Wait? What??? It's been a month. I don't deserve any readers at this point. Bail out now! Whatever you do, no clicking on any reactions!!!
So, the last morning. The girls both have annual passes (given they both have had multiple visits since buying them and have more planned), but I was just on a 3 day pass, so the last morning was girl time at Animal Kingdom while I got our room packed up and everything into the rental car. To avoid waiting for a bus, I actually drove them to AK first thing and it was quite odd not parking!!
They did their usual morning at Animal Kingdom plan. Everest, Everest, and more Everest. Which, if you haven't done early morning in Animal Kingdom in recent years, heading to Everest in the morning means this...
Yes, totally empty paths. Everybody heads to Pandora first (or maybe the Safari). They got three rides in before heading to their breakfast at Tusker House.
And they were delighted to have it back to something very close to pre-COVID normalcy with buffet food (so much less wasted than with the family style service they had been doing) and real visits with characters.
At about 9:30am, I was out of the room and headed back to Animal Kingdom to get the girls. We still had a decent bit of the afternoon to enjoy some time in Disney Springs, so we headed there right away. My daughter had some things to try to exchange (ill fitting shoes she had bought on her visit in January and a backpack that fell apart way too quickly) so the girls went to Vera Bradley to figure out if they could do anything about the backpack and I headed to the Co-Op to try to exchange the shoes. No success with the backpack, but shoes were secured!
Did a little more shopping around Disney Springs and I caught some random high school band and chorus on the stage (doing some scouting for another school trip coming next January). As some strange kind of appetizer, we got the Tinkerbell Waffle Sundae - oh, that lemon curd was awesome. I think my wife might have a picture of it that I will share later (or possibly forget to share). And then we headed to lunch at The Boathouse, which is always a favorite.
After lunch, we had a little more time before we needed to head to the airport, so we decided to drive up to the new College Program housing campus (along the Western Way) to just explore a little since our daughter is planning to maybe do the CP in summer 2024. We then headed to the airport. Just incase we thought things would be easy... about 5 minutes from the airport we got stuck in traffic. Serious traffic. Like route 528 was pretty much shut down for a little while. Eventually we got to the issue, which was a tractor trailer totally jack-knifed across the entire road with a couple other vehicles obviously involved. The negative was it meant some anxiety and not much time when we got to the airport. The positive was it meant that we got to see the SpaceX launch from Cape Canaveral that happened that evening. That was pretty cool. The insanity of getting through security with very few moments to spare was not so cool.
But we made it onto our flight on time and managed to get seats together and got back home in the middle of the night with at least 4 hours of sleep before heading the school the next morning!!
Hopefully in something less than another month, I'll get the rest of the pictures from everyone's phones and get a few more posted for you! But, don't count on it. The musical at our school is two weeks away, so I'm at school from 7am-7pm every day for the next two weeks in rehearsals.
