Day 2 Part 2!
Once we got into Epcot via the International Gateway, we high-tailed it over to Imagination for the Figment meet and greet. Having just done 2 days at Epcot a month prior, we had really ridden everything multiple times, so there were only two things we had to do this trip - meet Figment, and ride Soarin' which had just changed over to Soarin Over California.
We made it to the Imagination Pavilion and there he was! My favorite purple dragon! I have been a huge Figment fan since I was 3 and he was created, so this was a big deal for me! My living room is Figment themed As it was for everyone else in the queue, since everyone seemed to be decked out in their best Figment gear!
They told us the wait would be 1 hour and 20 minutes, and it actually ended up taking 1 hour 30 minutes. It was NOT that long of a line, but for some reason Figment takes short breaks every 5 families or so. I'm not sure what he's doing in that time - the breaks are too short to get the costume off to go to the bathroom! Maybe swapping out Figments? I'm not sure. But that definitely made it take much longer because he was constantly going in and out.
Waiting....
The actual meet was awesome, he was so cute and took time for lots of pictures with each group. After meeting him, I bought way more Figment swag than I needed (but the Figment merch is SO MUCH BETTER now!), and then left the pavilion for some more rides.
We crossed over Future World (will always be FW to me) and rode Spaceship earth with had about a 10 minute wait. Then it was on to Test Track, in which my kids had their first single rider experience ever! I generally hate riding TT because the line is always SO LONG no matter what it says. I've never waited on the line when the ride didn't break down at least once. Sometimes never to come back online and I've wasted hours waiting for no reason. Also, I recently learned that the posted wait times only include the time you wait before getting into the room to design your car. But as we all know, there's AT LEAST a 20 minute wait after that to go on the actual ride! So this ride always ends up taking twice as long as it says it will take and I'm just over it lol. So I told my girls - who are shy and don't like to talk to strangers - that the only way I'll ever do TT again is if they do single rider. They agreed. And even they could not believe it - we literally WALKED RIGHT ON. We chose not to design a car and just walked straight through and onto the ride. Under 5 minutes. It was AMAZING. Seriously, unless you have small children who can't ride alone, do single rider. Even a LL is terrible for this ride because you still have that second line after the car design room. Single rider all the way!
We ended up in 3 different cars but we all went out and finished at the same time, so it was perfect. Once done with that, we decided to start making our way around the world, because there were a few things we wanted to eat that we didn't get to last time.
World Showcase was a MADHOUSE. The "drinking around the world" crowd was next level this day. Note to future selves - avoid Epcot on Saturday nights during Food and Wine. Thankfully we had done most of our Festival eating the month before, because the lines for literally ALL festival foods were huge and in the blazing sun.
Our first stop was the Brew-Wing lab where we had to try the pickle milkshake. It was....interesting. It did not have a strong pickle taste, but a strong dill after-taste. We also had the peanut butter and jelly sticky wings which were delicious.
We entered world showcase and thought we would take a spin on the Grand Fiesta tour, only to find out the queue started OUTSIDE and it was a 35 minute wait! WHAAAAT?!?!?! That tells you all you need to know about the state of Epcot this weekend. We skipped that and decided we'd try again when we came back for our Frozen LL at the end of the night.
Then over to China where my daughter got the Mongolian beef she had been craving since the last trip. Then to France, where we waited a half hour for the pressed brioche ice cream sandwich that my daughter saw on TikTok and we didn't want to wait for last time. We got pumpkin with caramel sauce. It was good, but I'm not sure I'd wait another half hour for it again!
After we ate all our food, I was struggling to stay awake, so it was time to get myself on some rides to get a second wind! So we headed back over to Future World and into the Land, my favorite pavilion. One spin on Living with the Land just to remind my kids that you are supposed to LEARN at Epcot, lol, and then on to Soarin' Over California (used a LL for this). My girls had never seen this version and loved it because we have a lot of family in Cali and they knew many of those locations. And there are so many more and stronger smells than the Around the World version. But they didn't like the lack of transitions between the scenes and say they prefer Around the World better. I like them both for different reasons.
Then back into world showcase for our final two rides of the night. Grand Fiesta was back to a walk-on and all was right with the world lol. So we did that, and then headed over to Norway to use our LL for Frozen, our last ride of the trip. It was bitter sweet because we knew our trip was coming to an end but having one of our favorite rides be the last one was pretty perfect. Here we are in the front row letting it go
We decided to head back over to the Brew-Wing lab to watch the fireworks. Epcot Forever really has nothing going on on the actual water, so there's no reason to fight for a spot in front. Instead, we sat ourselves down against a wall with no one anywhere near us, and could still see the tops of the pavilions lighting up, as well as an unobstructed view of the fireworks. I still don't particularly care for this show, but it was a bit more magical this time sitting there comfortably with my girls after a whirlwind of an amazing two days, knowing we had successfully done everything we set out to do.
We made our way back to the Connections store for a little shopping before heading to the buses and back to the hotel. My kids were convinced we were the only ones staying in the Country section because we were once again all alone making the looooong trek back to the room, but we were in bed by 11 for some much needed rest before our final (non-park) day!
