Trip Report The "Crayons" Take WDW: A Halloween Party Weekend Adventure

I'm back with a new trip report! This was a much shorter trip than my last one (3 days vs. 8 days!), but we had an amazing whirlwind of a weekend and I'm excited to share with you all!

Who: me and my two daughters (10 and 13)
When: September 21-24
Where: All Star Music

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BraveGirl

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Thanks everyone for following along!

Ok, so this was SUCH a whirlwind trip that I am going to break each day into part 1 and part 2. We did so much in three days we couldn't even believe it ourselves lol. So, let's begin!

Day 1 Part 1!

We flew in late on a Thursday evening, which is unusual for us. We typically get early morning flights so we can have a full Disney day when we arrive! But the kids had school (much to their disappointment lol) and I was trying to limit how much they missed, so we left from LGA in NY at 7:30 and arrived at MCO at 10:30. We took an uber to our hotel and arrived around 11:00. We are typically Pop people, but momma needed to save as much money as possible on this trip so we stayed at All Star Music. We loved the theming but did not love that we were put in the Country section - it was about an 8 minute walk to the food court/front desk/transportation! Really had to make sure we committed to leaving the room when we were ready because there was no quick run back to grab something lol.

Love the cute headboard of the murphy bed:

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So our first "official" day of the trip was Friday. We had the Halloween party that night, so we decided to have a lazy morning at the hotel. Mickey waffles for breakfast of course.

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Some pool time:


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And some exploring. I was disappointed to learn that there is no All-Star scavenger hunt. We love the one at Pop and were hoping to do one here. But we still walked around to all the different sections and the second pool and took it all in.

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We are big Broadway fans so that was our favorite section of course! I've been a huge "Fansie" since 1992 so of course this was my favorite marquis!

After exploring we made our way back to the hotel to get ready for our Halloween party! Stay tuned for part 2!
 

BraveGirl

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
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.
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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!
 

MickeyCB

Well-Known Member
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!
You guys deserve some kind of award for this party effort/accomplishments!!
 

BraveGirl

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Day 2 Part 1!

On very little sleep, I woke up at 6:45 to be ready to snag our LL's for our park hoping day of HS and Epcot. At 7:00 I refreshed my screen, tried to book my first LL and......it told me "something's wrong, try again later." What?! I started a bit of a panic because our park hopping adventure really depended on using LL's for our big ticket rides. And our room was SO. FAR. AWAY from the front desk, I couldn't run to ask for help quickly while my kids were still waking up. So I woke up my girls in a bit of a tizzy and said "HURRY UP WE NEED TO LEAVE OUR GENIE+ ISN'T WORKING AND I NEED TO GET TO THE FRONT DESK NOWWWWWW"

Poor girls are such troopers they jumped out of bed and were actually ready before I was! So by 7:15 we were out the door and rushing over to the front desk. I got there breathless and told the CM that my genie+ wasn't working...and she said no one's was and that the whole system was down. Ahhhh! Wish I would have known that before I ran out the door like a maniac! She said to just keep refreshing and at some point it would come back online.

So at this point we made our way over to the buses, read to get to HS for the early morning hours at 8:30. We were super early and they let us into the parks by 8:15.

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Our plan was to rope drop RRC because my older daughter doesn't ride it and it would be a super short wait for her to hang out by herself if we did it first. I love rope dropping RRC and ToT while the rest of the guests run over to Star Wars and Toy Story land! It's so empty and you can get both done so quickly. We ran over to RRC not only was there no wait, but they let us ride at 8:25 and we were done by 8:31! The park wasn't even supposed to be open yet (early hours started at 8:30) and we had already finished!

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We skipped on ToT so as not to make my oldest wait alone for another ride and then ran over to Slinky Dog. Genie+ had come back online but because I was just randomly checking every few minutes I missed the exact moment it was up, and by the time I saw it, Slinky Dog had a return time of 8:30 pm. Not going to work for us since we were spending the second half of the day at Epcot. So I booked TSM and we decided to just wait for SDD. It was our only "must do" of HS because it was broken our whole last trip. Posted wait time was 30 min but it was more like 20. Love that ride!

After that we used our LL for TSM and then made another LL for Mickey and Minnies Runaway Railroad. Then we ran over to Galaxy's Edge and did Smuggler's Run, with about a 25 minute wait. Pilots for both my girls, gunner for me. We skipped RoTR this trip, because we didn't have time to wait and I didn't want to spend the money on the ILL (especially since we had just ridden it last month!). It's a great ride but again, mama needed to save money this trip!

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While waiting for our MMRR LL, we did some shopping and took some pics.

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My feet were KILLING me because I only brought the one pair of shoes I wore for the Halloween party and they were NOT good park shoes. So, I am now the proud owner of my first pair of Crocs, which happen to be the 100th Anniversary ones!

Then we went on MMRR and we had pretty much done what we wanted to do, but it was still way too early to park hop! So we decided to see the 12:00 Beauty and the Beast show while we ate our lunches (somewhere in that panic-filled morning I managed to make everyone sandwiches!)

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After the show we said goodbye to HS and headed over to the Skyliners and Epcot.
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It was only about 1:00 when we got there, so we decided to walk around the lagoon and check out all the hotels. When we made it to the surrey bike stand at Boardwalk my youngest BEGGED me to try it. We had ridden them years ago but she was too little to pedal and sat in the front basket. She really wanted to pedal now. So against my better judgement (!!) we rented one for a half hour. The CM said we would have time to make it around the lagoon 2 or 3 times, and I assured him we were doing it once lol.

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As expected, we got stuck on the hill by Swan and Dolphin and I had to get out and push us. Thankfully a very nice gentleman saw our struggle and helped me push! We made it back to Boardwalk, returned the bike, and headed over to Epcot for part 2 of our day!
 

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