Day Nine – more breaks
Coming towards the end of our trip, we had another break day scheduled for today, which meant a bit of a sleep-in – hooray! But not too much of a sleep-in because we had an 8am booking for Jedi Training School! I found a Justin Aldridge, a former Jedi Training Academy cast member who had been furloughed (he’s since been brought back and is working at the Galactic Starcruiser) on the Ear For Each Other facebook group offering personal Jedi Training sessions. The Jedi Training had been a big hit with B on our previous trip but W hadn’t been old enough, and having him come to us was perfect because W is very clingy and definitely would not have wanted to do it at HS. It was actually amazing because I had messaged him months earlier and not heard back and figured he was just really busy but then a few weeks before our departure I’d gotten a message from him saying he was sorry, he’d somehow missed my message but he was still available – what great luck!
So anyway, just after 8am we met him outside on a grassy area and he spent 45 minutes teaching the boys the ways of the Force. He was AMAZING! So kind and patient, balancing B’s deep desire to learn how to battle with W’s deep desire to be silly and ask endless questions about Stormtroopers. He also threw in a dozen jokes for parents that still make me laugh – at one point he said that a Jedi’s most important job was to know how to hold a lightsaber without covering their face so Disney could sell the photos, I was dying. He was so incredible and I’d absolutely recommend him to everybody with kids who like Star Wars (or just fighting). (W, obviously, is the kind of kid who deliberately covers his face when told to not cover his face. I don’t fight it anymore.)
After Justin we had a 9am reservation at Kona Café, so we headed over there, got checked in and seated. It was…fine? Jay and I split the Tonga Toast which we agreed was just so-so, I much preferred B’s pancakes dipped in the Tonga Toast strawberry syrup. It was a good excuse to drink POG juice, though.
We had tossed around the idea of going to the waterpark today but it wasn’t all that warm and also it seemed like a lot of hassle – I knew the kids would have enjoyed it but I’m working on a thing about being less of a martyr and it seemed like a lot of work for the grownups on a break day so on the theory of “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” we decided to just go back to Disney Springs and this time try to do more of what the adults wanted to do.
This didn’t necessarily pan out that way, but that’s partly on us for raising kids who don’t really have the ability to be patient while they’re not being actively entertained. Plus B had decided, after Jedi training, that he needed another lightsaber – apparently all of his were too heavy for practice – so we had to go back to the Star Wars store, and W wanted more clothes for Stitch. I did get a bit of a wander through the Uniqlo store, though.
We also stopped in Amorettes, where we made a mistake – or maybe I’d made the mistake a month earlier. Before the trip, in an attempt to get the kids excited, we’d watched a “Top 10 50th Anniversary Snacks” video on YouTube, and one of the things she featured was this mini cake from Amorettes which the boys immediately decided was the #1 thing they wanted to eat. It was actually really lovely, designed to look like a geode. It also cost $22. And of course the kids saw it, and of course they wanted it, and of course we let them have it, and of course it looked a lot better than it tasted.
Actually Amorettes was very hit and miss here – the cake was fine but nothing spectacular, the wine slushie was delicious, and I got a passionfruit macaron that was actually inedible – the cookie was dry as dust with no discernable flavour and the filling was, for some reason, chocolate.
After we left Amorettes there was a school band playing in the little amphitheatre, so we stopped to watch that for a while, and then the skies were getting dark so we headed back to the hotel. I said on a previous day that we’d ordered Captain Cook’s and I’d had the Thai meatballs but I was wrong, it was actually this day that we did that, and ate them picnic style on the floor of our room. We then headed down to the beach to practice the newly acquired lightsaber skills, and over to the Grand Ceremonial House, ducking in just in time for – you guessed it, more rain!
There was supposed to be a Mickey tshirt tiedye activity on that afternoon but even though the weather had cleared up by the time it was supposed to start they cancelled it because of the weather, so we just hung out in the lobby pin trading, doing some colouring pages, and playing Uno – they had a table with games and colouring and stuff set up to use.
I also got worried around this point about not having any dinner reservations – the original plan had been Captain Cook’s but then we’d had that for lunch – so I looked in the app to see if I could find anything and there was a Whispering Canyon for 5:45! This had actually been on my original list of meals I wanted to do and then I ended up not booking it, so I grabbed that.
Around 5 we headed down to the boat launch to grab a boat to Wilderness Lodge, only to discover that there were no boats to Wilderness Lodge, you had to go to the Magic Kingdom and then take a different boat, so we did that.
Whispering Canyon was good, although I think they must have dialed down the shenanigans since COVID because there really wasn’t anything – there seemed to be one server who was doing stuff on the other side of the room but that was it. B was a little disappointed because I’d gotten him all ready to get his dad to ask for ketchup but then they just…brought us ketchup. I also think I would have preferred it on the dining plan – the cornbread was so good that I didn’t want to spend the, whatever, $35 on a skillet that I wasn’t really hungry enough for so I just got appetizer nachos, but then I did really want to try the skillet and I was afraid to try even a little taste of my husband’s because I didn’t want to get in trouble.
Whatever, I did get to eat a LOT of cornbread.
B REALLY wanted to watch the fireworks from the beach and it was already 7:30 so we grabbed an Uber back to the Poly, where we split up – B and I headed to the beach for fireworks while W and Jay headed to the pool for a nightswim. The beach was already pretty full when we got there but we found fairly good spot sitting on the sand and snuggled up to watch, which was a nice experience to have with my baby. Then we headed over to the pool to try to find the rest of our family, getting slightly sidetracked when an unaccompanied child of about 4 followed me out of the pool gates and while I was trying to figure out where his family was I lost B for a bit, but he was just on the lawn watching Encanto on the big projector they had set up there so it all ended ok. Turns out Jay and W had gone back to the room so we joined them there, and then I put the kids to bed while Jay headed back to Disney Springs for a bit – he ended up having a cool experience where it was just him and one other guy on the bus so the driver took them a different route and gave them a ton of cool facts about Disney history.
