That last picture is perfect!!
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Awww, man! How disappointing that it rained so hard! Glad that you did get to see fireworks, though.
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I’m late to this thread, but wanted to say thanks for the HM tip! I did not know you could skip the stretching room…that will come in handy when we go with our toddler.
Also share your frustration on ILL. I’ve only purchased ILL once and was so frustrated that it basically gives you a random time with no confirmation or ability to cancel. I knew going into it that genie+ would be like that but wasn’t expecting it for ILL.
And I agree that last fireworks shot is perfection. Enjoying your report!
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Day Seven – break day! (finally!)
Break day break day glory glory hallelujah! It was really nice to have a morning where I didn’t need to set the alarm, didn’t need to wake anybody up, didn’t need to do much of anything. We had had Wine Bar George reservations but I thought it might be nice to give the kids a break from the kind of patience required in sit-down restaurants, so I cancelled it the day before. I also don’t seem to have taken any photos so this is going to be a short (hopefully?) and likely kind of dull day, report-wise – I’m just going to throw some random photos in to break up the big wall ‘o text.
We lazed around the room watching Bluey for a while, which is honestly my personal favourite way to start any day regardless of where we are, and then hit Captain Cook’s for some breakfast on the patio, where I discovered that I have the only humans in the world who don’t like Mickey waffles, so B ate the better part of my breakfast burrito and W ate chocolate milk, his personal breakfast of champions. Then we rope dropped the pool.
We spent the morning there, bouncing from the splash pad, where the boys made a friend in the way that little kids do and spent a long time running around with him, to the pool, where W’s personal style of flail-swimming caught up with him and a lifeguard jumped in to save him, which INFURIATED him - he’s paddling along and suddenly a total stranger (actually multiple strangers, there were two adults nearby who also tried) was trying to rescue him when, in his mind, he was swimming like a fish. It was hilarious but I also felt very bad for the fully clothed sopping wet lifeguard, and we stuck closer to him from then on, to the hot tub. We had some drinks and some lunch from the pool bar, got some sun, and generally had a total great and relaxed pool morning.
We’d also brought the stroller and our wet shoes down and set them up in a sunny spot to try to dry them out because there was a literal puddle in the bottom basket of the stroller and I could wring water out of the insoles in my shoes. Luckily a few hours of Florida sun did it’s work and everything was dry by the time we headed over to Disney Springs.
We arrived at the bus stop just in time for a bus, thanks to a tip from a friend – the bus times app wasn’t working for our whole trip but she happened to be coming back from DS just before we were going and gave me a heads up that the next bus was in 15 minutes, so that was lucky timing.
My priority was getting on the Gideon’s waitlist, since I’d seen reports of it being hours long, so we headed there first, only to be told that there was no waitlist, and the line would take about 15 minutes. So I, very thrilled and not at all thinking this through, hopped right in line while Jay took the boys to the Star Wars store. 20 minutes and a bout of indecision later I was the proud owner of roughly three pounds of cookies. It was at that point that I realized that it was like 90 degrees out and I was about an hour from being the proud owner of roughly three pounds of melted chocolate chips.
While I was making shortsighted cookie decisions, B had acquired himself another lightsaber (three, for anybody who has lost track) and W had purchased a Chewbacca action figure.
We ate as much cookie as humanly possible (….less than one whole cookie) and then set out in search of more things to buy. Also water, because that much sugar in one sitting really gets to you.
B is a total soccer fanatic and had learned that there was a soccer store in the complex, so that was our next stop. He gravitated immediately to a soccer ball, because the kid is incapable of being in the vicinity of any sort of ball and not kicking it about, and decided that he wanted to buy it (“Buddy, we had SO MANY soccer balls at home!” “But we don’t have any HERE!”). We also decided to buy him a jersey and have his name and number put on it, so we did that, and then set back out through Disney Springs with B dribbling a ball through the crowd, which was actually pretty adorable and earned him some “Nice moves!” shouts from passers-by.
Nobody found anything they really wanted in World of Disney so we headed toward the Lego store, where I was kind of surprised to have to wait in line! But then happy about it once we got inside and it wasn’t jam packed. W is a Lego fanatic and we’d told him he could pick something out, so he thoroughly considered every possible option in the place while Jay tried very hard to steer him towards something Star Wars-y. B lost patience somewhere in the middle of the Ninjago section so he and I decided to head towards Blaze Pizza to grab a table.
Once we got there we decided we might as well just get in line and order, and then noticed that it was starting to drizzle out. Jay and W rolled up as it started to more than drizzle. I suggested Jay put the stroller under cover, as he’d just left it out front and we’d spent all morning getting it dry, so he ran it a bit down the “road” and got back just in time for the skies to open up. Yet again, we couldn’t believe how much it was raining! Luckily this time we were dry, settled at a table, and in possession of pizza, so it was extremely well timed, and by the time we were done so was the rain.
At this point we were pretty well done so retrieved the stroller, which was basically dry, called an Uber and headed back to the resort. Wandered through the lobby, did a little bit of pin trading, and then went back to the room for an early-ish night. Once again we were able to watch the fireworks from the balcony – we tried to cue up the music from a youtube video but were extremely unsuccessful – and then put the kids to bed while Jay headed back to the Grand Ceremonial House to pick up some evening cocktails – I had hoped for a raspberry mojito but apparently they were out of mint so ended up with a spicy watermelon margarita, which was not spicy and generally kind of meh. B had a hard time falling asleep which meant that he was still awake when we heard music from outside and I realized the Electric Water Parade was happening, so I got him out of bed and we watched that, and eventually we all turned in.
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I love it! I love seeing kids doing kid stuff and being happy. It makes me happy. So hopefully he was bringing a lot of happy to a lot of people. 
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This has to be one of the the best lines ever from a trip report.
Glad you managed to salvage some (all?) of the cookies
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This is such a nice thing to say - I’m always worried about walking that line between letting kids be kids and have fun, and not causing problems for the people around them, and dribbling a soccer ball through a crowd had some moments of touch-and-go on that tightrope.
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They were (shockingly) fine! I assumed, best-case scenario, they’d end up chocolate coated cookies but even the chocolate chips maintained most of their shape! Gideon’s magic powers are far reaching.
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I’ve never been but certainly plan to go in December.
I have one of these kids! My daughter begged to go in the deep end of the pool last summer, it was so hard to watch, I kept trying to “save her” and she would get so angry, sputtering “I’m fine!”. Her swimming was much better by the end of the summer, but it sure looked like drowning to me while she was learning!
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Day Eight (sob! Coming to the end!) – Magic Kingdom
We had a lot of plans on our to-do list for this day! We definitely had to ride Splash Mountain, because before we left my mom had mentioned “the log ride” to W and he became extremely focussed on it. I planned to do our first LL for Jungle Cruise because I knew that went fast. We wanted to get over to Tom Sawyer Island, because I put it in the schedule every time and we’ve never gotten there and I really think the kids would love it. The parade was coming back today, I wanted to see Enchantment from the park to see the projections, we had dinner at Steakhouse 71 – a lot on the go. So at 7am I grabbed a Jungle Cruise for 9:05-10:05. Then, flush with success, I decided to buy an ILL for 7DMT – selected a 10:30 time but by the time I checked out it was 1:30, which I wasn’t interested in, so we decided forget it, we’ll get a refund on that and rope drop.
I mobile ordered some breakfast at Captain Cook’s and headed over to pick it up, telling my husband I’d meet him at the monorail in a few minutes. 15 minutes later I’m still waiting for the food and I get a text that my husband is at the monorail, which is when we realize that when I said monorail I meant the one at the Poly and when he heard monorail he heard the one at the TTC. Then he realized a) only the ferries ran this early from the TTC and b) he didn’t have any masks, so fine, he’ll take the kids on the ferry, I’ll get the food, we’ll meet at the gates.
The food ended up taking a really long time, over half an hour, although honestly I’m not sure what I expected – in retrospect yes, obviously everybody is trying to get their breakfast and get out before the parks open! Next time grab and go stuff only. The ferry departed, I hopped the monorail, and I was able to join them just before they started letting people through the tapstiles.
We were further ahead today – just outside the bathrooms (last time we were halfway on the bridge) but somehow still ended up in basically the same place in line, across from Dumbo. I somehow got to talking to the woman ahead of me, who mentioned that she wasn’t that impressed with Genie Plus from everything she’d read. I said that we were having pretty decent luck with it and she asked me to give her a tutorial, which I suspect she later regretted because I vomited a year’s worth of research and forum posts all over her, showing her the lists I had saved of when they ran out, talking her through the atomic clock at 6:59:59, etc. Then I asked she had booked that morning and she said “Oh, nothing, I’m not too worried about it. Plus you can only book two a day, you know, so I’m saving them for later.” I blacked out temporarily and then tried to urge her to book something and she just shrugged and said “We’re just playing today by ear, all my daughter really wants to do is ride the teacups after this anyway.” I restrained myself from yelling “OK GREAT THEN BOOK THE TEACUPS GIVE ME YOUR PHONE I’LL JUST DO IT FOR YOU!” and changed the subject to pin trading, another thing they had planned to do but were totally unprepared for, in the sense that they had no pins. I had the one odd-numbered one from dividing our 25 pack amongst two boys, so I gave it to her daughter to get her started, and felt pretty happy about getting to give somebody else some pixie dust.
Once we got off Mine Train, at almost exactly the same time we’d gotten off Mine Train on our previous rope drop, we headed over to the other side of the park. The Lines app said that the Big Thunder line was about 15 minutes and Splash Mountain was 7, so we hopped in Big Thunder figuring we’d do that, we’d do Splash, and then we’d hop onto Jungle Cruise right before our LL expired at 10:20, but after a few minutes in Big Thunder and my running the numbers I started to think we were pushing our luck. Splash’s LL return times were already really late and it was really important to W so we bailed on Big Thunder and ducked over to Splash, where the line did not LOOK like it would only take 7 minutes but I hadn’t done it since 2001 so what did I know?
Except my instinct were correct, and it started to get towards 10am, and I kept checking my watch, and googling how long the actual ride was, and thinking about grace period, and at 9:52 I realized it wasn’t going to happen so I cancelled Jungle Cruise and rebooked for 4pm.
Like I said, I hadn’t done Splash Mountain since 2001 and nobody else had ever done it – in previous years we’d skipped it due to some combination of height requirements and my hatred of getting splashed - so we were all surprised at how much fun it was! I was not expecting so many drops. Plus we stayed pretty dry, which was a relief for me personally.
The plan from here was to go over to Tom Sawyer’s Island for a while – every year I’ve put it in the plans but we’ve never actually made it. This year we were foiled by it not being open! So that was disappointing, because I really do think the kids would love it and it would have been a great place to run off some energy! We had some time before the parade but not a huge amount so we headed across the park to do PhilharMagic, which is always enjoyable – I really loved the Coco addition, it was so beautiful!
While in the theatre I had mobile-ordered a snack from Friar’s Nook but when the show ended and I went to hit ‘prepare my order’ it wasn’t in the system, so something must have gone wrong, and by then it had switched over to the lunch menu and nothing appealed to us. We had a Big Thunder LL for 11:20-12:20 so we headed over in that direction thinking that we’d do that and then watch the parade, but when we got over there and saw people starting to line the streets I realized that I’d gotten the parade route backwards – it starts on that side, not finishes – so we grabbed a great seat on a planter and grabbed some popcorn and mickey bars to get us through to lunch.
There were cast members in the street enforcing the rules and getting people excited and one of them yelled “Who’s ready for the first parade IN TWO YEARS?!?!!?” and the crowds cheered and my eyes filled with tears, it was a really emotional moment. And it was so lovely to see the parade, and how happy everybody was – the parade has always been, for me, my favourite thing – there’s so much magic, and goodwill, and kindness, and it makes me so happy. And just the sheer spectacle of it! The fire breathing dragon will never stop blowing my mind and watching my kids watch it – I’m getting emotional just thinking about it. I was so happy to be there.
After the parade we hopped over to do Big Thunder and then headed back towards the front while I put in a mobile order for Caseys, positive that my kids would eat hot dogs – B loves hot dogs, W weirdly will only eat veggie dogs but they had those too, for sure this would be a successful lunch.
When we got up to Casey’s Corner I realized I also still needed to deal with the Mine Train ILL, so I got in line at a blue umbrella with the kids while Jay went and grabbed the food, and everybody looked a little nervously at the grey clouds rolling in. By the time I got to the front of the line we were in the ILL window so it seemed easier to just bend the truth a little so I told them that my kids weren’t feeling well and we were going to head back to the resort, and they refunded it no problem. But while I was talking to one cast member another took a call and then said “Ok, we just got the call that we need to move to our rain location.” As soon as they were done helping me she announced to the (not short!) line that they had to pack up and move, which, I can only imagine, would have been INFURIATING if you’d been waiting for 20 minutes!
Then it started to rain, so we grabbed everything and ran to the awning by the baby care centre to wait it out and eat some food – the kids, being kids, refused to eat the hot dogs and were only interested in the fries. I’d order the corn dog nuggets because Molly from AllEars talked about them a lot – they were fine, I didn’t love them. It poured for a while and then cleared up, so we headed for the monorail – weirdly walking right past Molly from AllEars! I refrained from telling her I hadn’t liked her suggestion.
While we were on the monorail it started to rain again, HARD. We got to the TTC and stood under the awning for a bit and then decided what the heck, at least it was warm, so we put the boys, the bags, and our shoes and socks in the stroller under the raincover and ran through the rain back to Moorea, grateful that it was close. In the two minutes we were outside we got drenched but it was easy enough to change clothes. I also took a gamble, cancelled Jungle Cruise AGAIN, and booked Dumbo, which was closed due to the storm, for a time 20 minutes away, hoping it would convert to an anytime. And it did! So then I booked Tomorrowland Speedway, again 20 minutes way, and even though the rain had stopped by the time the LL opened it was still closed so it converted as well, at which point, after some refreshing, I was able to rebook Jungle Cruise for a third time, this time for 9:20pm.
When the rain let up I put in a mobile order for Captain Cook’s, excited to finally get to try the Thai meatballs I’d heard about, which DID live up to the hype. We hung out in the room eating and watching tv for a bit and then, once the sun came out, headed over to the Grand Ceremonial House – on Monday they had been making kakui nut leis but we’d missed it, and W really wanted to do one, and B wanted to play soccer on the lawn. So we made leis, and then B and Jay played soccer while W and I went up to Tamu Tamu to fill one of my Polynesian dreams – drinking out of a pineapple in the sun. So I acquired us two nonalcoholic and one extremely alcoholic pineapples and, feeling a little bit like Baby Houseman juggling a watermelon with the added complication of making sure I didn’t accidentally hand a rum-filled one off to a kid, went back outside.
Carrying around a bunch of pineapple drinks gets you a lot of attention, multiple people stopped me to ask where I’d gotten them from. It also feels a bit wasteful when you finish your, like, 8oz of fruit juice and then toss basically a full pineapple into the garbage, but in the grand scheme of things that’s probably the least damage we did to the environment on this trip so what can you do.
Lei’d, pineapple’d, soccer’d, and refresh’d (hmm, that fell apart at the end), we packed back up and headed back to the Magic Kingdom, this time taking a ferry at the boy’s requests and completing the Disney transportation checklist – boat, monorail, bus, skyliner, check check check check!
The first plan was to use one of the anytime LLs on Big Thunder but the LL line was ENORMOUS, probably because a ton of people had anytimes after the shutdown, so we decided to try again later. We then used a LL I’d booked at some point to ride Pirates, and then were unable to make it out of the gift shop without acquiring yet another sword. We then saw Captain Jack Sparrow was out and about so B wanted to go over and meet him, and it was a pretty great interaction – he held up the sword to show him, Captain Jack said “That’s a very good sword, do you know how to use it?” and B, struck dumb with shyness, just nodded with big eyes and without any hesitation Captain Jack nodded and said “An EXCELLENT strategy, say yes but don’t show off your skills, that way nobody knows if you’re telling the truth or not and they’ll be too afraid to test you.” It was pretty cute.
We had a bit of time before needing to head over to the Contemporary for our Steakhouse 71 reservation and there was, obviously, no line for the Swiss Family Treehouse, so we went back up that before heading back to Main Street. I had gotten it into my head that I needed a hoodie so we walked through the stores a little, where I didn’t find a hoodie I liked but W did decide that he needed a Stitch Nuimo, as well as a Star Wars spirit jersey, a backpack, and an ice cream sundae in a Mickey sink to go along with him – a somewhat random collection of accessories but sure, why not, it’s his money and is it really any weirder than the, at this point, seven swords/lightsabers that B had accumulated?
So anyway, we left the park again and walked to the Contemporary. Writing this out it sounds like all we did is arrive at and leave places all day but it didn’t feel that way. Went over there and checked in and were called quickly, and headed in for dinner. I think I had expected it to be Incredibles themed? Obviously it wasn’t. But it was nice inside! We had a bit of a weird start to the meal, service-wise – our waiter arrived at the table, took most of our drink orders, and then said “Oh, hold on, excuse me, I’ll be right back” and went to, I think, help another waiter clear a table. But then didn’t come back for at least 10 minutes, and when she DID come back she brought the drinks that she’d taken the orders for, which meant that I had a drink and one of my kids had drinks but my husband and B had no drinks. It felt like a strange choice, service-wise.
Regardless, dinner here was DELICOUS, and my only regret was that I couldn’t order more sides and sauces because they all sounded so good – I had the filet with mushroom sauce and mashed potatoes and it was excellent, my husband had some kind of meat with chimichurri and broccolini that was also amazing. I also got the raspberry gin sour which was, I think, the best drink I had on the whole trip and way up there with best drinks in my whole life – yum. We wrapped up with an absurdly tall chocolate cake, crème brulee, and the sundaes for the kids. Plus when the hostess had seated us she’d noticed W’s Happy Birthday button and so his dessert also came with a cupcake, which was so sweet.
At this point it was getting close to 8pm and we’d wanted to see the fireworks, so we went back to the Magic Kingdom, tapped in, and were confronted with a LOT of people. So many people. We found a fairly central spot in the middle of that circle in front of the train station, and before long the show began. I’d seen a lot of talk about how it wasn’t as good as Happily Ever After and I don’t think we really got the benefit of the projections along Main Street but I still really enjoyed it and when Tinkerbell flew I legitimately cried – it’s magic! It was also the first time that W had stayed awake for a fireworks show – on our previous trips he’d fallen asleep before they started without fail – so seeing his amazement at it all was worth everything.
This was the first time we hadn’t left the parks right after the fireworks, and I hadn’t really accounted for how much it would feel like a salmon swimming upstream, trying to get to the back of the park while thousands of people were trying to get to the front, but we made our way to one of the bypasses behind the stores and that was a lot easier to navigate. We went first to Tomorrowland to use one of our anytime LLs on Buzz Lightyear, and then hopped in line for another go-round on the Peoplemover. There seemed to be something weird going on – the escalator wasn’t running, and there would be long periods of time where nobody would go up and then the cast member would let people up and then there’d be nobody for a while – and as we got closer it seemed like the ride was having some troubles. We finally got to the top of the escalator where the ride stopped again, and we waited about ten minutes before they started loading people. At this point I was having real second thoughts about the wisdom of getting onto a ride that kept breaking down, but it seemed too late to turn back.
This was the first time we’d done the Peoplemover at night, which was really neat, but it did indeed stop moving for several minutes at a time four separate times, including one time inside Space Mountain at an incredibly loud point, so it wasn’t the relaxing ride I’d been hoping for. Also the boys, B in particular, were really really flagging. But when we got off and raised the prospect of maybe just going back to the hotel they protested – we’d been promising them Jungle Cruise all day and dammit, they wanted to go on Jungle Cruise!
So, 12 hours after the LL we’d originally booked, we finally used our LL for Jungle Cruise. It was pretty cool in the dark! I think a lot of the jokes were lost on the kids. We had hoped to use our last anytime for one more ride on Big Thunder but everybody was way too tired, so we headed out of the park for one last time with W, who was definitely awake when he got into the stroller off Jungle Cruise, falling asleep before we even made it out of the park.
One last note for this day – we had originally planned to go back to Magic Kingdom on Saturday, our home day, until mid-afternoon. B, however, had been lamenting not getting to finish the Wilderness Explorers book and, feeling like we’d done pretty much everything we wanted to do at MK, the idea of a relaxed last day wandering around Animal Kingdom was pretty appealing, so that night we switched our last park reservation for Saturday to Animal Kingdom.
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This is so awesome that you got to see the very first one in two years!!!
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ROFL
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I could feel myself getting stressed while you were trying to get the woman to use Genie!!
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My kids have asked to visit Tom Sawyers Island on our upcoming trip… Do you know if this is this a long term closure, or was it just closed for a day?
Oh sorry, it wasn’t closed closed, it was just closed at 10:30am, which is when we wanted to go. I think their hours are 11am - 3:30 or 4pm.
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Got it, thanks for the clarification!
@erinkippen Thanks for this lovely trip report - really helpful and a joy to read. We’re coming from the UK in August for 14 nights at CBR, and this is just the sort of trip I’d like - plenty of breaks and Nomad Loung-ing 
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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.
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I loved that about a long trip - on our first trip we had a week and I felt like I had to wring every minute out of it, with multiple days at each park it was so nice to just go “Sure, let’s go back to the pool, we can do everything else on our next day.” CBR was great! I liked Aruba a lot - being close to the Riviera was great for access to their quickservice and bus stops. I’d expected to also use their skyliner station but found that it was better to walk to the Caribbean Beach location for the skyliner so as not to deal with having to wait for space.
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