Day 2
We woke up around 6 and headed to meet our reps. Mine was James, a food services cast member from The Land at Epcot. If you're ever at The Land and you see him, probably at Garden Grill, please tell him Michael says hi. He was fantastic.
We then headed to the Contemporary to kick off the events. We started with a delicious breakfast of Mickey waffles, eggs, and fruit and met our hosts, Princeton Parker and Shannon Smith Conrad. We did some icebreaker activities and then our daily Morning Affirmations. We also learned the DDA Rally Cry (I'll put that in a separate post at the bottom of the thread).
After this, we headed to the welcome rally. I'll add more details about that in an edit in a bit. We then headed to a talk with Martha Blanding, after which we got lunch and a safety briefing for the parade. During lunch, we met Moon Girl in what's believed to be her first-ever WDW appearance.
We went to the parade staging area behind Tiana's, and while, of course, I don't have photos, it was awesome to hang out backstage. We got to see a float from Starlight, the floats from Boo to You and MOUACP, the America float from Electrical Water Pageant, and the process of loading floats and staging a parade.
We did the parade, which was of course amazing, and then proceeded to have a day of fun at Magic Kingdom. Pirates, Tron, Country Bears (which we saw with
@Drew the Disney Dude), PeopleMover, Space, and then fireworks with the dessert party. We had a great time. The rest of the crew headed back to the hotel, but with permission from my rep, I met up with my dad and closed out the night at the park with another showing of the Bears and a ride on 7DMT.
We also started to get to know our camera crews, whom we'd know very intimately through the next week - every time we showed even the slightest bit of emotion or happiness, there'd be two cameras, a selfie stick, and a boom mic in our faces.
Rating - 10/10 absolutely amazing day.
Photos/videos coming later.