Trip Report Day 6. Thursday, August 15, 2019. REALLY REALLY LONG.
Today was our day at Hollywood Studios. Kind, lovely @Shmebulock had gotten our FPs for us because I was on a flight during my 7am/60 day time period, and she had managed to get us SDD FPs! They were for the evening, but that was fine. I was a little nervous we might get rained out of SDD, but decided based on all the reports I’d read here that my family just wasn’t up for the insanity of the SDD Rope Drop dash. I was planning on TSMM until the bus ride there, when I decided to check what a touring plan that did ASS first would look like. The ASS line seemed to build quickly so I decided we should do that first instead. The bus was filling up so I made my 3 year old sit on my lap. Some random woman sat next to me.
While I was optimizing my new plan, the woman next to me asked, hey, are you on Lines? And that’s how I met @mamaluvsdisney.
We arrived at Hollywood Studios at maybe 8:10 or 8:15 for a 9am opening. My mom was still feeling awful after our lunch at Homecomin’ yesterday and had spent much of the night in the bathroom, so she stayed in bed. My wife was feeling weak but didn’t want to miss any more of our trip, so came with us. She thought she might rent an ECV.
We were through security and in the crowds by 8:25.
At 8:25, we are just in front of the intersection with Sunset Boulevard. My dad asks me what time the park opens, grunts, and goes to sit down on the large cement planter. I worry that we will lose him in the crowd. Wife has already peeled off to use the bathroom and maybe get an ECV, but I was slow through security because the stroller line was waaaaayyy to the left.
Wife looked at ECVs as we entered but they were charging $70/day to rent one and wife decided to skip. She told me later she felt so bad that she wasn’t sure she’d make it more than an hour or two, and didn’t want to rent the ECV and get such little use out of it. Made me feel even worse for putting her through rope drop at HS after I realized how ill she still was. Too late!
So we stand in the crowd. I can’t see the front but the back is rapidly filling in behind us. Cast members urge us to crowd in. There is space diagonally to my left, but I can’t easily move the double stroller into it. It gets filled in by people who are not my family. My dad and wife finally join us. Kids are this point are very frustrated with the wait especially because I won’t let them use my phone (my external battery charger stopped working) to kill time.
At 8:49 (I had expected earlier!) the crowd finally starts to shuffle forward. There’s a jam at the doorway/passageway. I go left but that may be a bad decision. I am just trying to keep my family with me. I accidentally clip 2 people’s ankles with my stroller. I feel awful but I can barely see the end of the double stroller and at least 1 of the women had stopped short right in front of me at the entrance to TSL! I really did feel bad, though.
99% of the crowd peels off for SDD and I realize that we should have either just ridden SDD or not bothered to rope drop (coming 15 minutes later and being at the end of the crowd would have been fine). Being in the rope drop crowds only to skip SDD is dumb. Don’t do what we did.
That said, we got to ASS and were maybe 3rd or 4th in line after parking the stroller. It was 8:55am.They hadn’t opened the ride yet and I worried that maybe we should have gone to TSMM instead. But at 9:01 exactly, they let us go into ASS, and we were of course in the first run.
ASS doesn’t get a lot of love around here, but my family loved it. It was DS3’s favorite ride across all of the parks. For him it was a thrill ride, and for the rest of us, it was just a nice, silly ride.
When we got off ASS, Jessie was right at the exit. We waited for about 5 minutes for a few people ahead of us, and met Jessie! We hadn’t brought anything for her to sign because we hadn’t planned on doing characters this AM, but we got pictures and hugs.
Then we went to TSMM. Wait time predicted about 25 minutes and this was accurate. Ride was fun. My dad thought he did well (22k) until he saw the rest of our scores. Even my 3 year old beat him! (with 29k). My dad was a good sport about it, though.
We were ahead of schedule and I had been wanting to check out Woody’s lunchbox—I really wanted the totchos! Sadly I hadn’t realized they would still be serving breakfast. I also couldn’t mobile order because then I couldn’t use my wife’s dining plan credits—this was annoying the ENTIRE trip. Never let someone without his or her own MDE account be the only person who can access dining plan credits.
I stood in line. Whatever. We got the smore’s sandwich with a root beer float with a meal credit and the yogurt parfait with cash. Initially I was told I could get the yogurt parfait as a snack credit even though it wasn’t listed as one, but then (of course) it didn’t work and we had to do 2 separate transactions. I was annoyed since I had told the cashier it wasn’t a snack credit, and the whole process took forever. On the upside, my family managed to find a table. I was hungry but nobody else was. DS3 knocked the yogurt parfait off the table, spilling most of it. Didn’t matter because he said he didn’t like it anyway. DD7 had really wanted the s’more sandwich but then didn’t like the bread (wheat). I ate some but it was very very sweet. I really just wanted the totchos. I would have settled for breakfast ones, but nobody else wanted any so I’d skipped them. The only good part about the woody’s stop was that they had tons of cups of free ice water, and it was really hot out.
My wife was looking green at this point, but said she wanted to stick with us through our FPs so she could help out with DS3.
We headed to the lightening mcqueen dance party, which was seriously underwhelming.
DS3 refused to participate or even to pose by his favorite car! He said he was sick and wanted to go back to the hotel and watch Mickey. I didn’t think he was really sick but couldn’t figure out what was going on. DD7 participated a little. DS3 decided he absolutely had to have another souvenir. I left my wife in charge while my dad, DD7, and I went to use our ToT FPs. We had a FP for my mother as well, but she was still stuck in the hotel. I think I cancelled it but honestly don’t remember.
Those of us who went on it loved ToT, or at least, as my dad put it, “survived it.” My dad is a Twilight Zone fan but we hadn’t really explained the drop. hehe.
After ToT, wife left. It started to rain so we just went and saw the lightening mcqueen show (again, for DS3). It was cute but very very skippable. DS3 barely paid attention and just played with his new car that Wife had bought him outside… Everybody was a little cranky and I tried desperately to figure out what to do next. Our RnR FP wouldn’t start for another 45 min.
We ended up walking back up sunset boulevard and going to the Disney jr show. The kids liked it. My dad took his hearing aids out and liked it better that way. It was fine—I spent most of it in the back on the phone with housekeeping/being on hold with housekeeping (about our lack of it). Finally I spoke to a manager and they threw 3 fastpasses at the 6 of us for our next day at AK (pandora blocked). That was fine and I sat through the rest of the show. DD7 really liked the paper leaves and tried to collect them, but they fell out of the diaper bag later that day in a bathroom and I said we were absolutely not taking trash from a show that had then touched a bathroom floor home with us. So.
They must go through SO many paper leaves. And soap flakes in the frozen show.
DS3 was upset that Mama had gone back to the hotel, but he was surprisingly into the Disney Jr show for a kid that has very little exposure to Disney Jr. I didn’t even know he knew who Vampirina was! He liked her well enough to want to stand in line and meet her afterward the show, but then got shy and wouldn’t actually hug her.
Mid-way through the line for Vampirina, DS3 relaxed his death grip on me and decided his Papa Gene (my dad) could hold him instead. Since his legs “didn’t work” after all… So DD7 and I took the opportunity to run away, and we used our FPs for RnR. These were actually DS3 and Wife’s FPs, since they weren’t doing anything that required FPs and hadn’t wanted to go on/were too short for ToT. So some band switching, but that was fine. My wife and I carried an extra copy of each other’s bands every day, me for the dining plan access, her because I had only been able to get the band she wanted that way. My mom finally enters the park and meets up with my dad and DS3 at Vampirina. They then head to BB-8 at my direction. DS3 has zero star wars knowledge but has somehow decided that BB-8 is his “favorite robot.” They also meet Chewbacca, whom DS3 called “the furry dog.”
DD7 LOVED RnR. I was terrified. Also, it hurt my head! DD7 swore it didn’t hurt her head but I have no idea how it wouldn’t. DD7 wanted to go on again and again, but I was barely willing to ride it with a FP. I told DD7 that me going on rides like this was proof I loved her. I had also taken a pregnancy test that morning and it had been negative, so I felt very “what the hell, let’s do crazy things.”
After RnR, we just made it to Frozen. We were in the very back, so no snow, but I still liked the show. Wife really loves the historians, so I was sorry she was missing it, but nothing I could do. The Frozen show was at 1:30 and our lunch ADR at 50s Prime Time was at 1:55, so I knew we would be a few minutes late but I figured it would be fine. However, when we came out of Frozen, I couldn’t find our stroller! I looked for a few minutes but didn’t have time to look longer. So we just headed to 50s Prime Time, which was terrific. DS3 was a total grump (hungry, tired, maybe a little under the weather) when we went in and so I was letting him watch something on my phone. The waitress made a couple of comments about his walkie talkie but he very seriously told her it wasn’t a walkie talkie, it was a phone. Then he went back to watching and snarled when she tried to comment further. I felt bad but also needed him to have that distraction. He was literally trying to climb the walls of the restaurant before I gave him the phone.
We all loved 50s prime time. My mom still didn’t feel good so she only had the chicken soup, but she liked it. She managed to dump it all over her lap, unfortunately, but the waitress kindly brought her another. My mom also had a root beer float and spilled much of it. The waitress didn’t notice but did offer to refill the root beer later when she noticed my mom only had ice cream left. DD7 ordered something unremarkable but was happy to have her own food and not have to share as she’d been made to do at most of the prior meals.
My dad ordered the mixed platter and I got the meatloaf and a chocolate shake. We ordered the crab cake appetizers. I liked trying my dad’s, but the meatloaf was really terrific and I was glad I had a whole plate of it. I saved the crab cake for later and had it for breakfast the next day—really delicious. DS3 ate at least half of my meatloaf and then his mood dramatically improved. By the end of the meal he was actually smiling at the waitress. The green beans were also very good. I didn’t eat a lot of vegetables on this trip, but I am realizing that the ones I did eat were mostly green beans… We got the desserts to go because we were full. Don’t think I ever ate mine (apple crisp) but my dad liked his cheesecake back in the room.
There wasn’t much here that Wife could have eaten (gluten free and low fat), so I was glad she was back in the room resting. Still, at this point I both missed her and was worried we had way too many dining credits left.
After lunch it was raining. We ponchoed up and found the stroller—it was just in a different zone than where I had remembered parking it. We took the bus back to Pop and we all crashed hard. DS3, again, was asleep in the stroller before we got to the bus. I was grateful for my mom, who carried the stroller onboard. The double citi mini is just not a one-handed carry.
After naps, we snacked a little and headed back to HS. My dad decided to stay at the hotel and rest but gave us his magic band with precious SDD FP on it. Wife was really excited about SDD so roused herself to come as well.
When we got to HS, we had a little time to kill. We tried to go meet Olaf but there were a LOT of people waiting. We abandoned that mission since the kids didn’t seem to care much. DS3 really wanted to meet Buzz since he had a Buzz Lightyear shirt on. We got in that line and it moved very very slowly. I wanted to murder the families that took photos with 10 different configurations of their families. Maybe not murder, but at least ban from WDW. 
We felt a few drops of rain and Buzz’s handler warned us that if it started raining Buzz would stop signing. We mentally urged the people ahead of us to hurry. The woman ahead of us did so out loud, lol. It made no difference, but she promised us that she and her daughter would be quick, and they were. We were also quick and Buzz got through us and the family after us before the rain. Not sure about after that, as we’d walked away.
I was so so glad DS3 got to meet Buzz. DS3 is just a little nugget. He can be very challenging sometimes, but he is often so so sweet and was very sincere about wanting to show Buzz his shirt.
After that we set up rider swap at SDD and I sent my mom, Wife, and DD7 to ride first while I waited with DS3. We told my mom that SDD was not scarier than BTMRR. Apparently that isn’t true.
I wasn’t on the ride, of course, but Wife reports that my mom held on for dear life and then, at the part of the ride where it stops and beeps, my mom really thought the ride was broken and started freaking out. Then, when it does those gentle little up and downs, she said through gritted teeth, “I am not pleased with this ride.” Hahahaha.
So my Mom didn’t want to use the rider swap on her band anymore after that.
That left us with 6 more available rides: My mom’s RS, DD7’s RS, my RS as the original waiting person, my original FP, DS3’s original FP, and my dad’s original FP. And we had 3 people who wanted to ride. So Wife, DD7, and I rode 2 (more) times, meaning I rode 2x and they each rode 3x. Pretty great. My mom took DS3 to ride ASS, since DS3 loved it and my mom had missed it this morning. They “Went crazy,” as DS3 put it. My mom confirmed this meant they screamed a lot. DS3 loved it and my mom loved riding it with him.
It was now 8:30 with park closing at 9. We decided to get in line for TSMM since we didn’t care about fireworks and my mom had missed the ride earlier. Unfortunately, the line did NOT move quickly. I have no idea what happened, but it took about 50 minutes for the line + ride. The ride had been posted at 25 and TP had said 20. When we got near where we had loaded previously, we were instead directed up a flight of stairs and down another hallway. Finally we rode and everything seemed normal, but it was the longest line all trip and we definitely would not have stood in line that long if we’d known in advance!
We hurried out of the park as fireworks were going off all around us. The star wars show looked cool (although the fire was very hot!) but I just wanted to get out, as we had AK in the AM and hadn’t planned to stay that long at HS.
I was disappointed that we never made it to the muppet show attraction, as my kids love the muppets, but it was over by the time we got back to the park in the evening and just didn’t happen before lunch.
We had FPs for one of the Frozen shows (the latest show) but cancelled them because we had seen the show earlier w/o FPs. Probably would have been better to get FPs for everyone to ToT and for RnR to allow for repeat rides for the people who wanted to ride them, but I wasn’t that quick-thinking. Also I kind of felt bad planning to have some people not use any of/only use one of their planned FPs. But at HS, if you rope drop with a small kid, what on earth does that small kid need a FP for? Ah well.
We also had our last FP scheduled for night, so there were no 4+ FPs happening. With an afternoon break, those seem hard to make happen anyway.
Overall, it was an excellent day. Last year I hadn’t gotten to ride SDD and really wanted to, and ASS and 50s Prime Time were great surprise hits. I can’t imagine we’ll be back at HS anytime soon, but other than Muppets we really did everything we wanted to do and some extras.
