The Magic Kingdom - Day 1

Saturday April 25th was our day for the Magical Kingdom of Disney.  Our day started out early as we had a couple teenaged enthusiasts who insisted we get there the moment the park opened.  I willingly got up by 7 am, and drug myself through a shower.  After a slightly later start than was initially planned, we made it onto a shuttle headed to MK.  Within the Disney property there are free shuttles that will take you to the hotels and parks, which was a good thing because the property is enormous!  From our hotel we took a twenty-minute bus ride and a monorail just to get to the park entrance.

We made it!

I didn't realize prior to going, but Disneyworld is divided into four distinct parks: Magic Kingdom, Epcot center, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood.  We only made it to two of the parks during our adventures.  Magic Kingdom is most similar to Disneyworld with several distinct differences.  I was having the strangest sense of deja vu.  My family and I are regular visitors to Disneyland, and therefore know the park pretty well.  Disneyworld was similar enough that I knew which rides were my favorites, but different enough to confuse me.  Seriously, so confused!

Disney World is much more tech savvy than it's older cousin.  Tickets, fast passes, photo ops, even money were all electronic, which made navigating the park much easier in ways.  Fist stop was to pick up some digital fast passes, then we jumped our butts onto the first ride of the day - Space Mountain!!

I began noticing differences from Land immediately.  First of all, the lines themselves were much more interactive.  In an effort to make waiting in line with hundreds of strangers less taxing, Space Mountain had fun little shooting games in the line, similar to Galaga.  (They thought we wouldn't notice.)  This theme was present in pretty much all the lines, but I liked Space the most!

Get ready for a lot of Avenger's references!  Sorry, not sorry.

That early in the morning we practically walked onto the ride, which was awesome!  Space Mountain and Indiana Jones are my favorite rides in the park, and since Indy didn't have a presence at World, we made it onto this ride several times throughout the trip.  I also had a good time figuring out where the hidden camera within the ride was.  However, they had an irritating trend in Florida of needing to go to a booth manned by an employee to actually view your photo, so you couldn't plagiarize your shot for free.  Seriously, I'm an expert at making dumb faces for in-ride cameras, and I disapproved of where they placed the one for Space.  It was right around a turn so you're not even looking at it - whose bad idea was that?

The original plan was to spend only one day at Magic Kingdom, and one day at Epcot, so our goal was the same as at Universal - do all the things!  We took advantage of our fast passes, and hopped one of the busiest rides - Seven Dwarves mine ride.  It was basically a princess-themed Big Thunder Mountain, and I definitely would not have waited 30 minutes, much less the 90 minute stand-by line.  We did make it onto several of the old classics, including Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Big Thunder Mountain.  Much to my chagrin, I was also forced onto It's a Small World.  I harbor a deep dislike of that ride and it's ridiculously catchy tune.  In all good fun I texted my brother, "I'm being forced onto the bloody 'It's a Small World' ride.  I'm dying inside."  It really wasn't so bad, but my brothers and I have too good a time making fun of it!

Because Pirates is probably my third favorite ride, I did notice when the entire section of floating through the bayou, the watery drop into the darkness at the beginning of the ride, and the ascent back up the hill at the end had been cut.  Sorry World, California does it better!  Also notable by their absence were Indiana Jones, and the Matterhorn.  Although to be fair, I think the Matterhorn made its home in Animal Kingdom.  Overall Disneyworld was roomier and therefore less crowded, but I still think I favor Disneyland!

Within the park there was a growing trend of little girls dressed up a princesses with their hair in fancy up-dos with glittery makeup.  These little humans had made a visit to the Bibbidy Bobbity Boo salon, a place for miniature costumes, hair, and makeup.  We randomly stumbled upon a pirate themed salon for little swashbucklers, and for some reason the nice lady helped up select our pirate names!  I will now be known as Charlotte Tackrash.

Or perhaps some form of knight?...

At some point during the day Rach and I split off from our teenage accomplices to do some shopping.  They were interested in riding Splash Mountain, and with the 'wet shoe Dudley Do-Right disaster' fresh in our minds, we decided to skip it.  Rach has a two-year-old daughter, so we had a blast looking at miniature princess swag.  Side note, I can definitely tell she is a mother, because any cute toddler or infant was an instant draw for Rach!  It was really entertaining for me, and also very obvious what a different stage of life I'm in right now.  Namely not thinking about kids at all, while that's the number one important thing to her.  We also ran into some cute characters, including the wicked stepmother and her daughters from Cinderella.

After running around to all kinds of rides we took a brief break to check out Tom Sawyer island.  This is something I rarely do, and it was actually pretty fun to check out the random foot trails, as well as just sit in a less crowded area.  By then all our feet were basically destroyed!  Haha.  Seriously, we'd sit down at the hotel at the end of the day, then realize how sore our poor legs were once we tried to stand up again.

We ended up leaving the park a little early in order to get to the opening ceremonies for the DECA competition.  It ended up being this massive event with something like 18,000 high schoolers.  It was so packed that we had trouble even moving around the conference center, much less keeping our group together.  As a part of the event the kids were all given swag related to their particular state, and throughout the weekend they worked on trading with each other.  These included pins, some form of headgear, and something that lit up - like a fairy wand or lightsaber!

It was hilarious, because the hot items included literally anything from Canada!  I too got in on some trading, but I ended up giving most of my swag to the students.  It was a blast, but it did take forever to get a bus back to our hotel at the end of the evening.  Ah welcome sleep!

Sunday came as a welcome respite from the constant tourism we had experienced thus far.  As a DECA advisor, Rachel was assigned to work at a booth for most of the morning, which pretty much left me to my own devices.  That meant I slept in, took a nice long shower, and sat out on the balcony reading!  I was planning on heading down to the hotel lobby to get some lunch, but was dismayed to discover they were only open for breakfast on Sundays.  I decided to try out the restaurant at the neighboring B Hotel, which was some kind of American cuisine.  When Rach got back from advising, we decided to venture over to Downtown Disney.  It ended up being a short walk away from our hotel, and we had fun browsing through the random shops.  Admittedly we were a bit disappointed by the shopping selection, but we did enjoy a delicious dinner at a Mexican joint.  The rest of the day was spent relaxing, hanging out on the balcony, and reading my book.  What a lovely day!