Good morning! We got back to the room a little after 2am last night and after a good 6+ hours of sleep, ready to get back out there. But, I promised y'all some pictures (and DD still needs to get dressed).
We hit the Magic Kingdom right around 2pm and headed to Liberty Tree Tavern for our 'dinner' ADRs. A nice meal and the Ooey Gooey Toffee was great! After lunch, it was time for DD to meet Anna and Elsa. The wait was 90 minutes, but through the magic of FP+, our wait was less than 2 minutes. Since we have a longer visit, we have been able to spread out our FP+ to hit pretty much everything we like at least once, which has been nice. After meeting Anna and Elsa, we went to Hall of Presidents for the show and then we planned to head to Haunted Mansion (it was about 4:15pm at this point), but did a quick re-evaluation. Heavy clouds were rolling in and we really wanted good seats for the fireworks, so we headed to the Train Station. And scored!! Got three chair right along the railing just a little off center.
Please take note more of the crowd than the storm clouds, because pretty soon the people really started to roll in. Since we had 4+ hours to spend up there, we played some cards, looked at our pictures, DD chatted with a friend on the phone, DD and DW took a train trip to the back and rode Teapots (I can't do teapots, no one likes it when I do!!), DW and I went over to Town Hall to get a night EMH attraction list, and multiple bathroom visits happened. We made friends with the families around us from Ohio and Mississippi and a couple cast members, and we all had a good old time. By the time it hit 8pm, the train station was packed (yes, a little part of my mind thought about the weight limits up there) and we were very happy to have waited so long.
Here come the fireworks! I took well over 100 shots (thank goodness we don't still use film) and have just picked a few to share here - haven't done any editing yet except to crop out the people and side buildings on a couple, but I think they work pretty well as is!
The show was incredible and the finale amazing - DW and I both had tears in our eyes! We weren't sticking around for the parade (since we have seen it more times than we can count) which made the Mississippi group quite happy to score our chairs and front row spot! We dodged the raindrops (actually if felt like more hit us than missed) and went back to Mine Train to use our FP+ for a night ride. Excellent! Then it was just touring and doing what we could as the crowds watched the parade and eventually we hit EMH. Neither of those things really thinned out the herd too much, but we did manage to do the following in our three hours back there (after grabbing some food with Sonny Eclipse) - It's A Small World (facade is no longer covered, but I can't see what changed), Haunted Mansion (with our rescheduled FP+ from the afternoon), Barnstormer, Dumbo, Carousel of Progress, Buzz Lightyear, Winnie the Pooh, Philharmagic, and Peter Pan. The longest waits were Pooh and Pan, both around 15 minutes - not too shabby on July 3rd!
Here's the good night view of the castle at about 1:40am as we headed out.
Now we are about to head to the mass of humanity that will be Epcot for July 4th! Wish us luck!!
