Day 4 - Christmas Eve at Magic Kingdom

Knowing that Magic Kingdom is Jaime's favorite of the parks, (I knew this would be the case beforehand as Magic Kingdom is the most like Disneyland...) we decided to spend Christmas Eve there.  This was our first day to spend daylight hours in Magic Kingdom and, among other things, we wanted to see some characters that we either hadn't seen before or hadn't seen in a while. (Finding characters and getting a pic/autograph has always been a hobby of ours.)

When it comes to finding new characters to have pictures with, we count characters with new outfits as new.  For example, Pirate Goofy:

We own a Dub Video Dub that includes Disneyland songs including the Country Bears.  Disneyland has long since gotten rid of their Country Bear show but it still exists at Disney World.

This was the absolute craziest thing I have ever seen at a Disney Park. Songs that included lyrics like; "blood on the saddle, blood all around and a great big puddle of blood on the ground", "all the guys that turn me on turn me down" etc. was just plain weird...but fun.  Harris loved it and made us go see it again later on in the trip.

After this we saw the Disney World version of the Tiki Room. Here it is a little different in that Iago and Zazu (from Aladdin and Lion King) had taken over and revamped the show.  It was fun to see it a little more updated.

Zazu

Iago

At this point we headed over to Toon Town to check it out. They had a cool Character Spot that had a place for the Disney Princesses. Now, Jaime loves the Disney Princesses but Olivia feels that she is now way too mature for such things :).  As such, we haven't stood in line to see them for years so we decided to overrule Liv and give it a go.

So, I was in charge of photography and Jaime informed me that I had taken an inordinate amount of pictures of Belle.  For the record, I have no idea what she is talking about...

The kids in front of Mickey's house.

Keeping with the theme of meeting with Characters, we decided to do a Character Dinner with Winnie the Pooh and friends.

I liked seeing the characters this way (with them just walking around to each table), especially Tigger.  Tigger is one of the most obnoxious characters to get a picture with when he is walking around Disneyland. He usually ends up just walking away.

We spent the rest of Christmas Eve doing rides and having a good time.  Here is some picture evidence:

We almost never do the Teacups ride (both Jaime and I get a bit motion sick) but we made an exception here.  The kids here are wrestling me for control of the spinning mechanism ( I won, btw)

We saw parts of the Electrical Parade just about every time we were at Magic Kingdom.  Christmas Eve was no exception.

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is one of our very favorite rides at either park.  We made sure to do it as much as possible.

Jaime's favorite ride is Splash Mountain, so we made sure to do it twice...

I thought this was funny.  The park was so dead late on Christmas Eve that even though there was no one on the ride they kept taking pictures of when the logs went over the big drop...

We liked not having to wait though, we especially liked that we didn't have to exit our log when we went on the ride for the 2nd time!

The Laughing Place outside the ride

After a very full day we headed back to our hotel room.  On the way out I snapped this cool pic of the castle:

I also thought this was a cool photo opp.

At this point  I should relay the story of the Christmas Tree. 

For months and months, Jaime has been bugging me to get this ridiculous Christmas Tree from the Disney Florist to have in our room.  It was a cool 4 foot flocked tree with a  monogrammed tree skirt.  While the tree was cool I would describe it as...cost prohibitive.  So, much to Jaime's dismay, I denied her request.  I definitely understood Jaime's concern about spending Christmas morning without a tree and decided to honor her request but without her knowledge. 

So, in the middle of the day on Christmas Eve we found an 18" fiber optic tree for sale at one of the little shops and Jaime asked me if we could buy it so we could "at least have something"...my wife is so dramatic!  Anyway, I had already purchased the tree from Disney Florist and arranged to have it delivered and set up while we were at the park on Christmas Eve and I really didn't want to spoil the surprise (for her or the kids) so I agreed to the purchase of the fiber optic tree and send her and the kids out of the shop so I could "arrange to have it sent directly to our room".  

OK, back to the blog journal.  Once we got back to the resort and headed to our room Jaime could see that our blinds were open and what looked to be Christmas lights were shining through the window.  As I opened the door for Jaime to walk in she caught site of the tree and started to cry.  That moment made it all worth it.  Here is a picture of said tree;

So, all in all Christmas Eve was a smashing success.

Day 3- Hollywood Studios

The Hollywood Studios icon is the sorcerers hat. There was a big concert stage set up in front of it so we had to take our picture from the side.

Hollywood Studios was very California Adventureish. That's where Tower of Terror and Rockin' Roller Coaster are. Neither are my favorite rides but Chet and the kids love them so while they did those rides I did some shopping. Those are really the only two rides besides Toy Story Mania (which was a 2 hour wait!) so we spent most of our time there looking for characters. 

Bad pic but that's Chet, Liv and Harris on Tower of Terror.

Chet and I were going over the character meet and greet schedule and saw that you could meet Lotso from Toy Story 3, who is Livs favorite character. We didn't tell her who we were going to see and just rushed over to meet him. She was pretty excited when we walked into the room and he was there.

He even smelled like Strawberries!

We also got to meet several other new characters at Hollywood Studios like...


Frozone


And...

Sorcerer Mickey. New to Harris but the rest of us met him the first time we took Liv.

And...


Mike Wazowski

 When we were done meeting characters we had dinner reservations at Mama Rosa's for some Italian food and then reserved seating for Fantasmic! Dinner was good but it took almost 2 hours! Way too long in my opinion. When we were finally done with dinner we got our tickets for Fantasmic and headed to the other side of the park where they have an open air theater just for the show. This was so much better than standing around for hours at the Rivers of America at Disneyland waiting for the show to start.

When it was time for the show to start we went to the area we were told and were led behind a gate that took us to the back and outside perimeter of the park. It was soo cool! I love it when we get to see a place that not everyone gets to see. :)


All alone behind the park. Awesome!!!



The show is a lot different than the one at Disneyland. I would say that overall it was much better, although there is a really long segment dedicated to Pocahontas that I just didn't understand. I mean who even liked that movie?

(Please excuse the blurry pics. The camera had a hard time focusing beyond the mist from the water screens.)

The Pocahontas part. The kids were like what is this?!

The Villains part was cool because besides the Maleficent Dragon they had Jafar the snake.

Harris knew what was coming after Jafar and was not to thrilled about it. Not may things scare Harris but bears and the Maleficent Dragon do. We had to do lots of persuading and reassuring to convince him to go. One thing that we have told him more than once is that Little Buddy will protect him. So when the time came he was ready...

I am pretty sure that this is the cutest picture EVER!

Pretty scary but not as scary as the one at Disneyland.

When the show was over we walked over to the Streets of America to see the Osbourne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights. There are about 5 million lights that "dance" to music every 10 minutes. We were there in between shows which I was just fine with. I liked seeing them all on at the same time.

This was the first night it started getting cold.

There was a huge line for pictures in front of this tree so we just took a pic of the tree without us standing in front of it.

While it wasn't my favorite park we still had a great time looking for characters and seeing Fantasmic!

Day 2 - Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom

On Day 2 we planned to go to the Animal Kingdom in the morning and then had a dessert party and reserved seats for the firework show at Magic Kingdom.

Jaime wanted to take pictures in front of all the main icons of the different parks.  The one for Animal Kingdom is this very cool tree.

As part of the dining plan we were on we got to do 1 sit down meal per day.  This is different for us because we usually prefer to eat quickly and then get back to doing rides or tracking down characters.  It took some getting used to for us to spend a leisurely 90 minutes for these sit down meals but we definitely grew to appreciate the expertise of the Disney chefs.  In Animal Kingdom we ate at the Yak and Yeti in the Asia section.  Great oriental themed food here.

There were a number of attractions at Animal Kingdom that we wanted to do but our time was limited as we were still getting used to the east coast time and didn't get into the park until lunch time.  Once lunch was done we decided to do the Safari.  Jaime and the kids are big animal lovers and we thought this would be cool.  The park was pretty busy and wait times were long.  We approached the Safari and it said there was only a 45 minute wait.  Great, right?  Well, the line went beyond the entrance to the ride and once we finally got to said entrance the wait time had changed to 60 minutes (it is measured from the ride entrance to the point you get on the ride itself).  That was concerning but we were committed.  We waited, and waited, and waited...well, you get the idea.  All told, we waited about 90 minutes for the ride but it felt like eternity.  Jaime and I noticed for the first time (and continued to notice throughout the trip) that Disney World does a much worse job of line management than Disneyland.  There were no cast members around to explain why we were still in the middle of the line after 60 minutes, there was no ambient music, there was visible litter in places.  Picky, I know, but the bar is set pretty high by Disneyland.  So, we finally got on the ride and it was fun.  Here are some pics:

 Open air vehicle goodness!

 Rhino!

 Great scenery.

 Hippos in the water!

 My wife is so pretty!

 I thought I did a good job of capturing the beauty of the Safari with this picture.

 Jaime would probably take the time to research what animal this is...

 Elephants.

They call this the upside down tree.  (because the branches look like roots, I guess)  

A cheetah. 

A lioness.  There was a lion too, but we could only get a blurry picture of him.

Because we weren't quite sick of waiting we also went to the Expedition Everest ride.  Animals are great and all but I would much rather do a roller coaster and Expedition Everest did not disappoint!  There is some great vertical ascension followed by what you think is the big drop but once you get there you find that the track has been broken by the mysterious Yeti and then...YOU START TO GO BACKWARDS!  Yip, you then do a number of hills and turns while backwards, it was awesome!  So, as you can tell, I really enjoyed this ride.  Here are a couple pics:

The kids standing in front of Everest.  It wasn't as cold in the Himalayas as I thought it would be... 

Harris and I on the ride.  You can't see it but Harris has his stuffed Triceratops, Little Buddy, hidden with him.  Little Buddy's job was to frighten the Yeti away.  It was the only way we could convince Harris to go on the ride... :)

So, to finish up our day we had reserved seating and a dessert party for the fireworks show at Magic Kingdom, Wishes.  The dessert was incredible and the fireworks were beautiful.  The evening is best described pictorially...

 Yum!

 We had difficulties with our new camera and taking night pictures (it's especially aggravating since we bought the camera specifically to take good nighttime pictures).  Anyway, this is us in front of the castle at night.

                          

 The castle really is a sight to see when it's all decorated for Christmas.

 I like this picture...

 So, there you have it.  Day 2 was another great day.  Chet is out, peace!