A Trip to Disney World Pt. 2

Read part 1 here.

We spent Tuesday and Saturday at Hollywood Studios. Besides Magic Kingdom, which is the special one, Hollywood was/will be my favorite park. Right now, it's in transition from the behind-the-scenes park I loved to the going-to-be-blow-your-mind-awesome park it's going to be once they're done. Construction. 😜 But there's still awesome stuff at Hollywood even now.

Like Beauty and the Beast. It's definitely my favorite Disney World stage show, even though we didn't get the Gaston with the real muscles this trip...and the fact that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you haven't seen the movie yet. (2008 trip. That Disney vault!) "Through a series of strange circumstances, Belle ended up at the Beast's castle." Yeah. But it's beautiful, and makes me want to see the Broadway show. (2 times this trip.) I also enjoy the Little Mermaid show. While the movie annoys me--Ariel is pretty stupid and immature--I love the songs, which are the focus of the 17 min. stage version. (3 times this trip.) And then there's the Frozen show. Oh my goodness, it's hilarious. The newly appointed historians of Arendelle tell the story of Frozen and the audience gets to sing along to the songs. And the "historians" are so goofy and hilarious. Fun jokes for the grownups goofy and hilarious. Anna and Kristoff show up once each through the main part of the show ("Is that Justin Bieber?" "It's Crisco, and his reindeer Seven.") and then at the end, Elsa, Anna, and Kristoff come out and sing "Let It Go" and it snows soap bubbles. I feel like such a six-year-old girl when I go, but I love it. (2 times this trip.) And it sure beats Tower of Terror. The Indiana Jones show is still fun, and pretty much the same as it always has been. We can always pick out which "extra" is really a stunt man. I definitely enjoy it, though it could use a little updating. (2 times this trip.) There's also Muppet Vision 3D, which is the same as it's always been too, but I still enjoy it.

There are only two rides at Hollywood right now that I'll ride, since I won't do Tower of Terror or Rockin' Roller Coaster. My two rides are Toy Story Mania and Star Tours. Toy Story Mania is so awesome. It's a Toy Story themed 3D arcade game. We rode it six times this past trip and I got a new personal best of 199,000 points. Which is awesome because all but one game I beat my whole family, but not as awesome as I'd like because it doesn't come close to the all time Toy Story Mania high score of around 550,000. I can be a bit competitive when I want to be. But my high score is pretty respectable and I'm proud of it. Star Tours is a lot of fun. It's a 3D Star Wars flight simulator where you get to go to all sorts of Star Wars planets and keep the rebel spy out of the hands of the bad guys. I love it. And my sister was even the rebel spy once. (5 times this trip.) We even met Chewbacca and BB-8 over at the Launch Bay. I love how a lot of the Star Wars-related cast members have a Star Wars planet listed as their "hometown" on their name tags. 😆

Because of the threat of rain later in the week, we did Fantasmic on Tuesday. It's the best night show at Walt Disney World. So much fun, so many characters, so much imagination. It's seriously awesome. Except the crowd control. They need to create more exits. As it turned out, it was a good thing we did Fantasmic earlier in the week because it rained on Friday and Saturday. We're hard core Disney people. We just whip out our rain ponchos (which make us look like hunchbacks due to our backpacks), let our feet get soaked, and stick it out. I'm glad we did. Fantasmic got cancelled for the storm, but they still did the Star Wars projection show, and because most of the park was at Fantasmic when we got our spot (they all came in behind us) we got a spot right up at the ropes. It was really cool, and that, combined with all the other Star Wars stuff at Disney, has gotten me really hyped up for The Last Jedi. I'm just going to forget about the frog that hopped onto my back on the way back to our campsite that night. Yup, going to put that creepy incident out of my mind.

Friday was our only day at Animal Kingdom. It was an interesting day, to say the least. They've got two new Avatar themed rides which are super duper popular. Like, 4 hour wait times popular. Well, they broke. Both of them. Our only day at Animal Kingdom. And so everyone who would have been standing in line for hours in the Pandora area was spread out all over the park. We still managed to do Kilimanjaro Safaris twice, a safari ride with real animals...and not so real termite mounds. The driver the second time could have done Jungle Cruise. "A group of giraffes is called a tower. What do you call a group of scared giraffes? A Tower of Terror." The evolutionary story to Dinosaur drives me nuts, but the ride is still a lot of fun. We did It's Tough to Be a Bug, NOT my favorite 3D show (the special effects cause a good bit of screaming, but I know how to avoid them), but hey, it had air condition. Festival of the Lion King is pretty awesome. It's a live show with singers, dancers, acrobats dressed as monkeys, a guy who puts fire on his feet, and Lion King sing alongs.

Halfway through the day, Flight of Passage, the Avatar flying ride, opened up. The boat ride never did. Thankfully, they gave us "multiple experience fastpasses" to make up for having to miss our regular one, so we were able to get in the fastpass line. Now, I think the movie is creepy and weird, and the whole soul transfer thing is wrong, but that ride was AMAZING! It makes the amazing awesomeness that is Soarin' lame. I'm not even joking. It's a 3D flight simulator, but that doesn't even begin to describe it. You sit on this thing sort of like a bike, and it puts bars around you to keep you on. Then the screen opens up and you're swooping on a banshee through Pandora, diving between rocks, flying through waves and getting mist on your face, feeling the animal breathing under you, and unlike Soarin', there's no chance of having feet hanging in front of you. It was so amazing, I'd have gone on it again and again if the wait wasn't ridiculously, insanely long. But at least that ridiculously, insanely long wait cleared out the park.

And then it rained. They ended up cancelling Flights of Wonder, the bird show, because of the rain, but oh well. I'm sure it's the exact same show we've seen multiple times. We rode Kali River Rapids in the rain, because we were already wet, in spite of rain ponchos, so what does it matter? Pro tip: Never, ever, ever ride Kali River Rapids without a rain poncho unless you're willing to go back to wherever you're staying to change and throw your clothes in the dryer. They aren't kidding when they say "you will get wet, you may get soaked." Years ago, my mom ended up getting soaked (you never know which seat it will be because the raft is round), we hung her shorts over the bathtub later, and after several days, they STILL weren't dry. Wear a poncho. You may look like a dork getting on, but you'll look super smart getting off.

After dinner, my mom and youngest sister went back to the camper because my sister wasn't feeling well, but my dad, middle sister and I went really hard core and stayed, even though it POURED. We rode Dinosaur again, and then did Kali twice in a row without getting off. They'll let you if there's not really any line and you ask really nice. We could have stayed on longer, but we wanted to get a good seat for the new night show, Rivers of Light, and on a non-rainy day, you have to get in line as soon as they start letting people in. So we sloshed through puddles no longer caring that we were pretty much soaked and our shoes were totally waterlogged, and got in line. We talked to some cast members while we were waiting, and had a good time. And the guy who was there totally reminded us of Adam from Studio C. 

As it turned out, the rain had cleared out the park really well, so we didn't actually need to get in line that early, but oh well. We got great seats. It stopped raining shortly before the show started, so I was able to get a pretty good video on my phone. It was a pretty cool show, with fountains, and projections, and people on boats dancing to create shadows on the sails. And then on the way out, I narrowly escaped face-planting into some bushes while walking in the dark and checking the weather for the next day. I just didn't see that big rock. Luckily it was too dark to be obvious and everyone was looking at the Tree of Life. But man was my knee sore! That bruise was pretty significant.

Animal Kingdom was also the reason I read Replication by Jill Williamson on our trip. See, I'm the dork who brings a book into the park to read during long waits. I have on multiple occasions walked through various lines with my nose in a book, rather oblivious to my surroundings. It's the best way to wait. One year it was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Another, it was Holes by Louis Sachar. I've had security guards at bag check ask me if my book was good. This year, I checked out a couple Margaret Peterson Haddix books to bring. I read Children of Refuge and Leaving Fishers earlier in the week, but because of Kali, I didn't think it was a good idea to bring in a library book. Still, I wanted a book, so I found a Ziploc bag and put the book I own, Replication, in it in my backpack. And that book is AMAZING. I started it at Animal Kingdom, read a little at Hollywood, a little at Magic, and finished it on the way home, even though I had to use the flashlight on my phone to do so. Seriously, if you haven't read it, do it. 

And that, in as much of a nutshell as I can make it, was my Disney trip. I got all sad when we were leaving, because I never know if I'll ever be able to go back, but I'll always have my memories.

Have you ever been to Disney World? What's your favorite part of it?