straight down. Right next to all the rush hour traffic. And I don’t know how, but I ended up with a deeply implanted splinter in my palm - which took the nurse in the medical service at work about 5 mins to get out. I was very glad that I had an appointment scheduled the following day to see my osteopath, so my aches were luckily short lived.
Glad you’re ok! My back is doing better now. I just ended up with a pretty nasty blood blister from scraping the walkway, but that seems to be about it.
I hope you’re doing better & it didn’t have a negative effect on your trip🤞
Doing better now thanks. It loosened up as the day went on!
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Saturday December 7 continued.

We entered Epcot via international gateway. The hordes of riff raff read about in other TRs was nowhere to be seen at the time. Certainly more crowded than the old days, but still far preferable to the main entrance.

We headed towards future world(which we now refer to as wall world) to pickup our AP magnets.

Some festive decorations along the way
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Thats a very large tree.

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The line for the magnets moved fast, and we soon had magnets in hand.

Our next stop in Wall World would be imagination.

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The water has returned!
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We entered the standby line and were in before the people using FP.

We entered the land pavilion next to use a FP for Soarin, before realizing our first FP was actually for SSE, oops! Back outside we went!

There was no wait in the FP line for SSE. We only got stopped one time on the ride, so I guess that’s good? Thing needs some TLC that’s for sure. Also I miss the Jeremy Irons version. The current version hasn’t aged very well. I’ll be interested to see what they come up with for the new version.

Anyways, we did make it back into the land pavilion to use our next FP(still not for Soarin!) living with the land. The Christmas additions were nice.
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We tried to ride again later that night, but it was down of course. We also kept checking on the ROTR boarding groups. It must’ve broken down though, because the number was stalled at 37(we were 63) we hoped it would be up quick enough for us to get on before having to watch the candlelight processional, or wait long enough for us to do it after. We knew the timing would be close.
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Saturday December 7 continued.

We had a little time to kill before our Soarin FP, but we didn’t feel like leaving the land pavilion. We hung out around sunshine seasons for a while.
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The orange bird made the trip this time!

We made our way over to Soarin. We had a nice conversation with the group behind us about the orange bird, and the history of the orange bird at WDW. They were from California and were DL locals. They thought the bag was great. Our ride on Soarin was great, we were in the middle section row one.

We had a lunch reservation at garden grill. We were doing the candlelight package. We had not eaten here in quite some time. The food seemed fitting for the holidays, and A loves Pluto, so we went with it. We checked in and waited about 10 minutes for a table.


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Entire spread that they give you. I really enjoyed the turkey and dressing, as well as the mashed potatoes. I also couldn’t help but sneak in plenty of Mac and cheese! There was also a steak with chimichurri, it was good too. I assume the fries are there for the picky eaters. There’s also a salad that’s made using ingredients from the land pavilion. We both thought it wasn’t very good.

Characters here are chip, dale, Pluto, and Mickey.


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Chip was waiting for us as we were being seated. He had a little fun with our server.

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Mickey came by next in his farmer attire. He insisted we stay seated for our photos.

We got a nice break after Mickey to enjoy our meal. Our server Karen did a nice job of keeping our drinks filled and making sure we had plenty of the dishes we liked.
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The mac and cheese was much better here than at liberty tree tavern, must be because of the goldfish!
 
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Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Saturday December 7 continued.

Dale came by next. He was very playful!
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Finally Pluto came along. He must’ve sensed A was a dog person, as he really interacted with her a lot!

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Pluto was a lot of fun! I forgot to mention that we were seated on the lower level, which allowed for some nice views into the living with the land attraction!

We were ready for dessert after meeting Pluto.
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Berry shortcake. This was excellent! The whipped cream is made fresh daily.

We paid our ticket and slowly rolled out of the restaurant. I was so uncomfortably full, but the meal was so good!



We decided to try and walk off our lunch by checking out some of the countries around WS. We crossed the bridge into France first.
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It was another perfect weather day!

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I thought these were really cool!

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Picture fail on my part. Also notice a little sweat on my shirt, it was warming up!

A quick check of the boarding groups showed that the ride was back up, the number was up to 42. We continued around WS.
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All those people behind the tree are lined up to meet Santa and Mrs. Claus.

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We settled for a passing picture.
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Saturday December 7 continued.

We continued making our way around WS. It was getting very crowded.
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Germany looked great, but I didn’t dare brave the crowds to go deeper into it.
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Another check of the boarding groups showed the number was up to 47. That combined with the swelling crowds made us decide to head out.

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I love the view of SSE from the Italy pavilion.

We knew if the boarding groups continued to get called at the rate they were going, ours would be called with the hour. It was just after 2 at the time. If our group got called around 3 we figured we could do it, but would have to seriously hustle to get back for candlelight processional. Wanting to save all the time we could, I rented a locker at IG so we could skip bag check at both parks. This turned out to be a very very good idea.

We left Epcot and walked over to boardwalk to check it out.
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The boardwalk display was nicely done with several small details. I meant to get a cookie here that @Nunu had been raving about, but I forgot.

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We got off our feet in the lobby for a minute. A check on rise boarding groups showed that group 58 was now boarding. We got up and started walking towards DHS.

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This popped up about halfway through our walk. We picked up the pace trying to make it there as fast as we could. I was ever grateful we didn’t have to go through bag check!

We tapped our bands and made a beeline for galaxy’s edge. We were let into the queue a little before 3:15. We waited around 30 minutes before the experience began. The queue is very well done and snakes it’s way through a cave, each turn building your anticipation that it might be your turn.

My thoughts on Rise of the Resistance.

Without giving anything away, I thought the ride was absolutely brilliant. The way you transition from the queue to the pre show, to the ride, and the ride itself is all just so so well executed. This is the absolute E ticket attraction that we’ve waited for for years. The scale of the thing is just unreal. I know things at Disney can get way overhyped(like flight of passage), but this thing absolutely delivers in just about every way. By the time the ride was over, everyone in our ride vehicle was screaming out of pure joy. This is now unequivocally my favorite attraction at WDW. I will leave one photo that I’m sure most people have seen already plenty of times, so it’s not much of a spoiler at this point.

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The attraction took about 20 minutes from the time the pre show started, until the exit. It was worth all the hassle! We quickly made a rush for the park exit, it was after 4 at this point. We knew it would be a challenge to make it to the processional on time!
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Saturday December 7 continued.

We left DHS and had to make a decision on how to get back to Epcot. Unfortunately the boat launch was packed, with no boat in sight, and the skyline was doing skyliner things and not moving. I ordered a Lyft to go to beach club. Luckily the driver was already at DHS and pulled up just a few seconds later. He must’ve sensed we were in a hurry, as we left the parking lot at about 50 mph! We made it to beach club in no time at all and power walked through IG to the America pavilion. We were seated with 5 minutes to spare!

Our view was obstructed a bit by a tree, but we were just glad to get in on time!

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Whoopi Goldberg was the host that evening.

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She did a very good job.

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This was our first time seeing the show, we both really enjoyed it. We exited the show to full fledged “Epcot festival Saturday night”. We worked our way through the crowds toward the front exit to get on the monorail.

We eventually made it back to our room to get freshened up, and to just relax for a bit before heading over to bay lake tower.

What on earth could we be doing over at BLT, since we aren’t even DVC members you ask?


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We were there to meet our new friend @Nunu of course!
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Bucky finally makes an appearance!

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It was so great to meet Nunu and Frank. We hung out at top of the world lounge for hours laughing and talking like we were old friends! Such great, sweet people!

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Anyone who can meet a fellow magician should do so! I promise most of us don’t bite! A was a little on the fence about meeting strangers, but I convinced her if anything crazy happened I could take Nunu and frank down! 🤣 She left that night with a new friend!

We enjoyed the views while we chatted.
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Eventually we had to leave top of the world because it was closing time. We headed down to the monorail and bid our new friends goodbye.

The lobby at grand Floridian was nice and quiet when we returned.
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We went back to our room and crashed for the night. One of our best Disney days ever!
 

Nunu

Wanderluster
Premium Member
Saturday December 7 continued.

We left DHS and had to make a decision on how to get back to Epcot. Unfortunately the boat launch was packed, with no boat in sight, and the skyline was doing skyliner things and not moving. I ordered a Lyft to go to beach club. Luckily the driver was already at DHS and pulled up just a few seconds later. He must’ve sensed we were in a hurry, as we left the parking lot at about 50 mph! We made it to beach club in no time at all and power walked through IG to the America pavilion. We were seated with 5 minutes to spare!

Our view was obstructed a bit by a tree, but we were just glad to get in on time!

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Whoopi Goldberg was the host that evening.

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She did a very good job.

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This was our first time seeing the show, we both really enjoyed it. We exited the show to full fledged “Epcot festival Saturday night”. We worked our way through the crowds toward the front exit to get on the monorail.

We eventually made it back to our room to get freshened up, and to just relax for a bit before heading over to bay lake tower.

What on earth could we be doing over at BLT, since we aren’t even DVC members you ask?


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We were there to meet our new friend @Nunu of course!
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Bucky finally makes an appearance!

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It was so great to meet Nunu and Frank. We hung out at top of the world lounge for hours laughing and talking like we were old friends! Such great, sweet people!

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Anyone who can meet a fellow magician should do so! I promise most of us don’t bite! A was a little on the fence about meeting strangers, but I convinced her if anything crazy happened I could take Nunu and frank down! 🤣 She left that night with a new friend!

We enjoyed the views while we chatted.
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Eventually we had to leave top of the world because it was closing time. We headed down to the monorail and bid our new friends goodbye.

The lobby at grand Floridian was nice and quiet when we returned.
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We went back to our room and crashed for the night. One of our best Disney days ever!
Looking at those pictures gives me "the feels". 😊
Good times amongst friends!
 

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