Over the years I have not been shy to lecture folks on all kinds of WDW related subjects and how they should do it my way rather than the wrong way. This kind of unbending dogmatic preaching is quite endearing I’m sure.
One of those gems was that day two should *always* be a rest day. The long travel day, the jet lag and the post adrenaline crash after the excitement of the first park day (and that has to be Magic Kingdom of course) can lead to a grumpy and unsatisfactory day two.
Anyway, today we were completely ignoring my own advice as we needed a rest day tomorrow as we planned to do some drinking this evening.
Amazingly I had slept from 9 to 5, what a way to make a living. Everyone was tired this morning so we lazed around for a while and didn’t leave the house until 8.20am. Today we took Sherberth Road and discovered that Mikey cannot say that word without sounding like Christian Slater in Austin Powers.
We were all laughing a lot at this as we got to the top of Sherberth and then all of a sudden the hilarity stopped as I realised I had left my attractive bum bag on the chest of drawers in our bedroom.
There was a brief amount of time whilst I calculated if we could do without it before deciding we could not and turning around. Credit cards are pretty vital in this neck of the woods. I apologised to the group for my incompetence and spent the drive home silently berating myself for ruining the whole day, and holiday and next ten holidays. I’m not one to over react.
It cost us forty minutes in total and as we arrived at the gates of Animal Kingdom, it was rammed. This would be a theme of this trip for reasons we never really fathomed. It would often take ten to fifteen minutes to pay them $35 for parking!
As we queued today, some idiot cut us up very badly adding to my already sunny disposition. It would seem it might be one of those mornings.
We parked in Dinosaur.
As we made it to the top of the row a full tram was just pulling away. Sigh. So we took up a position at the front of the poles that denoted where the tram would pull up. A few moments later it did, but the end of the tram was about ten feet past us, leaving us with no tram to get onto.
We did manage to find some seats which allowed me to seethe a little more as we headed toward some Disney magic.
I felt guilty about the delayed start to the day so bought Lightning Lanes for the day. Our first hastily made LL was Festival of the Lion King at 10.30.
Knowing we would now have LLs today, I felt less pressured to charge around and allowed us to take onboard some breakfast. We did this at Starbucks and sat on a wall opposite the kiosk that sells that viral ice cream sandwich thing. It didn’t open until 10.30 but the queue started to form at 10.15 and from what we saw through the day never went away.
After eating we wandered towards Lion King and even took in a couple of shops before entering the queue. We would be Elephants.
As I always do I attempted and failed to take some impressive scenery shots.
This show never fails to impress, no matter how many times we have seen it, and we have seen it a lot!
Whilst in this show I also invested in some LLs for Flight of Passage. This was likely to be our one day at Animal Kingdom and the wait time was offensive. I had to do a lot of refreshing to get a time we could do and eventually one popped up for 11.30 rather than the 6pms I’d been seeing and we’d be out of the park by then.
Once the show ended we walked over to FOP via a restroom, and undertook the longest preshow on property, surely?
Again, an experience that impresses every time. There was a brief shower of rain as we exited the ride. We sheltered whilst Emily and Mikey had their Crocodile Sandwich thing as they had only had coffees earlier.
We were Everest bound for another LL.
We were off at 10.50 and being in this part of the park it seemed obvious to go and do the Nemo show that started at 11am. There were some members of the party not overly keen to do so, but I am the map, so off we went.
We sat right down at the front and everyone enjoyed it.
This song was of course the highlight.
We walked over towards Tusker House and got a couple of beers and two waters from the bar there. We had a brief sit down before heading off towards what will always be known to us as Birds of Flight for the upcoming show time. Some idiot had got the show time wrong so instead we spent twenty minutes or so watching these guys.
They were excellent.
The next bird show was now happening so we took our seats.
Despite all of our burning rage that It’s Tough To Be A Bug was no more, we were now about to witness the new Zootopia thing for the first time. Look, I know I am not the target audience for this and granted I don’t think I’ve ever seen Zootopia but this was not for me.
It just seemed like a lot of shouting and chaos without any of the charm of the old thing. I’m sure kids will love it, or younger parents with some form of connection with the film, but this feels like a downgrade.
We browsed a couple more shops before doing the safari just as the rain started.
Our driver was great and I would recommend the front seats if you can get them. The rain stopped by the time we got off. Maybe the Gods don’t hate me today after all.
It was now time to head out of the park, recognising we hadn’t done a lot of things on offer here. Alas, we had plans to see two of our favourite piano players this evening and the first of those would be in Grand Floridian lobby. We drove over to Magic Kingdom and parked in Simba. A tram and a monorail got us over to Grand Floridian, nicely circumventing the “you off site scum cannot visit resorts any more” rule.
We found some seats that were not ideal and got a drink.
This resort oozes class.
I cannot explain the dinosaur.
Michael (our fave from the Jellyrolls days) began to play shortly afterwards.
Luckily some seats opened up and Louise pounced on them like Steven Segal.
We spent a lovely couple of hours listening and having a couple of drinks.
Just before we had to leave I requested he played Wishes, which fully broke Emily, who was in floods of tears, to the extent that he came over and asked if she was OK. I think he understood.
A Lyft was summoned to take us over to Port Orleans now as we had a date with Yeeha Bob! The Lyft was a Tesla with a human in it but, as I observed being sat in the front, the whole trip was done in self drive mode. It was only mildly stressful.
At resort security it seems any kind of ride share gets you can immediate wave through and we were in. There were no seats initially but some loitering and patience saw us gradually obtain and improve our seating over the next hour or so.
We ordered some food as we were all hungry now.
It was as good as it looks and we destroyed it.
Eventually our seats were this good.
It turned out that I had left my credit card in the card reader at the bar when I got our first round of drinks when we had no table. Luckily the server spotted me as she was leaving and said she’d left it at reception. Honestly I am beginning to worry myself. I wandered over and picked it up. I wasn’t even drinking!!!
Everyone else was and they were all pretty worse for wear by the end of the night. I ordered another Lyft at 12 to take us back to the TTC. A tram got us back to the car and I got us home in one piece by about 12.40. I told you we’d need a rest day tomorrow.
In the end, this was a great day. We got a decent amount done, albeit at some expense at Animal Kingdom despite the delayed start and early departure, but the evening was really lovely. We all thought it was one of the highlights of our trip. Right now though I was very sober and very tired, so sleep was welcome.
Till the next time……
