Trip Report No, seriously, we have important meetings... honest! Live reporting.

Hello WDWMagic friends and family. I know, I know... back when we last travelled together in February, the next trip wasn’t supposed to be until December. But then @MeffysMom and I got our new teaching assignments for the upcoming year. And we both are teaching Advanced Placement classes. And the Annual AP National Conference is at the Swan/Dolphin next week. So... we had to add in a trip!

If you’ve followed along with us before, you know that our trio travels every chance we get (and almost always via car). Well, with no Disney planned, we decided to drive cross country this past month with the destination being a Disney cruise to Alaska and most of the drive through Canada. It was 8000 driving miles, plus the cruise of amazing experiences, but also an exhausting 4 weeks. We didn’t expect to be turning around 6 days later for the 900 mile drive to WDW.

We hit the road late tonight after @MeffysMom gets done ushering Hamilton in Baltimore. So a very late night drive! Here’s a brief overview of the plans:

Wednesday- arrive around 4pm and check in to Pop Century. Then DVC bowling at Splitsville and a short evening visit to Magic Kingdom.

Thursday- morning at Epcot, then get checked in for meetings. In the evening we will be going to the DVC Moonlight Magic at Animal Kingdom.

Friday- EMH at Magic Kingdom, then Meffysmom has meetings and our daughter and I will be on our own. The evening will be at Studios.

Saturday- more meetings for Meffysmom, while our daughter and I are going to take a slow tour of Epcot. Then we are all meeting up for more Epcot time.

Sunday- this is my meeting day, so the girls are possibly doing a nuts 4 parks and Disney Springs in one day PLUS moving to Old Key West. For the evening we will head back to Epcot for our final final Illuminations.

Monday- morning at Animal Kingdom and then nice dinner at The Edison.

Tuesday- check out day with a morning at Studios and then maybe stop in Magic Kingdom before the long drive home.

As usual, I’ll try to do live posting throughout the adventure. See you soon!

 

[brifraz]

I guess this isn't so much live anymore since it's been 5 months. Pretty much all the posting for this report was from my phone and I'm a computer guy. After the drive home, I pretty quickly was back into preparing for marching band season and wasn't really on my phone at all. Since our laptop was on life support, I didn't find myself on wdwmagic at all for a while. Well, now we are getting ready for a trip with family next week AND I bought a new laptop on Black Friday, so I've got better access and a few minutes (snow day today off school!) and I'm finally going to get those promised pictures from the last day!

So, the morning was at Hollywood Studios. As mentioned earlier, we were in Studios pretty early and got to enjoy quite a bit. Toy Story and Alien Swirling Saucers via the standby line and then Slinky with an FP+.

Then we met up with Edna Mode and then headed to Star Tours and Muppet Vision. Afraid that our Edna Mode pictures have yet to get downloaded from Memory Maker as I've only just gotten the million or so photos from our phones, camera, and old laptop and my brain is a bit friend in that area. So, you'll just have to imagine those same smiling faces with a huge Edna Mode head between them!

Then it was over to Magic Kingdom with the masterful FP+ scoring. Splash Mountain first, then over to Haunted Mansion, and our final adventure of this trip was a visit to Tinkerbell.

Or was it??? We had planned to hit Disney Springs for some early dinner before getting on the road, but realized that we had a little more time than expected. And some curiosity. So... we decided to have a little adventure. At the VOID. Yes, we gave it a try with the Ralph Breaks the Internet adventure. Had some technical difficulties as we got set-up (huge thunderstorm, power outage, internet down, etc) but once we were up and running, we had a lot of fun as these three characters.

Shooting virtual thingamabobs while wearing a huge helmet doohickey works up a big appetite, so before our 15+ hours on the road, we made a stop at the Polite Pig for some dinner. It was very good and will be another place we visit again, I'm sure.

At that point, we hit the road and, as per usual, began planning our next visit which is now just a week away!

 

[brifraz]

Or...maybe I really did already have those pictures from Memory Maker and didn't realize they were here! Some great shots from the last day in both Studios and Magic Kingdom!

 

[Darstarr]

Way to finish strong!
Looking forward to the next adventure!

 

[brifraz]

Way to finish strong!
Looking forward to the next adventure!

Saying finish strong after I took a 5 month delay to finish the TR reminds me of the last few races I have run. Past couple 5Ks I have done with my daughter, I convince myself that I'm going to make it through only to have one of my knees give out in the first 50 yards. She runs on and finishes in 25 minutes and I hobble across the line in nearly twice that time... finishing strong!

 

[SharonD]

Enjoyed reading your report, and nice job coming back to finish it!

 

[slipperalwaysfits]

We hit the road late tonight after @MeffysMom gets done ushering Hamilton in Baltimore. So a very late night drive! Here’s a brief overview of the plans:

So, Quarentine has me bored, time to read more trip reports from @brifraz !!! How'd @MeffysMom get to usher Hamilton? Was it a high school production?

Then we headed to the Living Seas and spent a good half hour actually exploring the aquarium. We all tend to forget, in our rush to do exciting things, that it really is a high quality aquarium in there

The Nemo ride is cute but I really love the Living Seas and I can spend a long time in there! It's so fun to look around the aquarium and watch so many different species swim around!

Now, this evening is another adventure. Meffysmom managed to score seats at the premiere of the new Lion King, but sadly only two were available. So, the girls are off doing that.

Good job on the ticket procurement! IT was a visually stunning movie! I wasn't a fan of the animated one when I was a kid and it was released but now I prefer the animated one to the live version, except for the visual effects, of course. The nostalgia in me prefers Elton to Beyonce.

Being pretty hungry, we started our evening by using one of the meal vouchers for some chicken nuggets st Restaurantosaurus. Maybe not all that interesting, but free and comfortable. Plus I decided to splurge on this guy

What a fun after-hours event! The food vouchers are a great selling point and that cupcake looks absolutely incredible!!! The Safari in a rainstorm looks fun! I'd love to see so many animals moving about!

So, we bailed out and did Star Tours with just a 10 minute wait.

Ten-minute waits are part of the thrill of Disney Magic!

Now it was dinner time so we met up with Meffysmom and off to 50’s Prime Time.
Ended up sitting right next to @Tuvalu !

WOW!!! Lucky You! A @Tuvalu and @TrolleyFollower91 encounter!!! That must have been a fun conversation! Not sure how I feel about a PB & J milkshake!

I think the Darth Vader coming out of my head is pretty appropriate

AWESOME! I love it when spontanious things like that happen!

That’s the Brie, apples, and cranberry. Our daughter gets one every visit-she loves it!

Putting this on my must-try list for next time!

And, Epcot knows very well that people stake out spots 1-2 hours before the show. 40 minutes before show time is pretty darn late to close off a prime location and rudely tell people to move.

This is weird, that they hadn't cordoned off the area prior to showtime, like others say: EPCOT peeps totally knew this was happening, they just didn't know where.

The girls logged about 10 miles of walking over the course of the day, but loved it!

WOW! We average between 8-10 miles a day when we are there, too. It's a lot of walking, but so worth it. We try to get in long walks around the neighborhood so we aren't absolutely shot when we get to Disney.

And now, we find ourselves back at Animal Kingdom and they are about to ride for the third time (and it’s just 8:30).
We did get on the first train.

I LOVE Everest and it's such a thrill to get in so many rides at once! I can only handle 4 in a row on that one because of the G-forces, but it's worth it!


Wonderful trip report! Glad you had a wonderful time and what a great excuse to have your AP conference there to go to Disney!!

 

[brifraz]

So, Quarentine has me bored, time to read more trip reports from @brifraz !!! How'd @MeffysMom get to usher Hamilton? Was it a high school production?

The main theater in Baltimore uses volunteers to usher all their shows. When the season is happening normally (who knows what or when that might be now) she ushers about once a week and then also picks up/trades shifts with others. For Hamilton, I think she ended up ushering 6 or 7 times over the 4 week run of the show.