Day 1 Part 2!
Once we were ready for the party, we made our way over to MK on a relatively empty bus, and arrived to a HUGE line.
We got there at 3:45 because we knew we did not want to go see Jack and Sally, and we didn’t want to stand in the sun for hours. We’ve done that in years past, and yes, we’ve gotten in the park exactly at 4, but we almost melted waiting to do so. So this year we decided to get there a little later, even if that meant sacrificing a few minutes of park time.
We were in the park by 4:10. The line moved FAST! So, totally worth it to get there a little later. (Jack and Sally had a 210 minute wait by 4:10 so it was a good thing that was not our plan!). Our priorities for the party were rides, candy, and shows.
We got our bracelets and started to make our way around the hub. We started with Tomorrowland and decided we’d do multiple loops throughout the night – first loop would be rides that don’t have a wait during regular park hours, since the park was still open to party guests. Then we’d loop for rides that had shorter wait times once the party started, and then loop again for anything we missed. Trick or treating along the way of course! We knew we wanted to see the shows and the parade, and had thought we’d do those last.
On our first loop around we went on Buzz Lightyear, Under the Sea, It’s a Small World, and climbed the Swiss Family Tree House. We had just been there a month before so we skipped some things that take more time, even though we love them, like CoP, Jungle Cruise, and the Peoplemover. We took lots of pics along the way.
We had planned to go on Pirates which was showing a 20 minute wait, but it went down when we got there. By this time it was almost 6, so instead of getting on a ride and missing the time for the Tron VQ, we did some pirate-y shopping and then sat ourselves down so we could focus on snagging a good BG! At 6:00 on the dot we got our boarding group and were in group 107!
We started to make our way back across to Tomorrowland and before we knew it, our Tron boarding group was called! We got to Tron by 6:15 and there was almost no one there. I think most people assumed they would not be called that quickly, because they were sending cars out half empty! We walked right onto Tron and were done by 6:35. We were so excited because we were worried we’d get called during a show or fireworks and we didn’t want to miss those (see my last trip report for when we missed fireworks due to the Tron VQ).
Since it was almost party time, we decided to make our way over to our first candy stop, the Monsters Laugh Floor. And this is where the crayons in the title comes in!
So, as you can *hopefully* tell, our costumes are Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather. But as we sat to watch some Monsters, we popped up on the screen and the two headed monster said “Do you know what would make this party great? Some tiny hats. Oh look! There they are! It’s crayons! There are crayons at the party!” They then also called us fancy traffic cones lol. We watched a few more jokes and then as we were leaving they put us up on the screen again and said “Oh, the crayons are leaving! Good bye crayons!”
We’ve never been on the screen before and we got such a kick out of that, that we started calling ourselves the crayons the rest of the night. So fun!
From there we continued our second loop. By now the party was in full swing! We went on Space Mountain (posted wait 30, actual 20), got zombie fingers and my amazing Donald sipper from Cosmic Rays (literally the only thing I wanted to buy this trip!), went on Haunted Mansion (posted wait 50, actual 20), and got the candy corn milkshake from Pecos Bills.
As we were drinking our milkshake, we realized the first parade was about to start. And we were in an AMAZING spot in the Pecos Bills seating area, with no one in front of us. So, we decided to stay. We had planned to do the second parade but this was too perfect to move! I bought us some nachos and we sat and ate and watched Boo to You from the best spot ever! I am not a parade person but I LOVE that parade!
After that we went on Big Thunder Mountain (posted wait 10, actual 5) and continued on past a still-broken Pirates. We were starting to worry that it would never re-open, which made us sad since it’s one of our favorites. By this time, the fireworks were about 20 minutes away. We decided to head back toward the hub to see if we could watch them from a not-to-crowded spot, assuming we would not get close enough to see Jack.
We were wrong! This was a sold out party but for some reason, there really were not a lot of people trying to watch the fireworks from the hub. We managed to get a great spot with lots of room (sitting down and spreading out before the show started!) and we could see Jack very well.
After the fireworks, there was 15 minutes till the next Hocus Pocus show. We had planned to do the midnight show but we were so close to the stage already, and had done most of what we wanted to do, that we decided to stay for this one. As people left after fireworks, we filled in the empty spaces, and ended up right in front of the stage! Again, with tons of room. Everyone was sitting and relaxing until the show started. That show is SO GOOD, we loved it so much.
Once it finished we looked at the app and saw that Pirates was back on! So we made our way back to Adventureland to ride (posted 10 min, actual walk on). When we got off, we decided to head back to Fantasyland for the end of the night. We got there at 11:40 and still had 7 Dwarves and Peter Pan to do. We figured we would only be able to do one, and chose 7 Dwarves which was showing a 30 minute wait.
It was walk-on! We finished at 11:55 and decided to run over to Peter Pan even though our feet were yelling at us at this point (we were wearing cute sneakers for our costumes, NOT our regular park shoes!). We made it onto Peter which was also basically a walk-on, and when we were finished, the party was officially over!
We made our way back to the buses as the final Hocus Pocus show was still going on, got on the first one that came, and headed back to our room. Barefoot by this point because OUCH lol. We were in bed by 1:15, which was better than we had thought and gave us *slightly* more time to sleep for our rope-drop-to-fireworks park-hopping day 2 to come!