Quick weekend trip report and info on naval battle at Epcot Saturday night...lol

Welcome aboard folks - please keep your hands inside the trip report at all times. Some of the pics come from an iPhone so please excuse the quality in some cases.

Got back earlier tonight from a 3 day trip staying at CS. Went to MVMCP on friday night. First the obligatory picture of the castle from friday night:

Crowds were pretty good size although pretty much everything was a walk on most of the night. The "florida snow" was not on at any of the times we were near main street, not sure about that.

An artsy shot:

Parade Crowds:

Our group for fiday night:

Finally a video from that night proving that they will pretty much let anybody onto the rides no matter how grizzly they may be. The video is almost un-bearable. (YouTube darkened it up a bit in the transfer. sorry.)

MVMCP Video

More to come - Chapter 2 is next....:wave:

 

[Horizons78]

Moving along now to Saturday Morning and DHS....

My SUPER EXCITED friends on the tram in morning:

It was actually pretty cold that morning for those of us native to the sunshine state.

Me and Jodi on the way in:

Crowds were ok saturday at DHS - we are about 97% sure we saw Gary Sinise walking around. He is the narrator starting tonight at CP over at Epcot so who knows.

How do you like my Scrooge?

On to Chapter Three and the final part of our update for today.....:wave:

 

[Horizons78]

Welcome to Epcot saturday afternoon!

Rode SE right when we got there - it certainly is nice to see a line there.

I think I look pretty good in a black jumpsuit:

Later on that night - "The Earth and the Moon."

Now....About my naval battle comments.... We went to the 8:15 CP with Edward James Olmos as the narrator. It was just as awesome as ever. We have seen Olmos the last couple of years as we like the way he performs. The choir was great Saturday night and the orchestra was spectacular under the direction of Mr. Jung-Ho Pak who is simply an awesome, very animated conductor! We all agreed we would love to see a production anywhere with him in command.

At any rate - the CP ran to about 9:20 and we made a beeline for the Isola over at Italy which, surprisingly, did not have a private group booked into it. It wasn't until about 2 minutes before the start of Illuminations that we even thought to look at the wind. Big mistake! :lol: We were pretty packed in near the railing so we decided to stick it out. Within 3 minutes of show start we were completely enveloped in a Fog/Smoke blanket. Some people were laughing, some were definately not laughing. We laughed.

All you could see were places in the sky where it would get brighter for a second. You absolutely could not make out any detail at all! Everyone in our group is an AP so we are up there all the time so it wasn't that bad - just really funny. This is how we arrived at the "Naval Battle" designation. I made the comment that "this must be what Francis Scott Key saw...." and we all had a really good time furthering that idea along. At the begining of 'Promise' we decided to run toward canada which is where we finally stopped, out of the line of smoke with plenty of time to catch the additional Christmas fireworks. The fog by the time we left was pretty thick.

A very foggy SE:

And what I thought was a great shot with the fog from the exit:

Well that's about it folks. Thanks for riding watch your head and step, and if you can't watch your head and step - watch your language!

Merry Christmas to all my family online here at wdwmagic and may the blessings of the season find you and all of yours in good health and good times.:xmas:

Looking forward to seeing some of you at our SE Re-Opening Party coming up! :wave:

 

[SweetMagic]

Glad you had a nice trip! Thanks for the cool fog pics, although I must admit my favorite part of the pictures is the lower right hand corner :lol: Nice touch!

 

[LeeSeeBabe]

Thanks for the trip report! I got to ride SSE when I went too, and my face wasn't on the screen. Just another thing to be excited for the grand opening! Anyway, glad you had a good time!

 

[CAPTAIN HOOK]

Thanks for sharing your trip

 

[Tiggerfanatic]

Spunds like you had fun. We ran into some cold weather last week, too. We woke up to 27 degrees on Monday morning. We're used to that up here in PA, but wasn't quite ready for it in Florida. The gift shops were doing a brisk business in blankets and hoodies!!

 

[TurboCaroline]

Nice report!

 

[dandaman]

I remember having a blast with having all the smoke drift right across to us... I even made the same "naval battle" comment. :lol: