So after a mostly positive experience at Magic Kingdom yesterday, I figured I may as well share my thoughts on the eve of the month of the 50th:
-Despite heavy crowds and long wait times, the in-park experience was actually pretty good. FAR better than the 2018 visit that was marred by FP+ misery.
-Liberty Tree Tavern is a gem of a restaurant that I would love to see in more places. For the uninitiated, it's a lovely table service restaurant with rooms themed to different early Americans where it's essentially an all-you-can-eat Thanksgiving feast. The food and setting are absolutely perfect (Skipper Canteen, my dinner spot, was also nice, just a bit less perfect).
-Perhaps it was somewhat scaled down because of the anniversary, but Halloween at MK is essentially limited to Main Street.
-The castle paint job looks SIGNIFICANTLY better in person than it does in photos. Only found one completely terrible angle.
-Jungle Cruise, by virtue of its re-imagining, was the most popular thing in the park. I went there immediately at opening and I'm glad I did, because they made us walk the entire queue as if we were doing Peter Pan. Incidentally, I think the changes are a lateral move. If we're being honest, if divorced from its historical legacy, the Jungle Cruise was, by modern standards, an ok ride in 2020. It's still an ok ride in 2021. None of the changes were particularly bothersome or felt like they didn't belong, although they did not shoot the hippos, at least on my trip.
-Maintenance issues, naturally, reared their ugly head from time to time in terms of a broken AA here, the sounds of hydraulics there...
-What I thought was interesting was that even though FP/FP+/Geniewhatever are currently not running, waits still easily crossed the one hour mark for most attractions of interest and most lines were spilling out onto the midways. They weren't distancing either. Heaven help the park when Genie starts up over the next week or so.
-The newly redone and expended confectionary was...fine? It's yet another thing that the internet tells me I'm supposed to be mad at and I'm not really sure why.
-There's really not that much 50th merchandise, it appears. Lots of people walking out with Cinderella Castle anniversary bling playsets, but few other things to spend money on.
~HAUNTED MANSION~I know there are plenty of people on this forum, both those who have and have not experienced the WDW version that still maintain that the DL version is better, and that's their right. But sorry, the WDW version is better, and here's why (it's not just the fact that it's the only Mansion actually open during October, though that helps). The WDW version of the ride just *pops* in a way that the DL version simply does not, and also in a way that the vast majority of WDW attractions do not. There are a lot of attractions at WDW that are neglected, that have stilted audio, hydraulic sounds that aren't quite masked by the music, etc. Mansion has none of this. Everything is working, the audio is crystal clear (no dead speakers in the doom buggies as has often happened to me in California), and it really feels like the one ride at that park that is in HD surround sound vs. SD mono. As a Mansion purist, no version is perfect and I can and have elaborated on any number of things I'd like to see done differently in regards to how WDW runs it...but I simply have not, in my memory as an adult, seen the DL Mansion running so smoothly or as obviously well taken-care of as I saw in Florida yesterday. Half the time it feels like modern DL is burdened by the regular HM and just keeps it around because they feel like they can't get away with running HMH year round. Not so in Florida-it's clearly an attraction that both guests *and* the resort care a great deal about. And it's such a treat to see.
-Oh, and Swiss Family Treehouse. Some of you have forgotten just how much better this is than Tarzan's Treehouse. Simply perfection.
THAT SAID, almost all of this was kind of negated by the horrific walk out of the park yesterday. The park closed at nine, which is stupidly early for right now and the crowd level that was there, but we thought that by waiting until 9:30 and taking the ferry we would be in the clear. Wrong on both counts, and waiting in a giant line to cross the darn lake AND THEN not have the option of taking a tram made me never want to give Disney money again. Disney: RUN. YOUR. TRAMS.
So really, better than I expected, but the park (at least) still needs work. It really could have benefitted from the TLC DL got for its 50th, which was nowhere to be seen, but even just opening the park for another hour and/or doing something about the abysmal end-of-the-day situation would have made a huge difference.
