Travel dates: January 2024
We’re back from another summer trip now…another summer trip during which I fully intended to get some blog posts up and then failed to do so. So! Back at it!
I’m picking back up with our first actual park day at Disney World, having already recounted our Skyliner day This day and the next day were the days August was with us, and we picked Hollywood Studios and EPCOT as our parks for these days solely because these were the ones he most wanted to do (because they had the most things that were new since his last visit).
I won’t spend a lot of time talking about the details of Genie+ and Lightning Lanes since Disney has just completely redone the system for these. But we bought Genie+ for both of these days, so I was up bright and early to book Lightning Lanes. I set the alarm for 6:45 and grabbed a Slinky Dog LL for 10:20, which I considered a good start to my first ever day of dealing with Genie+. This was our third and final day of checking in to a new resort, so we also had to get the car packed up…our plan was to get everything out of the room and check out, take the Skyliner over to the park, then come back and drive to Port Orleans French Quarter around lunchtime before going back to Hollywood Studios via bus. Which was kind of a lot. But, then, isn’t Disney always a lot, really?
Anyway, by the time we packed up the car and headed for the Skyliner, it was around 7:20…which seemed pretty good to me, but was, alas, already too late to beat the Skyliner lines. The line wound along the lake all the way back to…our room, pretty much. But, sadly, we didn’t realize this until we walked all the way to the front of the line, thinking we were taking a clever shortcut. Then we walked back past all these people to return to where we’d started and the back of the line (see the bridge way at the right of the photo? that’s what you cross right before you get on the skyliner):
However! Once the Skyliner starts running, the line moves very quickly, and we were to Hollywood Studios in plenty of time to stand in this line before they started letting people in (early entry for resort guests started at 8:30 that day; we were in line by around 7:50):
My plan was to go immediately to Rise of the Resistance. I knew from obsessive research that the only thing that could mess up my plan was the ride being down at the beginning of the day, as it often is. And this is exactly what happened (I have since attempted this Rise first plan three times over the course of my two Disney visits, and it worked as planned only one of those three times. FYI). They had cast members standing outside letting people know that the ride was down and that we could get in line, but they had no idea how long it would be before it started running. Rise was one of those new-to-August rides that he wanted to make sure to do, so we decided to just get in the line and take our chances. We stood in the line not moving at all for a good half hour, but after that things moved relatively quickly, and we were off by 9:35. Which, of course, meant we were well into ordinary park hours.
So Rise of the Resistance was pretty great! It is, dare I use an overused word, really immersive. And it was a good intro ride for Abe (who had not been to Disney World since he was five, so we didn’t have a great idea how he would do. The Skyliner terror did not give us a lot of confidence…but he did great on every single ride! Not a single one freaked him out!)…relatively intense, but not too scary.
Watch out, August: there’s a Stormtrooper behind you!
We did Star Tours next, since it was close by, then headed over to Toy Story Land, where I took a lot of pictures while we waited for it to be time for Slinky Dog Dash:
As you can see from our wardrobe choices, it was a chilly, sometimes rainy, day. Slinky Dog was downright cold…and I loved it. Being chilly at Disney World is my absolute favorite, and I never want to do it any other way. Alas, chilly days are in short supply in Florida, particularly in These Troubled Times.
Abe loved Slinky Dog. Then we went over to Alien Swirling Saucers which, historically, I hate, but which we needed to ride to fulfill Abe’s do every attraction goal. It was even worse than I remembered!
So anytime it looks like we’re criss-crossing the park in a weird way that makes no sense, you can assume it’s because of all the Genie+ stuff that I’m not going to talk much about because it doesn’t exist anymore. Like now! We saw the Frozen Sing Along, and I tried to recreate this picture of August with snow falling on him from our last trip:
I did not do as good of a job as last time, though. Oh well.
Then back to Toy Story Land for Toy Story Mania before heading over to see the Muppets 3-D, which let us out exactly in time for our lunch reservation at Mama Melrose. Our lunch reservation came a bit too late for Abe, I guess, because he was doing his grumpy low blood sugar thing wherein he, counterintuitively, refuses to eat anything. So August and I tried to enjoy our meals with a hangry Abe at the table, and we got his pizza boxed up to take back to the hotel. Also of note: August and I both ordered soda water here (like from the dispenser; not bottles of Perrier or something) and were charged $10 for the two of them! After not being charged for them at Beaches and Cream the night before. Much like with kids’ menus and 11 year olds, don’t look for consistency here. But I will say that Mama Melrose was very flexible about the kid meal thing and gluten-free stuff and offered Abe things that weren’t on the menu (for him to refuse to eat). When he finally ate the pizza later at the hotel, he wolfed the whole thing down and declared it delicious. Shrug.
It was raining when we finished lunch, and we didn’t have any more lightning lanes booked until evening, so we decided it was a good time to go change resorts again. So one last Skyliner ride back to a rainy Pop Century:
…and then we drove over to Port Orleans French Quarter. I hadn’t gotten a text about our room yet, so I parked and went in to ask at the front desk…and we got a room almost immediately after that. It was around 3:45 by then, so this was not remarkable…but it shows that it pays to ask if it’s taking a long time to get that text. In my experience, they’ll usually try to find a room for you right away if you’re right there asking, even if it is before regular check-in time.
We’d never stayed at a moderate before, and we were only here this time because the Skyliner was going down for maintenance and because of the dining gift card offer that made a moderate a relatively good deal. But I was excited to try a new resort, and we really loved French Quarter. I picked it largely because I knew it was the smallest resort and word was that made the bus situation more pleasant than at bigger resorts…and this was very much the case. The buses were here were rarely very crowded, and the wait times were manageable. And the resort itself is very compact; a short walk to anywhere we wanted to go, but we could also walk or take the boat over to Port Orleans Riverside or the boat to Disney Springs (which we never ended up finding time to do). We also didn’t take advantage of the pool, but it looked cool. We ALSO never got around to using the World’s Largest Pac-man machine! But we could have–it was right there!
I think I’m still team Pop overall, though, particularly now that the Skyliner is in the mix (and particularly since we always have a car with us and can drive to avoid buses when we want to). I like Pop, and I don’t feel like the moderates offer enough of an advantage to justify how much more expensive they usually are. Oh, but we could see fireworks a little bit (from Epcot, I think) from the walkway near our room, so that was cool:
You can also see in that picture that the parking lot is not very full at all. We saw a ton of empty rooms any time we were walking around. The parks themselves felt pretty crowded, though (and all the word on social media from people in the know was that it was an unusually crowded late January).
Okay! So after crashing in the room for a little while, we headed to the bus stop, waited about 3 minutes for a not at all crowded bus, and went back to Hollywood Studios.
We did Smuggler’s Run first, with our Lightning Lane (I think everything this evening was Lightning Lanes) and then grabbed dinner at Docking Bay 7, where August enjoyed the veggie meatballs and Abe and I thought the cube-shaped chicken was kinda weird.
Then we headed over to Tower of Terror, where I’d managed to score a Lightning Lane with the help of much app-refreshing. Abe loved this, too, despite “terror” being right there in the name. We walked back and forth across the park doing assorted things for awhile until it was time for Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, another new to all of us ride. When we walked out it was time for the projection show they do right there, and it was…very loud. “I don’t understand,” said August, “so they put trailers for movies on a screen and play really loud music?” Yes, that was pretty much it. We were not enjoying it, so we made our way over to find seats for Fantasmic, even though it was really early. But it was fine; we got good seats and waited about an hour, but we were fine having a chance to sit and give Dave a call to see how things were going back home. And then we finished the night with Fantasmic!
The walk back to the entrance after Fantasmic is so very long…but we walked up to the bus stop to find a bus waiting for us and were back to our room by 10:45.
Next up: August’s last day 🙁 at EPCOT
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